by SHAMUS KHAN
Ricardo Amunjera, 31 and Marc Themba, 30, the first known gay couple to be married in Namibia, Africa PHOTO / International HIV/Aids Alliance/The Guardian
Other liberation movements have rejected the idea that biology is destiny. So why should gay rights depend on it?
Last month, the US Supreme Court affirmed the rights of same-sex couples to marry. The decision was a major achievement for a liberation movement that began nearly half a century ago. Throughout the struggle for marriage equality, supporters drew parallels with the oppression of African Americans, be that anti-miscegenation laws or legalised segregation. Yet one stark difference between these civil rights movements has escaped notice.
African-American activists aggressively called out arguments about genetic and biological differences as legacies of racist, Nazi science. By contrast, the marriage-equality movement has embraced biological determinism. Gay and lesbian activists have led the way popularising the idea that identity is biologically determined.
The proffered perspective is that sexuality is not a choice, but a way we are born. Getting Americans to believe this was a struggle. In 1977, according to the first Gallup poll on the question, only 13 per cent of Americans believed people were born gay. Even in 1990, only 20 per cent thought of sexuality as biologically innate. Yet since 2011 support has spiked, and today just under half of Americans think that the sexuality of gays and lesbians is determined at birth. Support for gay marriage and support for the idea of being ‘born that way’ closely track one another.
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Moving people to understand sexuality as being genetically determined took not just activism, but scholarly research. The first major step came in 1990 when the neurobiologist Simon LeVay, then at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in California, autopsied 41 individuals: 19 self-identified gay men, 16 straight men, and nine women. LeVay dug deep into the brain. Earlier research had shown the brain cell group INAH3, the third interstitial nucleus of the hypothalamus, to be associated with sexual attraction among rats. For males, this area is considerably larger than it is for females because male rat foetuses are exposed to higher levels of testosterone than females. If its size explained attraction, LeVay reasoned, then we might expect gay men to have smaller INAH3 than straight men.
The gay men LeVay examined had died of AIDS, as had one-third of the straight men autopsied. The ‘gay plague’ motivated researchers across the world to better understand the character of sexual desire. Some of this research explored the social life of gay communities, and activists were worried about shining a light upon what happened in the dark corners of bath houses. The broader American population overwhelmingly viewed gay sex as unnatural, and sexual licentiousness as perverse. Calling attention to the sexual freedom that characterised gay urban communities would do no good for the sick and dying.
But if gayness was a biologically-determined identity, then blaming the dying would be a lot more difficult. LeVay’s findings helped change the conversation; they were reported in 1991 in Science, the premier scientific journal in the world. Gay men’s INAH3 was closer in size to women’s than it was to straight men’s. It was a major step toward a biological understanding of sexuality.
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