3

Sexology, Activism, And Science in the 20th And 21st Centuries

The previous chapter traced the invention and development of the field of sexology, especially as it relates to same-sex attachments. The sexologists of the 19th century generally assumed that homosexuality was primarily characterized by gender inversion. In other words, as Karl-Heinrich Ulrichs wrotes, to be a male invert was to have “a man’s soul confined by a woman’s body” (quoted Halperin 16). The inversion paradigm was to dominate (pseudo-) scientific thinking about homosexuality for a century after Ulrichs, and still today it rears its now-unfashionable head in all kinds of writing about queerness (see discussion of LeVay study later in this chapter). Yet even in the mid-1800s certain writers, Ulrichs among them, advocated for greater sympathy, even outright support, for sexual and gender nonconformists. Havelock Ellis and even, at the end of his life, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, came to understand homosexuality as simply a variant of human sexual inclination and expression. Thus it should come as no surprise that during the 20th century sexology as a field became linked in the popular imagination with increasingly visible queer activism. In this chapter we explore these linkages between science and politics in the 20th and 21st centuries.

LEARNING OUTCOMES

Upon completion of this chapter, you should be able to do the following:

· 3.1 Discuss the connections between sexology and early sexual rights advocacy.

· 3.2 List the important contributions of Alfred Kinsey to developing knowledge about sexual behavior.

· 3.3 Describe the importance of medical models of homosexuality to early rights advocacy.

· 3.4 Explain how the search for the “gay gene” both assists and complicates sexual rights activism.

· 3.5 Describe the ongoing relevance of sexology for contemporary sexual rights activism.

SEXOLOGY AND EARLY SEXUAL RIGHTS MOVEMENTS

In this book we generally follow common practice in presenting sexual rights work as arising at about the same time as the understanding of sexuality as part of an individual’s identity, that is, at roughly the end of the 19th century. It is important to point out, however, that emerging secular humanist thought a century earlier during the Enlightenment brought with it the beginnings of new ideas about sexuality. Jeremy Bentham’s tract “Offenses against One’s Self” (c. 1785), for example, described homosexuality as a victimless “crime” whose persecution and punishment represented nothing more than irrational religious prejudice. Bentham defends same-sex sexuality as natural:

[I]f all men were left perfectly free to choose, as many men would make choice of their own sex as of the opposite one, I see not what reason there would be for applying the word natural to the one rather than to the other. All the difference would be that the one was both natural and necessary whereas the other was natural but not necessary. If the mere circumstance of its not being necessary were sufficient to warrant the terming it unnatural it might as well be said that the taste a man has for music is unnatural.

He further states that the impulse to punish homosexuality arises not from the fact that it causes “mischief” but rather from simple “antipathy.”

As philosopher Michel Foucault points out, the intense medical, psychiatric, and sexological scrutiny of inversion and homosexuality allowed some of those pathologized as homosexuals to create “reverse discourses” in which they recast their “illness” as positive identification. Ulrichs is a powerful example of this, leading some contemporary theorists to look favorably on the sexological enterprise. Steven Seidman, for instance, argues that “[s]exology has always had a social purpose.” He notes that “[s]ome sexologists saw their work as contributing to the creation of a healthy, fit population. Some policies even discouraged active sexual behavior by so-called inferior races and the sexual intermingling of races” (5). Such eugenic implications clearly complicate any “positive” intentions on behalf of sexologists to promote sex as a “natural” and “normal” practice, but we should not overlook the early sexual rights activists who used sexological research to fight laws designed to criminalize homoerotic behavior [λ Chapter 4].

Such laws were coming into existence at roughly the same time that sexologists were describing and categorizing homosexual behavior. Whereas practices such as anal sex had previously been punishable in several European nations, a number of homoerotic practices were now coming under legal scrutiny and being not only pathologized but criminalized as well. For instance, the newly formed German state adopted Paragraph 175 in 1871, which banned all sexual activity between men (as well as bestiality) (“Germany”) [λ Chapter 4]. Paragraph 175 spurred Ulrichs and others to become pro-homosexual activists, essentially creating the first relatively visible homosexual rights groups in Western history. Another prominent activist, the physician Magnus Hirschfeld (1868–1935), wrote pamphlets, books, and even a movie script (Different from the Others, 1919) to advocate on behalf of the “third sex” [λ Chapter 11]. John C. Fout details events of the early sexual rights movements in Germany, noting that “[i]n 1897 Magnus Hirschfeld and his newly created Wissenschaftlich-humanitares Komittee (Scientific humanitarian committee, or WhK) petitioned the Reichstag to reform [¶] 175 of the German penal code, which criminalized sexual acts between males” (265). Fout argues that governments enacted anti-homosexual legislation to calm the sociopolitical chaos that seemed to characterize the era. Hirschfeld and his allies organized five meetings of a Congress for Sexual Reform (1921–1932). Their Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Knowledge), founded in 1919, was finally attacked and burned by the Nazis in 1933.

Find Out More about early German homosexual rights in Kurt Hiller’s “Appeal to the Second International Congress for Sexual Reform on Behalf of an Oppressed Human Variety” (Copenhagen, 1928) in the readings at the end of thechapter. For the complete speech, see the following website: http://paganpressbooks.com/jpl/HILLER.HTM.

Other important early sexual rights activists included the British writers Edward Carpenter (1844–1929) and Radclyffe Hall (1880–1943). Their work owed a debt to George Cecil Ives (1867–1950), who founded the Order of Chaeronea in 1893. This was a secret society for homosexuals that advocated for the scientific study of sex. Carpenter’s poetry, pamphlets, and nonfiction works (including The Intermediate Sex, 1908) argued forcefully for thinking of sexual freedom for all as a basic right and privilege to be protected by democratic institutions as they slowly moved toward communist-style utopias. Hall is credited with writing the first novel recognizably about a lesbian, The Well of Loneliness (1928), which was subsequently banned in Britain and the subject of a censorship trial in the United States. The Well of Loneliness is an important document in that it borrows from sexological views circulating at the time; Havelock Ellis himself wrote a preface for the book in which he praised it for its “notable psychological and sociological significance [as] a completely faithful and uncompromising [depiction of] one particular aspect of sexual life as it exists among us to-day” (Hall, preface). Its hero, Stephen Gordon, is clearly a congenital invert in the sense that she is depicted (as Hall described herself) as a woman born with a man’s soul. The end of the novel is a passionate and moving plea for tolerance: “Acknowledge us, oh God, before the whole world. Give us also the right to our existence!” (437) [λ Chapter 9].

In the United States Henry Gerber (1892–1972), inspired by Hirschfeld, established the Society for Human Rights (SHR) in Chicago in 1924. The SHR was shut down in 1927 when its publication Friendship and Freedom (the first American gay publication) was found to be obscene. Despite its short life, the Society for Human Rights was important in that it represented a link between Hirschfeld’s activism in the Weimar Republic and the American homophile movement of the 1950s through Harry Hay (1912–2002); Hay learned about the SHR from a former member in Los Angeles around 1930.

The period between the world wars saw the development of various gay rights organizations in Europe and the United States. Their pleas for understanding and enfranchisement, however, fell on deaf ears as the European continent drifted toward war spurred by imperial ambitions, economic collapse, the rise of National Socialism and other fascist movements, and yet more global war. Amid this increasing social and political chaos, many politicians sought stability by imposing order based on clear class divides and gender roles. In their view, we should all know our place in the social scheme of things. Unfortunately, the maintenance of the status quo and the attendant social control that such maintenance entailed would keep further Western movements for sexual rights and freedom below the political radar until the 1950s and 1960s.

ALFRED KINSEY

Despite the seeming “pause” in advances in homosexual rights during the Second World War, scientific research that picked up on the work of sexologists during this time actually laid the groundwork both for greater future tolerance of alternative sexualities and for the work of future gay activists. Much of that groundwork was laid by Alfred Kinsey.

Before turning his attention to human sexuality in the 1940s, zoologist Kinsey was best known for his meticulously researched study of the gall wasp. In 1940, he and his research team at Indiana University began the massive undertaking that culminated in publication of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948 and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female in 1953. The group interviewed thousands of men and women, taking detailed sexual histories. When the 1948 volume appeared, public reaction was intense. Many were shocked and displeased by Kinsey’s frank and unapologetic discussion of sexual matters (“Kinsey in the News”). Others were glad to see puritanical America exposed as a “nation of sexual hypocrites” (Reisman). Still others were simply titillated. In any case, the country echoed Kinsey’s name. About 200,000 copies of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male sold in the first two months after it appeared in January 1948. Popular magazines featured articles and cartoons about Kinsey’s book. Singer and comedienne Martha Raye had a hit tune in 1949 titled “Ooh, Dr. Kinsey!” Archie “Stomp” Gordon recorded a blues number, “What’s Her Whimsy, Dr. Kinsey,” after Sexual Behavior in the Human Female appeared in 1953:

I had a gal named Mabel, she used to call me her Hon, But since your book came out, old Mabel always carries a gun.

What is her whimsy, Dr. Kinsey? Won’t you tell me if you could, Why she ain’t behavin’ the way your book says she would.

In fact, the rage for Kinsey has continued nearly unabated for 70+ years. As Bob Kanefsky’s 1988 parody “Kinsey Scale” and Momus’s 2001 song “Psychopathia Sexualis” attest, Kinsey’s reputation for opening the Pandora’s box of sex has not diminished (Kanefsky, Currie). In 2004, the feature film Kinsey met with reasonable popular success, and Kinsey was profiled in 2005 as part of PBS’s American Experience series.

One element of Kinsey’s work on sexuality that distinguished it from that of his sexologist predecessors was his absolute refusal to allow moral or medical concerns to enter into his examination. Kinsey insisted that human sexuality in all its variations was simply a matter of stimulus and response—given sufficient stimulus, human beings experience sexual arousal. Kinsey took the same approach to men and women as he had taken to gall wasps a decade earlier: Gather an extraordinary amount of raw data, keep careful records, and draw no conclusions not directly supported by the data. Another element that distinguished Kinsey’s work was that his goal was primarily descriptive; he sought to chronicle American men’s and women’s sexual histories and practices, but he was far less interested in why they behaved as they did. He included almost no discussion of the etiology of homosexuality in the Human Male volume and, in the Human Female follow-up, relegated the topic to a single footnote reviewing previous published work proposing causes of lesbianism.

Kinsey’s stimulus-and-response approach to sexuality in general and homosexuality in particular flew in the face of the congenital sexual inversion theories of Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis [λ Chapter 2]. Kinsey rejected the idea of a fixed, inborn (homo)sexual identity. “Only the human mind,” he wrote, “invents categories and tries to force facts into separate pigeon-holes” (Male 639). But because “nature rarely deals with discrete categories,” and because he believed that “the capacity of an individual to respond erotically to any sort of stimulus, whether it is provided by another person of the same or of the opposite sex, is basic in the species” (660), Kinsey devised a 7-point scale upon which people could chart their degree of homosexual or heterosexual inclination and experience.

To be sure, Kinsey did not invent his sexuality scale out of thin air. As early as 1896, Magnus Hirschfeld had constructed two elaborate schemata for measuring the intensity of sexual attraction. The first chart laid out a 10-point scale indicating the strength of an individual’s “Love Drive,” irrespective of object. The second chart used that scale to plot the degree of attraction to the same sex or a different sex. Hirschfeld’s results, which are conveniently symmetrical, identify three sexual “types”: the total man or total woman (heterosexual), the psychological hermaphrodite (what we would call bisexual today), and the complete Uranian (homosexual) [λ Chapter 2]. Kinsey adapted this continuum format to demonstrate the range and diversity of human sexual behavior. As a scientist studying observable behaviors, he sought to move the topic of homosexuality out of the realm of the soft sciences (e.g., psychology) and into the hard sciences (e.g., biology). Some scientists have taken issue with Kinsey’s research methods, pointing out that his interviewees were not truly randomly chosen and thus may not have reflected a reliable cross section of the population.

Despite such critiques, however, the Kinsey scale has become a common measure for psychologists and others to gauge an individual’s tendency toward same-sex or different-sex attraction; the scale seemed to provide a flexible way of understanding the diversity of human sexual expression. More than this, however, the enormous popularity of Kinsey’s sexual behavior books among laypeople has placed the Kinsey scale at the fulcrum of contemporary debates about the nature of homosexuality. Kinsey saw homosexuality as a fluid position on a continuum of possible sexual experiences, and all his conclusions were reached on the basis of self-reported personal statements. His sexual history interviews led him to conclude that “40 to 50 percent of the male population” (Male 660) has some homosexual experience, and roughly 5% to 22% of the male population and 2% to 6% of the female population is located at 5 or 6 on the Kinsey scale, or “exclusively homosexual” (Female 488). He found that 10% of males were predominantly homosexual between the ages of 16 and 55 (Male 651). This is the source of the “one in 10” concept that figures so prominently in gay rights discussions today.

Figure 3.1 Kinsey Scale.

Source: Kinsey, Alfred C., Wardell B. Pomeroy, and Clyde E. Martin. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. W. B. Saunders, 1948.

MEDICAL MODELS OF HOMOSEXUALITY

Despite Kinsey’s claims that homosexual behavior was far more common than most lay people were aware, his findings did not immediately lead in the medical community to greater tolerance of alternative forms of sexual intimacy. Instead, much scientific work in the 20th century on homosexuality was couched in phraseology that makes it seem as if the goal of such research is to identify homosexuality early to develop “cures” for those who “suffer” from it. Because human behavior is seen by many people as closely linked to the brain, many of the medical studies of homosexuals have focused on explaining how the brain of a homosexual works. This notion that homosexuals are somehow physically different from heterosexuals and that homosexuality is a psychological deviancy was adopted not only by the medical establishment but also by gay men and lesbians themselves throughout the 20th century. We see it, for instance, in Radclyffe Hall’s 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness, and the theme runs back into the 19th century and forward into the 21st century. For Hall and other lesbian and gay people in the early 20th century, it was important to embrace the medical model despite its emphasis on deviance because this model provided (1) a language with which homosexuals could describe their lives and (2) lists of characteristics homosexuals could use to recognize each other in the world. The notion that homosexuality results from biological factors out of the control of individuals is called essentialism, and it has been useful to a gay rights movement that needed to assert the innocence of homosexuals and the naturalness of homosexuality. Most recently, with advances in genetic science, Dean Hamer and others have tried to isolate a “gay gene,” but this attempt to discover a biological reason for homosexuality is not new. To date, no irrefutable evidence exists that homosexuals are biologically different from heterosexuals. Still, gay activists employ strategic essentialism (“born this way”) as a method whereby homosexuals’ presumably fixed identity is deployed as an argument against discrimination. Despite the political usefulness of essentialism, many activists have wondered whether focusing so much on the notion of innate sexuality might fuel a desire among antigay elements to “catch” and perhaps even “cure” homosexuality, and such suspicions are borne out by the existence of programs all over the Western world that promise to make homosexual teens and adults into “ex-gays.”

During much of the 20th century, psychiatrists in the United States and throughout the world treated homosexuality as an illness primarily caused by poor parenting—domineering mothers and passive or inadequate fathers. Many prominent psychiatrists—Sandor Rado, Irving Bieber, and Charles Socarides, for example—argued vehemently that homosexuality should be treated as a pathology in need of treatment and cure. In fact, in a 1969 Time magazine article that claimed to introduce “the homosexual lifestyle” to American consciousness, Socarides espoused this view in a very public forum.

Around the same time, Cornelia Wilbur, the psychiatrist whose work with “Sybil” (Shirley Ardell Mason) popularized the multiple personality disorder (MPD) diagnosis, also studied lesbian sexuality. Her article “Clinical Aspects of Female Homosexuality” (1965) argued that, like gay men, lesbians typically grew up in families with passive fathers and domineering mothers. The Wilbur study is one of the few analyses of lesbians done by the group of mid-20th-century psychiatrists that scholar Neil Miller calls the “‘Gay Is Sick’ Shrinks”; most of the studies focused on male sexuality, portraying homosexual men as predatory, effeminate, and emotionally unstable. This notion that “gay is sick” has had enormous negative personal implications for LGBTQ men and women; as well, the idea has served as justification for laws against “deviant” (nonheterosexual) sexuality. Because of widespread social acceptance of this idea, gay men and lesbians have been subjected to many invasive and traumatic medical interventions, including electroshock convulsive therapy (shock treatments), lobotomies, castration, hormone therapy, aversion therapy, and forced incarceration in mental hospitals.

Despite this backdrop of intolerance and pathologization, the work of scientists such as Kinsey and others working on understanding the diversity of human sexual and gendered behavior has had some important effects on generating tolerance, if not always acceptance, of such diversity. Many researchers in a variety of fields have found a continuum approach to sexuality and gender useful in theorizing varieties of human experience, behavior, and identification. A decade after Kinsey’s death (1956), Dr. Harry Benjamin’s book The Transsexual Phenomenon introduced the Gender Disorientation Scale. Benjamin’s scale has six stages:

· Group 1

· Type I: Transvestite (Pseudo)

· Type II: Transvestism (Fetishistic)

· Type III: Transvestism (True)

· Group 2

· Type IV: Transsexual (Nonsurgical)

· Group 3

· Type V: True Transsexual (Moderate Intensity)

· Type VI: True Transsexual (High Intensity)

Figure 3.2 An expression of gay pride, this button shows the way Kinsey’s Scale has become part of the popular consciousness.

Michelle Gibson

Benjamin breaks each of these six classifications down into eight subcategories: gender feeling, dressing habits and social life, sex object and sex life, Kinsey scale, conversion operation, estrogen medication, psychotherapy, and remarks. For example, Benjamin discusses the Type VI “True Transsexual” as follows:

· Gender Feeling: Feminine. Total psycho-sexual inversion.

· Dressing Habits and Social Life: May live and work as a woman. Dressing gives insufficient relief. Gender discomfort intense.

· Sex Object Choice and Sex Life: Intensely desires relations with normal male as female if young. May have been married and have children, by using fantasies in intercourse.

· Kinsey Scale: 6

· Conversion Operation: Urgently requested and usually attained. Indicated.

· Estrogen Medication: Required for partial relief.

· Psychotherapy: Psychological guidance or psychotherapy for symptomatic relief only.

· Remarks: Despises his male sex organs. Danger of suicide or self-mutilation, if too long frustrated.

Benjamin’s classification system was specifically designed to serve as a diagnostic tool for gender-dysphoric men, and not until later did anyone seriously consider the situation of gender-dysphoric women. Such sexism—a lack of attention to born women undergoing sexual-reassignment therapies and procedures—is all too common in both scientific research and medical practice. Still, the Benjamin standards, as they are known, have come to represent threshold requirements for approval of sex reassignment surgery. The Gender Disorientation Scale references the Kinsey scale; thus the Benjamin Type VI, or True Transsexual, measures Kinsey 6 (exclusively homosexual). Benjamin assumes that male homosexuality involves effeminacy; in so doing, he maintains the inversion model of homosexuality favored by the 19th-century sexologists. According to Benjamin’s interpretation of this model, gender—that is, learned behaviors and attitudes supposed to correspond with biological sex—serves as an indicator of sexuality and transsexuality. Benjamin also assumes that all appropriate sexual desire is heterosexual. Therefore, a man whose gender is “feminine” and who desires other men exclusively possesses one of the indicators for sex reassignment surgery (also called gender reassignment surgery or, as preferred by many transpeople, gender confirmation surgery), which would “correct” his sexual attractions by making him into a woman who desires a man. The original Benjamin standards required that a candidate for the “conversion operation” score high on the Kinsey scale because this would indicate that the individual’s gender was already feminine. So, even though transsexuals often do not consider themselves to be homosexual, many lied to their therapists, knowing they needed to present as close to total psychosexual inversion as possible to be eligible for surgery. Erwin Haeberle criticizes the early sexologists for making an “arbitrary linkage of erotic inclination and gender role.” The Benjamin standards, though applied somewhat less stringently today than in the past, are characterized by this same “arbitrary linkage.”

Whatever weaknesses such scales and research might have, they helped the scientific community at least begin to see homosexuality and gender variance in a less pathological light. In the years following the 1969 Stonewall uprising, specifically in 1973, the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of mental illnesses [λ Chapter 4]. Psychologists more accepting of sexual and gender diversity attempted to devise more complex schemata for charting sexuality, in part due to calls from LGBTQ activists for more gay-positive approaches. In 1978, psychiatrist Fritz Klein introduced the Klein Sexual Orientation Grid (KSOG), which was based on the Kinsey scale but with the addition of multiple dimensions (such as sexual fantasies and perception of lifestyle) designed to produce unique results for each person.

Find Out More You might be interested in mapping your own sexuality on other continuums. Try, for instance, the Klein Sexual Orientation Grid (KSOG) Klein Sexual Orientation Grid | Psychology Wiki | Fandom (wikia.org), the Storms Sexuality Axis Storms sexuality axis | Psychology Wiki | Fandom (wikia.org), and the Kauth model A Four-Component Model of Sexual Orientation & Its Application to Psychotherapy | American Journal of Psychotherapy (psychiatryonline.org).

Recognizing the sociopolitical dimensions affecting and in some cases shaping desire, Vivienne Cass and Adrienne Rich adapted the continuum format to overtly political purposes, and they thus may be thought of as distant cousins to Kinsey. In 1979, Australian psychiatrist Cass introduced a six-stage model of sexual identity integration:

· Stage I: Identity Confusion

· Stage II: Identity Comparison

· Stage III: Identity Tolerance

· Stage IV: Identity Acceptance

· Stage V: Identity Pride

· Stage VI: Identity Synthesis

Cass’s model is restricted to mapping the identity development of lesbian and gay people, not those who are transgender or bisexual. Because the focus is on internal self-recognition and growth, this model is assumed to be particularly useful for college students and other young people, although the basic progression is supposed to be more or less the same for all ages.

A notable feature of Cass’s model is Stage VI, Identity Synthesis, in which the fully adapted homosexual transcends a primarily gay consciousness to reach a stage in which they recognize that various aspects of identity are equally important and should be blended. Other homosexual identity models have occasionally omitted this last stage, assuming that Identity Pride is a sufficient goal in itself, but Cass argues that a person must transcend anger and rebelliousness (characteristics of Stage V) to achieve healthy self-actualization. Another notable feature of this model is Cass’s recognition of lesbian and gay culture and community. In 1979, when she published “Homosexual Identity Formation,” few resources were available to assist lesbian and gay people as they came out. Still, Cass understood (especially in Stages III–V) that a homosexual community existed and represented a key part of the coming-out process. Later models, such as Susan Meyer and Alan Schwitzer’s continuum, which appeared in 1999, keep Cass’s six stages but refer to more established community institutions. Meyer and Schwitzer’s Stage 6 (Networking and Connecting) differs from Cass’s Stage VI (Identity Synthesis) in that the final identity is validated through connection with other subcultural individuals and institutions. The other primary difference between Cass and Meyer and Schwitzer is that the former focused only on lesbian and gay people, proposing that the model could apply to any age group; Meyer and Schwitzer, by contrast, refer to “college students with gay, lesbian, bisexual, and other minority sexual orientations” (41). As sensitive as these thinkers are to the importance of queer culture, none of them really address the issues of transgender people, whose struggle for acceptance or at least tolerance is sometimes complicated by the fact that they are often shunned both by the larger, heterosexist culture and by many in the lesbian and gay community with whom they supposedly share common cause as sexual and gender “outsiders.”

While many researchers have approached queerness through biological and psychological research, others approached the question from a more theoretical or philosophical angle. Adrienne Rich, award-winning poet and longtime lesbian activist, introduced the concept of a lesbian continuum in her important essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” in 1980. Rich hoped to find a way to lessen the conflict between heterosexual and lesbian feminists in the women’s movement. She also hoped to unearth lesbian existence from the centuries of neglect in which it had been buried. Rich’s primary strategy for accomplishing these goals was the concept of the lesbian continuum: “I mean the term lesbian continuum to include a range—through each woman’s life and throughout history—of woman-identified experience, not simply the fact that a woman has had or consciously desired genital sexual experience with another woman” (239). Rich’s continuum bears some resemblance to the “Woman-identified Woman” (WIW) but differs in one significant respect: the WIW idea was designed to expand the definition of lesbian by including women who experienced primary relationships with other women. The lesbian continuum posited a deep and abiding connection among women across time and geography, such that a woman might recognize herself as occupying a position on a preexisting and ongoing timeline. “If we consider the possibility,” wrote Rich, “that all women … exist on a lesbian continuum, we can see ourselves as moving in and out of this continuum, whether we identify ourselves as lesbian or not” (240). Rich hoped that this recognition would have the power to unify women across superficial differences that divide them and to empower women to rebel against the compulsory heterosexuality imposed upon them by every culture in the world:

We begin to observe behavior, both in history and in individual biography, that has hitherto been invisible or misnamed, behavior which often constitutes … radical rebellion. And we can connect these rebellions and the necessity for them with the physical passion of woman for woman which is central to lesbian existence: the erotic sensuality which has been, precisely, the most violently erased fact of female experience. (241)

Rich’s lesbian continuum has been criticized—she even attaches a letter challenging it to later editions of the essay—for indulging a privileged white woman’s vision of the unity of “all women” when all women do not enjoy the same benefits or acknowledge the same needs. Still, it represented a stunning indictment of the phenomenon of compulsory heterosexuality, and by removing the concept lesbian from an exclusively sexual definition, it created a vision of a politically viable movement based on femaleness. Rich’s vision is far from Kinsey’s scale because its examples come from neither the “hard” nor the “soft” sciences but rather from philosophy and literature, but it nonetheless reveals the power of the continuum format in conceptualizing sexual connection.

Even more recently, other scales have emerged to continue to push past the hetero/homo binary and account for an even broader range of sexual behavior, feeling, and inclination—or disinclination. For instance, Langdon Parks has recently come up with what he calls the Purple-Red scale, which includes asexuality as a potential sexual orientation. The scale also attempts to map out not just sexual attraction to genders but when and in what context one might want to engage in sexual behavior. For instance, you might identify your sexuality as “tertiary,” meaning that you would engage in sexual behavior primarily to please a partner or have children. A “secondary” attraction type suggests that you are more inclined to develop erotic feelings over the course of a relationship, as opposed to initiating a relationship because of sexual interest. The far ends of this frequency and context scale include “aromantic” and “hyper sexuality,” the former attempting to take account of those who are not motivated by or particularly interested in sexual intimacy (DiDomizio). Parks’ scale also reflects the recent movement away from fixed binary gender poles toward a vision of a nonbinary and/or trans consciousness, as we will discuss in Chapter 7.

Figure 3.3 Langdon Parks’s Sexuality Scale.

Source: Langdon Parks.

Note: Colors have been altered from the original.

SCIENCE AMOK? THE QUEST FOR THE GAY GENE

Scientific advances in toleration for sexual and gender variance have sparked a number of attempts to determine the “origins” of such variance—some with varying degrees of credibility. Sympathetic scientists interested in discovering a “natural” cause of homosexuality have often done so to “normalize” it by claiming that it is inherent in gays and lesbians—much like early sexologists theorized a “congenital” homosexuality as a reason to decriminalize same-sex erotic behavior. The validity and usefulness of such studies is not without conterversy, however, and the scientific bar for proving the origin of complex sexual and gendered behavior and feelings is high.

Indeed, in Human Male, Kinsey warned future researchers that discovering “Factors Accounting for the Homosexual” (660) was going to be a daunting task. Psychologists, he wrote, must be aware that

it is one thing to account for an all-or-none proposition, as heterosexuality and homosexuality have ordinarily been taken to be. But it is a totally different matter to recognize factors which will account for the continuum which we find existing between the exclusively heterosexual and the exclusively homosexual history. (661)

Scientists seeking to locate a biological basis for homosexuality must show that “the fluctuations in preferences for female or male partners are related to fluctuations in the hormones, the genes, or the other biologic factors which are assumed to be operating” (661). Kinsey then laid out a detailed set of conditions that would need to be met to prove that homosexuality is an inherited condition in humans. His conditions have influenced much of the biological research in the 70+ years since the appearance of Human Male. This is interesting because Kinsey’s conditions make a point of alerting researchers to issues that he believes will make it close to impossible to gather valid data. Nevertheless, a host of studies both before and after Kinsey have attempted to identify genetic, hormonal, or anatomical factors linked to homosexuality in humans.

A number of these studies have used animals. One of the earliest seems to have been Richard Goldschmidt’s 1917 study of what he called intersexuality in insects. Goldschmidt’s observations of the gypsy moth Lymantria identified a number of intermediate types between male and female; he reasoned that these types demonstrated a hereditary basis for homosexuality in humans. Kinsey, among others, dismissed Goldschmidt’s findings because “he identified homosexual males and females in the human species as intersexes” (Male 661) rather than simply as people engaging in a spectrum of sexual experiences. Still, scientists have continued to attempt to extrapolate from animals to people. I. L. Ward’s work with rats; Roselli, Larkin, Resko, Stellflug, and Stormshak’s work with rams; and Ebru Demir and Barry Dickson’s work with fruit flies all suggest genetic explanations for homosexuality in humans. The Demir and Dickson study of Drosophila identifies one gene, named fruitless or fru, that they believe appears to control sexual orientation. It is true that when a female fruit fly is engineered to splice fru in a male-specific fashion, she approaches and attempts to copulate with other females. It has not been demonstrated, however, that any similar gene operates in humans.

Sibling studies—particularly of twins—were seen by Kinsey as promising in terms of establishing a hereditary pattern of homosexuality. Indeed, an early study from Kinsey’s era reported a concordance rate (the likelihood that if one monozygotic—or identical—twin is gay, the other will be too) near 100% (Kallmann). More recent studies make much less extravagant claims: J. Michael Bailey and Richard C. Pillard’s research, for instance, shows concordance rates of 52% and 48% for male and female monozygotic twins, respectively, and 22% and 16% for male and female dizygotic (fraternal) twins, respectively. Because the concordance results for monozygotic twins are less than 100%, it is impossible to conclude that genes absolutely determine sexual orientation, but these studies seem to indicate the possibility of a genetic influence on sexuality. Using pairs of gay brothers, a research group led by Dean Hamer attempted to locate a “gay gene” that controls sexual orientation. They reported finding a promising site in an area called Xq28 on the X chromosome, but a later group failed to confirm the discovery. A 2005 study by Brian Mustanski et al. found possible sites on chromosomes 7, 8, and 10 but did not present firm evidence of an actual connection between the gene and homosexuality. Simon LeVay asserts that “sexual orientation is … partly inherited, at least in men” (“Biology” 6); however, no irrefutable genetic evidence has surfaced.

A number of studies have focused on hormones as a cause of homosexuality in men and women. German neuroendocrinologist Günter Dörner’s prenatal hormonal theory of homosexuality proposed that the brains of pre-homosexual fetuses develop in a sex-atypical way due either to unusual amounts of hormones or to specific brain responses to hormones. Another set of hormone studies claims that the ring finger (D4) in lesbians is significantly longer than the index finger (D2), whereas in most women, D2 is nearly the same length as D4. The relatively low D2:D4 ratio in lesbians is similar to most men; the theory postulates that these individuals were exposed prenatally to high androgen, or male hormone, levels.

One of the most important and controversial hormone studies was undertaken by Simon LeVay in 1991. In an autopsy study of gay men, LeVay found that the third interstitial nucleus of the anterior hypothalamus (INAH3) was smaller than in straight men—in fact, similar in size to women’s. The hypothalamus is a part of the brain that serves a number of functions, among which is hormonal and neurotransmitter regulation. Therefore, a man with a smaller- than-usual INAH3 might be expected to have developed in a sex-atypical way. LeVay’s study was verified in 2001 and is probably the most plausible of the biological studies of homosexuality. Nevertheless, LeVay’s sample of gay men, most of whom had died from AIDS, points to two problems with his study. First, it is not clear what effect AIDS may have on the human hypothalamus, and therefore, the possibility exists that its unusual size in these men results from disease and has no relationship to sexual orientation. Second, the sample itself is suspect. LeVay’s own definition of homosexuality—”a dissociation between anatomical sex and sex-typical sexual orientation” (“Biology” 4)— presupposes subjects who self-identify as gay since, unlike skin color, for example, homosexuality is not visibly marked on the human body. The sample problem is not unique to LeVay, of course. Kinsey anticipated it in 1948 by urging future researchers in this area to undertake detailed sexual histories and to resist the assumption that homosexuals and heterosexuals are somehow distinct and opposite. Many have ignored his warning, and it is common practice to assemble a research sample of sexual minority individuals through suspect means, such as snowballing—beginning with people the researcher knows personally, then asking them to recruit their friends into the study—or using LGBTQ political or social groups. These methods produce samples that tend to be skewed with respect to (1) race, (2) social class, (3) outness, and (4) attitude toward gayness and gay rights issues.

A third problem with LeVay’s study that is not related to the AIDS sample—and that is common to virtually all sexual orientation research—is the assumption that what he calls “sex-typical” orientation is based on traditional ideas of what constitutes maleness and femaleness. The androgen receptor gene, for instance, “plays the key role in mediating testosterone’s influence on the body and brain” (“Biology” 6). Testosterone increases behaviors identified in many cultures as “male” (e.g., sexual aggressiveness and propensity toward violence). Therefore, researchers reason, if a woman is sexually aggressive or a man is gentle, they are sex atypical and might be lesbian or gay. In other words, much of the research on sexual orientation seems tied to the gender inversion models that were in fashion over a century ago but that are today seen as limiting to both men and women. It should also be noted that these researchers have focused on homosexuality as it is constructed in the United States and the Global North. Attention to non-Western constructions of sexuality will surely problematize the assumptions upon which these scientific studies are based. For instance, how might researchers collect interviews in a culture in which homosexual and heterosexual are not common terms of identity? It may be tempting for Western-trained researchers to apply sexual orientation identity terms to people who do not self-identify as gay or straight, but would such terms adequately reflect the interviewees’ experiences and desires?

Find Out More in “Essentialism” at the end of this chapter.

SEXOLOGY NOW: WHAT’S AT STAKE?

Let us conclude this chapter by considering what is at stake in contemporary sexology. LeVay argues that “the continued search for the responsible genes [for sexual orientation] and their mechanism of action is certainly warranted” (“Biology” 6), and many LGBTQ activists have employed a kind of “strategic essentialism” in their ongoing quest for civil rights; this has meant adopting the position that homosexuality is inherited in the same way that race or brown eyes are inherited. If one is simply born a homosexual, then discrimination is not morally justifiable. Proving that sexual orientation is a genetic trait thus seems to support the rights movement. One might expect that LGBTQ activists would unhesitatingly embrace the genetic explanation. Indeed, strategic essentialism has proved useful, and some still support it. But many LGBTQ people distrust the biological approach. For one thing, some prefer liberationist politics (supporting sexual freedom) to those that emphasize biological determinism. Interviewees throughout Vera Whisman’s Queer by Choice: Lesbians, Gay Men, and the Politics of Identity assert that a central component of their sense of identity is not so much gay identity as sexual self-determination: the right to choose how, when, and why they engage with other people intimately. Some also fear that the genetic explanation leads back to the gay-is-sick philosophy, where the medical establishment made draconian attempts to “cure” LGBTQ people. Some imagine fetuses genetically marked as homosexual being aborted or otherwise eliminated in families that prefer heterosexual children. Some critique the science as flawed due to the elision of racial diversity from virtually all research studies. Still others simply reject the sexist ideas of “gender confusion” and the pathologization of the “masculine female or the non-masculine male” (Pickering and Saunders 7).

Those who do not support gay rights use combinations of both nature and nurture arguments to oppose queer activists. The Concerned Women for America (CWA) charge, for instance, that “LeVay is an open homosexual, and … he had an agenda from the outset” (Chun). CWA criticizes LeVay’s work as bogus science undertaken to support the “gay agenda.” Probe Ministries traces the biology argument back to Kinsey’s 10% estimate, which was used by “Harry Hay, the father of the homosexual ‘civil rights’ movement, urging that homosexuality be seen no longer as an act of sodomy but as a 10% minority class” [λ Chapter 4] (Bohlin 1). Probe counters by including homosexuality among “sexual sins” that may be genetically influenced but must be resisted because they are immoral; they use Leviticus 18 and 20 [λ Chapter 1] to link homosexuality to incest, adultery, bestiality, and child sacrifice. So, from Probe’s standpoint, the nature argument is irrelevant; homosexuality, even if “natural,” should still be resisted, much as one might resist other socially “unacceptable” impulses. Arguing from a nurture position, Dr. Paul Cameron of the Family Research Institute maintains that “homosexual behavior is learned” (1) and therefore can be unlearned through psychotherapy and “ex-gay ministries” (6). The argument that homosexuality is a chosen set of behaviors has been deployed frequently in the fight against LGBTQ civil rights and social acceptance.

Find Out More in “Is Your Baby Gay?” at the end of this chapter.

Whatever side one may occupy in the debate, it is clear that even in the realm of science, political investments often influence the type and nature of research projects undertaken as well as the way those projects are understood, interpreted, and used by a variety of activists—both pro- and anti-queer. Both Kinsey and LeVay, for instance, pursued their research not just to understand human sexuality but to make room for a more capacious appreciation for sexual diversity. The fact that scientists such as LeVay, among many others, have argued for a biological basis for homosexuality suggests the power and cultural capital of science in Western societies. Such research is pursued in an effort to cash in on that capital, demonstrating the seeming naturalness of sexual behaviors found in all cultures throughout history. Still, as persuasive as some of the biological research seems to be in arguing for a genetic basis for homosexuality, and despite the fact that “five decades of psychiatric evidence demonstrate that homosexuality is immutable, and nonpathological” (Burr 65), no one appears to regard the issue as definitively settled. Methodological weaknesses have been perceived in both biological and psychological research, not the least of which is that both still assume heterosexuality as the default position. We can see heteronormativity at work in scientific inquiry; researchers look for a “gay gene,” but why do they not attempt to isolate a “straight gene”? Presumably, only the nonnormative—the queer—needs to be explained, while the normative goes unremarked as obviously and unquestionably natural. In addition, both the gay agenda and the antigay agenda weigh in on the debate, typically ignoring what the scientists are saying entirely (Mucciaroni and Killian).

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1. This chapter has included a number of instruments designed to measure a person’s homosexuality (the Kinsey scale, the Benjamin Gender Disorientation Scale, the KSOG, etc.). Take several of these tests yourself. What are your results? Is one instrument more accurate than another in expressing how you feel about your own sexual identity? What questions or measurements seem most effective to you? What might be missing from these instruments? If you were to design your own scale, what would it look like?

2. In this chapter, we have asserted that a number of biological and psychological studies about homosexuality rest on some typically dualistic assumptions about gender: men normally act a certain way and women another. Such assumptions are founded on cultural beliefs about what “normal men” and “normal women” are supposed to be like. As you read the article by Brown, Finn, Cooke, and Breedlove analyzing the D2:D4 finger length ratio in butch and femme lesbians, attempt your own gender critique. What unstated assumptions about gender underlie the authors’ argument?

3. There are those who argue that some scientists pursuing work that examines the relationship of nature and nurture to sexuality are supporting what they call the gay agenda, and it cannot be denied that much scientific research is done with an eye toward answering questions related to larger social issues. Can it not be argued that groups who accuse scientists such as Simon LeVay of having a gay agenda might have agendas of their own? Do some investigative work to find out more about organizations such as the CWA, Probe Ministries, and the Family Research Institute. Do they have agendas? If so, describe them.

READINGS

Kurt Hiller

(1928), Copenhagen

Appeal to the Second International Congress for Sexual Reform on Behalf of an Oppressed Human Variety (Introduction and translation by John Lauritsen)

Introduction

An important statement in the history of the homosexual rights movement was Kurt Hiller’s speech, “Appeal on Behalf on an Oppressed Human Variety,” written for the Second International Congress for Sexual Reform (Copenhagen, 1928). Hiller could not afford the trip to Copenhagen, owing to the economic crisis, so the speech was delivered in his stead by Magnus Hirschfeld, the President of the Sexual Reform Congress and the foremost figure in the early homosexual rights movement.

Kurt Hiller, one of the “left intellectuals” of Weimar Germany, was one of the strongest leaders of the German homosexual rights movement—from 1908, when he joined the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, until 1933, when he was thrown into the Oranienburg concentration camp; he was released nine months later, having nearly died from mistreatment, and went into exile. Hiller died in 1972 at the age of 87.

Much of Hiller’s 1928 speech is a defence of homosexuality against the writings of the French Communist Party intellectual, Henri Barbusse, who began in 1926 to expound the notions that homosexuality was the product of decadence in the bourgeois sector of society, a perversion favored by fascism, and so on. This mythology, unsupported by a shred of evidence, came to be the prevailing Stalinist line throughout the world, and it is still spewed out by publications on the left. Barbusse was a pacifist novelist who became editor of l’Humanité in 1926; he authored adulatory biographies of Stalin and Jesus, and sponsored congresses against war and fascism.

Hiller’s speech signals the breach between the socialist and homosexual rights movements, whose relationship had for more than three decades been one of mutual support. Not only were socialists the main champions of homosexual rights, but most of the leaders of the gay movement were themselves socialists of one sort or another—this would include Magnus Hirschfeld, Kurt Hiller, Benedict Friedlaender, Havelock Ellis, Edward Carpenter, and many others.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 seemed to usher in a new era of freedom as the tsarist laws against homosexuality were struck off the books. By 1928 the sexual legislation of the Soviet Union was held up as a model of enlightenment by the world sexual reform movement. The official Soviet legal philosophy then was to treat homosexual acts exactly the same as heterosexual, providing for punishment only in cases that involved real injury to another person, or the use of force, or the abuse of authority.

However, by 1928 the ideals of Russian Revolution had been left far behind: a gangster bureaucracy led by Stalin was consolidating its power, the Left Opposition had been crushed, Trotsky was sent into exile, and the gains for homosexual freedom were being reversed. In 1934 homosexual acts became criminal once again in the Soviet Union, just as they had been under the tsars. Then came the Moscow Trials of the late 1930s, after which Stalin was the only member of Lenin’s Central Committee not to have been imprisoned, murdered, or exiled.

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, they violently destroyed the entire sexual reform movement, including the movement for homosexual rights. Gay men were sent to Nazi concentration camps, where they were known as “the men with the pink triangle.” Tens of thousands perished.

Gay men found themselves attacked on all sides, their rights defended by no government in the world. It is bitterly ironical that while the Nazis were attacking homosexuality as “sexual bolshevism,” the Communists were attacking it as “the fascist perversion.”

In 1921 Kurt Hiller wrote an appeal “to the homosexuals of Germany” for the Action committee of a united front of German gay organizations. It included the following:

In the final analysis, justice for you will be the fruit only of your own efforts. The liberation of homosexuals can only be the work of homosexuals themselves. (Lauritsen and Thorstad 1974)

Appeal to the Second International Congress for Sexual Reform on Behalf of an Oppressed Human Variety

Honorable President, distinguished members of the Congress!

I thank you for giving me the opportunity to express my thoughts to you— indirectly; I should have presented them myself in your midst, had my economic situation not prevented me from making the trip to Copenhagen.

I wish to use the international forum you have set up to cry out to the world: From time immemorial there has existed among all peoples an unusual, but otherwise perfectly worthy, harmless, guiltless variety of human being, and this variety¹—as if we were still living in the darkest Middle Ages—is senselessly and horribly persecuted by many peoples, following the lead of their legislators, governments, and courts. Let the intellectual world, the researchers and policy makers of all nations, stand up against this barbarism and demand in the name of humanity: Halt!

The variety of which I speak is that minority of human beings whose love impulses are directed, not towards a member of the other, but rather towards a member of their own sex; these are the so-called homosexuals, Urnings, or inverts.²

They are outlawed, it is said, because their feelings and acts are “contrary to nature.” However, their feelings and acts are rooted in their constitution, components of their character, something dictated to them by their nature. And since the history of all primitive and all civilized peoples demonstrates that such a minority has existed in all ages, then this fact means that we are obligated to recognize this nature as being indeed perfectly natural—shocking perhaps, but nothing that deserves either to be denied or defamed. A phenomenon of nature, that is incomprehensible or discomfiting to the majority, does not cease on that account to be a phenomenon of nature.

Same-sex love is not a mockery of nature, but rather nature at play; and anyone who maintains the contrary—that love, as everyone knows, is intended to serve the propagation of the species, that homosexual or heterosexual potency is squandered on goals other than procreation—fails to consider the superabundance with which Nature in all her largesse wastes semen, millions and billions of times over. As Nietzsche expressed it in Daybreak, “Procreation is a frequently occurring accidental result of one way of satisfying the sexual drive—it is neither its goal nor its necessary consequence.” The theory which would make procreation the “goal” of sexuality is exposed as hasty, simplistic and false by the phenomenon of same-sex love alone.

Nature’s laws, unlike the laws formulated by the human mind, cannot be violated. The assertion that a specific phenomenon of nature could somehow be “contrary to nature” amounts to pure absurdity. Nevertheless, this absurd claim has persisted for many centuries in literature and in legislation, and even quite celebrated sex educators have come out with this nonsense.

Just recently, an internationally renowned spokesman of the European left, Henri Barbusse, exhibited his knowledge and brain power must unfavorably when he answered, in response to a circular enquiry on homosexuality (in the Paris magazine, Les Marges, of 15 March 1926): “I believe that this diversion of a natural instinct is, like many other perversions, a sign of the profound social and moral decadence of a certain sector of present-day society. In all eras, decadence has manifested itself in over-refinements and anomalies of the senses, feelings, and emotions.”

One must reply to Monsieur Barbusse that this alleged “over-refinement” of which he speaks, uncritically parroting a popular misconception, has always manifested itself just as much at times when a race was on the ascent as when it was in decline; that for example, love between man and youth was no more excluded from the heroic and golden ages of Ancient Greece, than it was from the most illustrious period of Islamic culture, or from the age of Michelangelo; and that a Marxist is making a fool of himself when he tries to connect the homosexuality of the present with the class struggle, by pointing to it as a symptom of the “moral decadence” of “a certain sector” of society, namely the bourgeois sector: as though same-sex love did not occur among proletarians of all kinds—among workers, peasants, employees, little people in all occupations—just as much as among the possessing classes.

The experience of sexologists and psychotherapists proves the contrary. Nature does not stop at any social class when creating her marvelous varieties of human beings. It is true that the proletariat as a rule has less time and means than the propertied class to devote to the pursuit of sexual pleasure, even to the sublime forms of sublimated eroticism; and this is one reason which, among many others, leads—or ought to lead—the fighter for human happiness towards socialism. But this is just as true for the broad mass of proletarians considered heterosexual as for the minority considered homosexual.

…

It is not true that homosexuality is a sign of “decadence” or something pathological. Men of glowing physical health, of undeniable mental soundness, and of great intellectual powers have been bearers of this inclination—just as often as have been the weak, the unstable, and the inferior. There are inferior, average and superior homosexuals—exactly as there are inferior, average and superior heterosexuals. To belong, not to the rule, not to the “norm,” but rather to the exception, to the minority, to the variety, is neither a symptom of degeneration nor of pathology. Likewise, having red hair is neither decadent nor sick.

If it is true that there are higher percentages of the mentally weak, the eccentric, the unbalanced, the hypersensitive and the hypertense among homosexuals than among those oriented in the usual way, the blame should not be placed on the predisposition, but rather upon the circumstances in which these people find themselves: one who lives constantly under the onus of attitudes and laws that stamp his inclination as inferior, must be of an unusually robust nature to retain his full worth in every respect. If the terrible weight of contempt and persecution that bears down on homosexuals were to be lifted from them, the neurotic traits within would to the same degree vanish, and then the intrinsic creative worth of their nature, especially the pedagogical ability of which Plato wrote, would come into play. It is necessary to incorporate homosexuals in the general culture of society, to assign homosexuality a place in society where it can act productively, for it has its own fertility. Hellas, and above all Sparta, understood this and knew how to draw the practical conclusions from this knowledge.

…

It is clear that socially harmful conduct in the sphere of same-sex love should remain punishable to the same degree as socially harmful conduct in the sphere of opposite-sex love; that therefore the free sexual self-determination of adults and the inexperience of sexually immature youth should be protected by law, and that the misuse of economic or official dependence for lascivious purposes should be forbidden, as well as indecent behavior in public places—with complete parity between heterosexual and homosexual acts. If anyone claims that the homosexual liberation movement would like to see Carte Blanche given to unrestrained and anti-social debauchery, or that such liberation would place the interests of the abnormal above the interests of society—then he is lying. The interests of society come first; but I question whether the interests of society demand that human beings be thrown in prison, disgraced and ruined socially, for acts that harm no one, merely because their erotic taste differs from that of the majority. I question whether the interest of society is served when a minority of its members are forced through severe penalties into lifelong sexual abstinence or chronic self-gratification (the situation imposed upon convicts serving life sentences)—a minority which, we know, causes not the slightest harm by following its own nature. That child molesters or homosexual lust-murderers should be protected is not the thrust of my argument.

Prudishness, along with false and monstrous notions about the forms that samesex love-making takes, prevents a general public discussion of the problem—especially in countries where it is most needed. And even more than prudishness: the apathy of those not personally involved, both in the masses and among the intelligentsia. One must have a great sense of justice and noblesse to take on the cause of a persecuted minority to which one does not personally belong. But fortunately there are still a certain a number of people distinguished by such fairness. These people comprehend that an age in which concern for national minorities is so extraordinarily keen and active must find the courage to protect a minority which, to be sure is not an ethnic one, but which can be found in all states, and is especially deserving of protection, since there is no state in the world where they are the majority and with which they, like the national minorities, could identify. International minority rights, which are slowly taking shape, should defend not only the national, the racial and the religious minorities, but also the psycho-biological, the sexual minorities, so long as they are harmless; and if the Second International Congress for Sexual Reform chooses to speak out in favor of these ideas, it would be a courageous act of ethical rationality.

Kurt Hiller, Appeal to the Second International Congress for Sexual Reform on Behalf of an Oppressed Human Variety. Copenhagen, 1928. Translated by Eds. John Lauritsen and David Thorstad, The Early Homosexual Rights Movement (1864-1935), revised second edition 1995.

Albert Mohler

(March 2, 2007), United States

“Is Your Baby Gay? What If You Could Know? What If You Could Do Something about It?”

What if you could know that your unborn baby boy is likely to be sexually attracted to other boys? Beyond that, what if hormonal treatments could change the baby’s orientation to heterosexual? Would you do it? Some scientists believe that such developments are just around the corner.

For some time now, scientists have been looking for a genetic or hormonal cause of sexual orientation. Thus far, no “gay gene” has been found—at least not in terms of incontrovertible and accepted science. Yet, it is now claimed that a growing body of evidence indicates that biological factors may at least contribute to sexual orientation.

The most interesting research along these lines relates to the study of sheep. Scientists at the U.S. Sheep Experiment Station are conducting research into the sexual orientation of sheep through “sexual partner preference testing.” As William Saletan at Slate.com explains:

A bare majority of rams turn out to be heterosexual. One in five swings both ways. About 15 percent are asexual, and 7 percent to 10 percent are gay.

Why so many gay rams? Is it too much socializing with ewes? Same-sex play with other lambs? Domestication? Nope. Those theories have been debunked. Gay rams don’t act girly. They’re just as gay in the wild. And a crucial part of their brains—the “sexually dimorphic nucleus”—looks more like a ewe’s than like a straight ram’s. Gay men have a similar brain resemblance to women. Charles Roselli, the project’s lead scientist, says such research “strongly suggests that sexual preference is biologically determined in animals, and possibly in humans.”

What makes the sheep “sexual partner preference testing” research so interesting is that the same scientists who are documenting the rather surprising sexual behaviors of male sheep think they can also change the sexual orientation of the animals. In other words, finding a biological causation for homosexuality may also lead to the discovery of a “cure” for the same phenomenon.

That’s where the issue gets really interesting. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals [PETA] has called for an end to the research, while tennis star Martina Navratilova called the research “homophobic and cruel” and argued that gay sheep have a “right” to be homosexual. No kidding.

Homosexual activists were among the first to call for (and fund) research into a biological cause of homosexuality. After all, they argued, the discovery of a biological cause would lead to the normalization of homosexuality simply because it would then be seen to be natural, and thus moral.

But now the picture is quite different. Many homosexual activists recognize that the discovery of a biological marker or cause for homosexual orientation could lead to efforts to eliminate the trait, or change the orientation through genetic or hormonal treatments.

Tyler Gray addresses these issues in the current issue of Radar magazine. In “Is Your Baby Gay?,” Gray sets out a fascinating scenario. A woman is told that her unborn baby boy is gay. This woman and her husband consider themselves to be liberal and tolerant of homosexuality. But this is not about homosexuality now; it is about their baby boy. The woman is then told that a hormone patch on her abdomen will “reverse the sexual orientation inscribed in his chromosomes.” The Sunday Times [London] predicts that such a patch should be available for use on humans within the decade. Will she use it?

This question stands at the intersection of so many competing interests. Feminists and political liberals have argued for decades now that a woman should have an unrestricted right to an abortion, for any cause or for no stated cause at all. How can they now complain if women decide to abort fetuses identified as homosexual? This question involves both abortion and gay rights—the perfect moral storm of our times.

Homosexual activists have claimed that sexual orientation cannot be changed. What if a hormone patch during pregnancy will do the job?

As Gray suggests:

In a culture that encourages us to customize everything from our Nikes to our venti skinny lattes, perhaps it is only a matter of time before baby-making becomes just another consumer transaction. Already have a girl? Make this one a boy! Want to impress your boho friends? Make a real statement with lesbian twins!

More to the point, Gray understands that such a development would reshape the abortion and gay-rights debates in America:

Conservatives opposed to both abortion and homosexuality will have to ask themselves whether the public shame of having a gay child outweighs the private sin of terminating a pregnancy (assuming the stigma on homosexuality survives the scientific refutation of the Right’s treasured belief that it is a “lifestyle choice.)” Pro-choice activists won’t be spared either. Will liberal moms who love their hairdressers be as tolerant when faced with the prospect of raising a little stylist of their own? And exactly how pro-choice will liberal abortion-rights activists be when thousands of potential parents are choosing to filter homosexuality right out of the gene pool?

The development of Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis [PGD] is one of the greatest threats to human dignity in our times. These tests are already leading to the abortion of fetuses identified as carrying unwanted genetic markers. The tests can now check for more than 1,300 different chromosomal abnormalities or patterns. With DNA analysis, the genetic factors could be identified right down to hair and eye color and other traits. The logic is all too simple. If you don’t like what you see on the PGD report … just abort and start over. Soon, genetic treatments may allow for changing the profile. Welcome to the world of designer babies.

If that happens, how many parents—even among those who consider themselves most liberal—would choose a gay child? How many parents, armed with this diagnosis, would use the patch and change the orientation?

Christians who are committed to think in genuinely Christian terms should think carefully about these points:

1. There is, as of now, no incontrovertible or widely accepted proof that any biological basis for sexual orientation exists.

2. Nevertheless, the direction of the research points in this direction. Research into the sexual orientation of sheep and other animals, as well as human studies, points to some level of biological causation for sexual orientation in at least some individuals.

3. Given the consequences of the Fall and the effects of human sin, we should not be surprised that such a causation or link is found. After all, the human genetic structure, along with every other aspect of creation, shows the pernicious effects of the Fall and of God’s judgment.

4. The biblical condemnation of all homosexual behaviors would not be compromised or mitigated in the least by such a discovery. The discovery of a biological factor would not change the Bible’s moral verdict on homosexual behavior.

5. The discovery of a biological basis for homosexuality would be of great pastoral significance, allowing for a greater understanding of why certain persons struggle with these particular sexual temptations.

6. The biblical basis for establishing the dignity of all persons—the fact that all humans are made in God’s image—reminds us that this means all persons, including those who may be marked by a predisposition toward homosexuality. For the sake of clarity, we must insist at all times that all persons—whether identified as heterosexual, homosexual, lesbian, transsexual, transgendered, bisexual, or whatever—are equally made in the image of God.

7. Thus, we will gladly contend for the right to life of all persons, born and unborn, whatever their sexual orientation. We must fight against the idea of aborting fetuses or human embryos identified as homosexual in orientation.

8. If a biological basis is found, and if a prenatal test is then developed, and if a successful treatment to reverse the sexual orientation to heterosexual is ever developed, we would support its use as we should unapologetically support the use of any appropriate means to avoid sexual temptation and the inevitable effects of sin.

9. We must stop confusing the issues of moral responsibility and moral choice. We are all responsible for our sexual orientation, but that does not mean that we freely and consciously choose that orientation. We sin against homosexuals by insisting that sexual temptation and attraction are predominately chosen. We do not always (or even generally) choose our temptations. Nevertheless, we are absolutely responsible for what we do with sinful temptations, whatever our so-called sexual orientation.

10. Christians must be very careful not to claim that science can never prove a biological basis for sexual orientation. We can and must insist that no scientific finding can change the basic sinfulness of all homosexual behavior. The general trend of the research points to at least some biological factors behind sexual attraction, gender identity, and sexual orientation. This does not alter God’s moral verdict on homosexual sin (or heterosexual sin, for that matter), but it does hold some promise that a deeper knowledge of homosexuality and its cause will allow for more effective ministries to those who struggle with this particular pattern of temptation. If such knowledge should ever be discovered, we should embrace it and use it for the greater good of humanity and for the greater glory of God.

Albert Mohler, Jr. (March 2, 2007), United States “Is Your Baby Gay? What If You Could Know? What If You Could Do Something about It?” Blog posting by R. Albert Mohler Jr.(http://www.albertmohler.com/2007/03/02/is-your-baby-gay-what-if-you-could-know-what-if-you-could-do-something-about-it-2/).

Rictor Norton

(1997), United States

From “Essentialism”

My traditionalist historical position is termed “essentialism” by postmodern theorists, which they regard with contempt, in the same way that I regard social constructionist theory as the main impediment to the understanding of queer history. The history of ideas (and ideologies) can be interesting and valuable, but it is tragic that homosexuals have been subsumed totally within the idea of the ‘homosexual construct’. The result is little better than intellectual ethnic cleansing.

In the social constructionist view, knowledge is constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed through ideological discourse. In my traditionalist or essentialist view, knowledge is discovered, repressed, suppressed, and recovered through history and experience. Social constructionism emphasizes revolutionary development (the dialectic); I emphasize evolutionary development, cultural growth and permutation, and sometimes mere change in fashion. Rather than the word ‘construct’, which implies building from scratch according to an arbitrarily chosen blueprint, I prefer the words ‘consolidate’ or ‘forge’, implying that the basic material already exists but can be subjected to shaping and polishing.

‘Cultural constructs’ are sometimes set up in opposition to ‘universal truths’ in an effort to force traditionalists/essentialists into an impossibly idealistic corner, but ‘culture’ is a concept that can be claimed by essentialists as well as by social constructionists. The essentialist position is that queer culture is organic rather than artificial. Social constructionists see culture as a construct whose arbitrary foundation is determined by the builder; I see culture as the cultivation of a root, and I shall be developing the ethnic view that queer culture grows naturally from personal queer identity and experience and is self-cultivated by queers rather than by the ideology and labels of straight society.

I cannot reasonably object if critics wish to label me an ‘essentialist’ pure and simple, because I believe that homosexuals are born and not made, and that homosexuality is hard-wired. However, I also believe that queers fashion their own culture (using their own resources rather than being imposed upon by society), and this is a significant focus of my own version of essentialism, which might be called ‘queer cultural essentialism’. I take the view that there is a core of queer desire that is transcultural, transnational, and transhistorical, a queer essence that is innate, congenital, constitutional, stable or fixed in its basic pattern. However, I distinguish between queer persons, queer sexual acts and behaviour, and queer social interactions, and try not to confuse the constancy of the desire with the variability of its expression. Personal queer identity arises from within, and is then consolidated along lines suggested by the collective identity of the queer (sub)culture.

In the theoretical literature it is generally assumed that essentialism is the same as uniformism/conformism (often made explicit in lesbian-feminist theory). But the view that homosexuality is a monolith is not at all an essential feature of essentialism. The essentialist does not say there is only one gay root: in fact a diversity of roots has been a key feature of essentialism since the early 1970s—witness the plural title of the two-volume collection of essays from Gay Sunshine: Gay Roots. It is really social constructionist theorists who have forced traditionalism into this straightjacket, just as they have forced gay experience into the political straitjacket.

I have no problem in reconciling the view that queer desire is innate but that it expresses itself in sexual or social actions and (sub)cultures that may reflect to a greater or lesser degree the time and place in which they occur. Self-presentation can be carefully constructed even though it is founded upon an innate self-conception.

“Essentialism” by Rictor Norton. http://www.rictornorton.co.uk/social03.htm, adapted from material in Rictor Norton, The Myth of the Modern Homosexual, London: Cassell, 1997.

NOTE PLEASE PLACE THESE NOTES RIGHT AFTER THE HILLER ARTICLE.

1. Kurt Hiller believed that the inclination toward homosexuality, or the homosexual disposition, is largely determined by heredity—hence his terms, “variety,” “constitution” (Veranlagung), “biological minority,” and so on. Hiller was not, however, in the camp of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and Magnus Hirschfeld, who considered homosexuals to be a “third sex” or an “intermediate sex.” In other writings, Hiller emphasized that all types of men, including the most robust and virile, could be homosexually inclined. While constitutional factors undoubtedly influence sexual orientation, modern scientific knowledge requires us to consider the potential for homosexual behavior, as well as the potential for heterosexual behavior, a component in the makeup of nearly all people. The Kinsey studies in particular show that “homosexuals” and “heterosexuals” are not two discrete categories, but rather that a gradual continuum exists between those who exhibit only heterosexual and those who exhibit only homosexual behavior.

2. That is to say, sexual acts between women are not subject to criminal penalties.

Descriptions of Images and Figures

The Kinsey scale is described as follows:

A rectangle is divided into seven equal segments with six vertical lines. The left side of the rectangle is labeled as heterosexual, and the right side is labeled as homosexual. A diagonal line is drawn from the lower end of the first vertical line to the top of the sixth vertical line. The region of the rectangle below the diagonal line is shaded. The numbers 0 to 6 are shown below the seven segments.

The heterosexual-homosexual rating scale is as follows:

· 0 equals exclusively heterosexual.

· 1 equals predominantly heterosexual, only incidentally homosexual.

· 2 equals predominantly heterosexual, more than incidentally homosexual.

· 3 equals equally heterosexual and homo sexual.

· 4 predominantly homosexual, more than incidentally heterosexual.

· 5 equals predominantly homosexual, only incidentally heterosexual. 6 equals exclusively homosexual.

Langdon Parks’s Sexuality Scale is described as follows:

The matrix is split into seven columns and six rows. The horizontal axis represents orientations and the vertical axis represents attraction types. Each entry on the matrix includes a combination of attraction type and the corresponding orientation.

The row-wise entries are as follows.

Row 1. F 6, F 5, F 4, F 3, F 2, F 1, and F 0.

Row 2. E 6, E 5, E 4, E 3, E 2, E 1, and E 0.

Row 3. D 6, D 5, D 4, D 3, D 2, D 1, and D 0.

Row 4. C 6, C 5, C 4, C 3, C 2, C 1, and C 0.

Row 5. B 6, B 5, B 4, B 3, B 2, B 1, and B 0.

Row 6. A, A, A, A, A, A, and A.

A legend below the matrix reads as follows:

Attraction types:

A: (Aromantic Asexuality): Experiences no attraction besides friendship and or aesthetic attraction.

B (Romantic Asexuality): Not interested in sexual relations whatsoever but open to romance, touch, or bonds stronger than friendship.

C (Tertiary Sexuality): Experiences no sexual attraction but willing to do it for other reasons. Such as children, pleasing their partners, and so on.

D (Secondary Sexuality): May develop lustful feelings over the course of a relationship but not at first.

E (Primary Sexuality): Sexual desire is established from the get-go, even if it is not acted upon. However other components (such as companionship) are essential to these individuals.

F (Hyper Sexuality): Sex is the be-all-end-all purpose of any relationship. Everything also is lust a consolation prize or means to an end.

Orientations:

0: Exclusively attracted to opposite sex.

1: Mostly attracted to the opposite sex.

2: Prefers the opposite sex but is also attracted to the same sex.

3: Equal attraction (bisexual or biromantic).

4: Prefers the same sex but is also attracted to the opposite sex.

5: Mostly attracted to the same sex. 6: Exclusively attracted to the same sex.