Biology and gay identity

New Left Review

Volumn , Issue 228, 1998, Pages 47-66

  Fernbach, David ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0032373608     PISSN: 00286060     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (44)

1. I write here of course as a gay man, and my subject is gay male identity. Some themes discussed will bear also on the lesbian situation, but most inevitably will not.
2. Richard Green, The 'Sissy-Boy Syndrome' and the Development of Homosexuality, New Haven 1987, reports that some two-thirds of gay men recall being perceived in childhood as sissies, while around four-fifths of markedly effeminate boys grow up as homosexual or bisexual.
3. 'Ninety per cent of gay men surveyed by the Advocate in 1994 claimed to have been born gay, and only four per cent believed that choice came into the equation at all.' Simon LeVay, Queer Science, Cambridge, Mass. 1996, p. 6. Of the lesbians surveyed, only half believed they were born that way.
4. 'Anima muliebris in corpore virile inclusa' - often cited in Ulrichs's Latin tag.
5. Numa Numantius [Karl Heinrich Ulrichs], Vindex. Social-juristische Studien über mannmännliche Geschlechtsliebe, Leipzig 1864. Cited after Hubert Kennedy, The Life and Works of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, Boston 1988, p. 57.
6. Numa Numantius [Karl Heinrich Ulrichs], Vindex. Social-juristische Studien über mannmännliche Geschlechtsliebe, Leipzig 1864. Cited after Hubert Kennedy, The Life and Works of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, Boston 1988, p. 57.
7. Simon LeVay, The Sexual Brain, Cambridge, Mass. 1993, p. 109.
8. Ulrichs, Vindex.
9. Magnus Hirschfeld, Die Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes, Berlin 1920. Cited after Simon LeVay, Queer Science, p. 32.
10. Magnus Hirschfeld, Die Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes, Berlin 1920. Cited after Simon LeVay, Queer Science, p. 32.
11. August Bebel, Woman and Socialism, trans. De Leon, New York 1904, p. 164. Engels elaborates in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State [1883] that the men of Greek antiquity 'fell into the distasteful practice of boy-love and degraded alike their gods and themselves with the myth of Ganymede' (London 1972, p. 133).
12. August Bebel, Woman and Socialism, trans. De Leon, New York 1904, p. 164. Engels elaborates in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State [1883] that the men of Greek antiquity 'fell into the distasteful practice of boy-love and degraded alike their gods and themselves with the myth of Ganymede' (London 1972, p. 133).
13. Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen, IX, 1908, p. 636; cited after Jim Steakley, The Homosexual Emancipation Movement in Germany, New York 1975, p. 64.
14. Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen, IX, 1908, p. 636; cited after Jim Steakley, The Homosexual Emancipation Movement in Germany, New York 1975, p. 64.
15. In 1869 Marx obtained and sent to Engels for comment one of Ulrichs's pamphlets, which elicited the following response on 22 June: 'That is a quite curious "Urning" which you sent me. Here are the most unnatural revelations. The pederasts are beginning to count themselves and find that they make up a power in the state. Only the organization is lacking, but according to this it already exists in secret. And since they count such significant men, in all the old and even the new parties, from Rosing to Schweitzer, they cannot fail to succeed. "Guerre aux cons, paix aux trous-de-cul" will be the call now. It is only luck that we are personally too old to have to fear that on the victory of this party we'll have to pay the victors bodily tribute. But the young generation! Moreover, only in Germany is it possible for such a fellow to appear, transform filthiness into a theory, and solicit . . . ' (Marx-Engels-Werke, vol. 32, pp. 324-5. Trans. in Kennedy, Ulrichs, pp. 134-5.)
16. 3.' Anne Fausto-Sterling, Myths of Gender, 2nd edn, New York 1992, p. 244, reviewing Laua S. Allen, Melissa Hines, James E. Shryne and Roger A. Gorski, 'Two Sexually Dimorphic Cell Groups in the Human Brain', Developmental Brain Research, vol. 44, pp. 314-18.
17. 3.' Anne Fausto-Sterling, Myths of Gender, 2nd edn, New York 1992, p. 244, reviewing Laua S. Allen, Melissa Hines, James E. Shryne and Roger A. Gorski, 'Two Sexually Dimorphic Cell Groups in the Human Brain', Developmental Brain Research, vol. 44, pp. 314-18.
18. LeVay, The Sexual Brain, p. 71.
19. 3.' Myths of Gender, p. 252.
20. 3.' Myths of Gender, p. 252.
21. LeVay, 'A Difference in Hypothalamic Structure', p. 1036.
22. J. M. Bailey and R. C. Pillard, 'A Genetic Study of Male Sexual Orientation', Archieves of General Psychiatry, vol. 50, 1993, pp. 217-23.
23. Dean H. Hamer et al., 'A Linkage Between DNA Markers on the X Chromosome and Male Sexual Orientation', Science, vol. 261, 16 July 1993, p. 326. Several critics have drawn attention to the surprisingly low 'background rate' of gayness, 2 per cent, that Hamer assumed in the general population and found among non-maternal relatives.
24. Not only was the first attempt to replicate Hamer's results a failure; a junior member of his own lab raised methodological questions with the Office of Research Integrity, responsible to the US Department of Health and Human Services. Science, vol. 268, 30 June 1995, p. 1841.
25. Unlike LeVay, Hamer only came out as gay in the wake of the publicity his work generated.
26. Dean H. Hamer et al., 'A Linkage', n. 29. Of the total bearers of any gene on the X chromosome, approximately two-thirds will anyway be women, since they have two X chromosomes against one in the male.
27. Stanley Coren, The Lefthander Syndrome, London 1992, pp. 200-1. When I first took an interest in this question, I found myself in a gay-male work situation where five of nine staff were left-handed.
28. The corpus callosum and anterior commissure, bundles of fibres joining the two hemispheres, are thicker in the female brain, suggesting that women more readily combined the resources of both. Laura Allen and R. A. Gorski, 'Sexual Orientation and the Size of the Anterior Commissure', Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, vol. 7, 1992, pp. 3697-702, also report that gay men's brains exhibit a greater thickness of the anterior commissure. Simon LeVay comments, 'It is possible that differences in the size of the commissure are related to differences in the lateralization of brain functions,' (Quan Science, p. 145), that is, to the high proportion of left-handers among gay men.
29. The corpus callosum and anterior commissure, bundles of fibres joining the two hemispheres, are thicker in the female brain, suggesting that women more readily combined the resources of both. Laura Allen and R. A. Gorski, 'Sexual Orientation and the Size of the Anterior Commissure', Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, vol. 7, 1992, pp. 3697-702, also report that gay men's brains exhibit a greater thickness of the anterior commissure. Simon LeVay comments, 'It is possible that differences in the size of the commissure are related to differences in the lateralization of brain functions,' (Quan Science, p. 145), that is, to the high proportion of left-handers among gay men.
30. There were other very different parts of Western society where male intimacy could be promoted as a social value, with varying degrees of erotic charge. Some of this energy flowed into progressive politics and the beginnings of socialism; in the special conditions of North America, Walt Whitman was its most eminent representative. The physical comradeship that he preached could mesh in with the open frontier and Civil War; it was quashed as Whitman's democratic utopia grew into the purest form of capitalism. From today's vantage-point, it is difficult not to claim Whitman for the homosexual tradition, yet in his time Whitman's poetry found a wide resonance among 'normal' men, both in his own country and in Europe, while simultaneously striking a special chord in the embryonic gay minority. Like his more gracile disciple Edward Carpenter, Whitman's robust comrade-love had a continuing influence on English socialism, the 'Bolton Whitmanites' surviving as late as the 1980s.
31. Reproduced in Jim Steakley, The Homosexual Emancipation Movement in Germany, New York 1975, p. 39.
32. See Harry Oosterhuis and Hubert Kennedy, eds, Homosexuality and Male Bonding in Pre-Nazi Germany, New York 1991, pp. 3-4.
33. Cited after Sreakley, The Homosexual Emancipation Movement, p. 84.
34. Though gay men of all kinds were sent to concentration camps, Nazi policy was not averse to a rough-and-ready distinction between those ostensibly 'born that way' and then fit only to be eliminated, and those whose deviation was supposedly 'acquired'. As manpower became scarce during the war, gay prisoners who could demonstrate their heterosexual adequacy often managed to exchange the death camp for a suicide battalion on the Eastern Front.
35. This is discussed by J. Meve in 'Homosexuelle Nazis'. Ein Stereotyp in Politik und Literatur des Exils, Hamburg 1990, and by Harry Oosterhuis in 'The Guilty Conscience of the Left', European Gay Review, vol. 4, 1989, pp. 72-80.
36. This is discussed by J. Meve in 'Homosexuelle Nazis'. Ein Stereotyp in Politik und Literatur des Exils, Hamburg 1990, and by Harry Oosterhuis in 'The Guilty Conscience of the Left', European Gay Review, vol. 4, 1989, pp. 72-80.
37. The more rigid the enforcement of gender, the more polarized is homosexual experience. At one end of the scale is the berdache, allowed same-sex relations only by crossing permanently to a woman's role. In the Mediterranean world until not so far back, homosexuality meant a queen having sex with a straight man. In 1960s London, new arrivals on the gay scene were still offered a choice between 'butch' and 'bitch'. The nub of any distinction made between 'homosexual and 'gay' is that the deviant minority have learned to enjoy sexual relations with one another, relatively free from the grip of gender stereotypes.
38. Ken Plummer, ed., Modern Homosexualities: Fragments of Lesbian and Gay Experience, London 1992, pp. 14-16.
39. Appendix to Derek Jarman, At Your Own Risk, London 1992. Jarman reproduced this as part of a miscellany of texts he was sent while completing his last book.
40. For Carpenter, the emergence of the intermediate type as a social phenomenon was evidence of a biological development under way on a historical timescale: 'Though these gradations of human type have always . . . been more or less known and recognized, yet their frequency today, or even the concentration of attention on them, may be the indication of some important change actually in progress'. (Selected Writings Vol. 1: Sex, London 1984, p. 189.) It made sense in terms of the rather extreme Lamarckianism that Carpenter espoused. It only fell into disrepute after August Weismann presented in the 1890s his decisive evidence against the inheritance of acquited characteristics, which Darwin himself had maintained till his death in 1883.
41. This was well expressed in the second of the 'Demands' of the London Gay Liberation Front adopted in November 1970: 'That all people who feel attracted to a member of their own sex be taught that such feelings are perfectly normal' (cited after A. Walter, ed., Come Together, London 1980, p. 49). It was distinctive of GLF, based on an implicit psychological notion of gay identity, that it sought to validate same-sex desire as such, not simply improve the conditions of the existing gay minority.
42. In 1994 the International Lesbian and Gay Association formally expelled organizations that defended 'boy-love', such as the North American Man-Boy Love Association. This was its acceptance ticket for consultative status with UN organizations.
43. Chandler Burr, A Separate Creation, New York 1996, p. 305.
44. Lee M. Silver, a geneticist at Princeton University, foresees in his Remaking Eden (New York 1997) the splitting of the species into a 'genetically enriched' minority and a 'natural' majority, which after a few generations may no longer be able to interbreed. The genetic enrichment he focuses on is informed by the present concerns of the American upper class: enhanced athletic prowess, scientific ability, and resistance to HIV. Already today, in-vitro fertilization accounts fot upward of 100,000 births per year.