ABSTRACT
In July 1993, the journal Science published an article about a scientific study linking homosexuality with a specific site on the X chromosome (Hamer et al. 1993; Angier 1993). As Garland Allen discusses elsewhere in this volume, the “gay gene,” as it was dubbed, or the “gay brain,” which preceded it by a few years (LeVay 1991), were not the first hypotheses of a biological cause of homosexuality, nor, I suspect, will they be the last. Both studies, however, have shared the limelight: they have been praised and condemned for their scientific merits, and they have been hailed and vilified for their political implications. One locus of criticism has been the delineation of the subject population (see, for example, Gorman 1994; Byne 1994): LeVay (1991) examined brain tissue of thirty-five males who had died of AIDS (nineteen of whom were retrospectively classified as homosexual); Hamer's group (1993) studied forty families with pairs of self-identified gay brothers. The question underlying the critiques pertains to the definition of homosexuality itself: Who counts when you're counting homosexuals? (See also Hamer and Copeland 1994, 52–73.)
