Inquirium Interruptus That homosexuality flourishes in that all-male klatch that is the Roman Catholic clergy is no longer a shocking revelation, if it ever truly was. Nevertheless, the busting of a priest for such behavior still has the power to shock—not so much for the sinful action itself as for the explanation offered when one is caught. In the case of Monsignor Tommaso Stenico, an official at the Vatican, the moment of truth was all captured on a hidden camera as the father made advances on a young man while asserting that gay sex was not sinful. Soon the tape was being broadcast on a private TV network (La7); Stenico was suspended from his Vatican post; and there he was explaining himself to La Repubblica, a national newspaper. It was all in the interest of research, he declared! The reason he spent all that time in gay chat rooms and met with gay men, even pretending to be gay himself, was to gather information about “those who damage the image of the Church with homosexual activity.” This is a tough job, no doubt, but how was Stenico rewarded for his service? “I was a victim of my own attempts to contribute to cleaning up the Church with my psychoanalyst work,” he told the paper. Not caught on tape, alas: Stenico questioning his young friend about the declining image of the Church.
Record Law Falls It was just a year ago that photographer Tom Bianchi wrote a piece in these pages deploring a law familiarly known as “2257” that required producers of erotic art to keep detailed records of all the models who ever appeared in their work. One feature of the law (which was strengthened by the Bush Administration) was that it defined a “producer” as anyone down the line who might reproduce such images, however far removed from the original photo shoot. Late in October, 2257 was struck down by the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals on the ground that it provided for “no commercial limitation on who will be considered producers.” So now the guy who posts a few naughty pictures of some hotty on his blog doesn’t have to worry about having a copy of the model’s birth certificate in his filing cabinet.
Over There How far the rest of the English-speaking world has leapt ahead of the US of A was on display in two stories:
First, this from Telegraph.co.uk: “Four firemen who disturbed an outdoor gay sex session have been reprimanded and heavily fined after they were accused by one of the participants of being homophobic”—this after the four happened upon the men in a park in Bristol well known as a lively site for “dogging.” Repeat: the firemen were not rewarded for breaking up a sordid sex scene but punished with a fine of £1,000 for shining their “torches” on some guys goin’ at it in a public place.
Next, an indication of just how far the British pendulum has swung: an amendment to the Criminal Justice and Immigration bill would make it a crime to incite hatred against GLBT people. Citing lyrics in rap songs that advocate attacking or even killing gays, as well as “fundamentalist claims that all gay people are paedophiles,” Straw defended the measure in the interest of public safety, apparently on the analogy of shouting “fire” in a crowded theater. Inevitably, though, the question arises: what constitutes incitement? What kinds of speech make people go out and attack fags? What about homilies against homosexuality in church? The latter question troubled the nation’s vicars, who suddenly realized that they could face jail time for their routine diatribes. Some might say that this is just the fate the churchmen deserve for centuries of condemning sodomites to hell; but it does raise what we on this side of the Pond would call First Amendment questions. At the very least, such a law would put a lot of our talk radio hosts out of business.
Science Prances On The following “propositions” are keyed to the theme of this issue and report on a few studies of homosexuality from the labs of biologists and other scientists.
Prop 1. The more older brothers you have, the more likely it is that you’re gay. A connection between birth order and sexual orientation has been fairly well established over the past few years—it seems the odds of being gay go up by a factor of 1.5 with each male birth—and has a striking implication: homosexuality begins in the womb. Other studies have suggested that homosexuality does run in families,* but here we’re talking about different rates of incidence within a family. The best explanation is that male fetuses are exposed to a different prenatal environment depending on their birth order. One possibility is that the mother’s body reacts to the presence of “foreign” male hormones when pregnant with her first son and produces antibodies against testosterone. So the next time a male fetus shows up, these antibodies could suppress the amount of the male hormone it receives. Note that this is a biological explanation for homosexuality that’s environmental rather than genetic. But it’s not the environment we usually talk about—infancy or early adolescence, say—but that of the uterus. Nor is this especially good news from the standpoint of GLBT demography: smaller family size means fewer younger brothers; more ominously, people are already imagining a hormone patch for pregnant women to diminish the odds of having a gay son.
* Studies of identical twins seem to converge on the figure of around fifty percent as the probability that if one twin is gay, the other will be as well (see separate studies by Richard Pillard and Dean Hamer). The probability is much lower for brothers who aren’t twins, but still greatly exceeds the rate for unrelated males. Of course, these correlations, while making a case for genes as the cause, do not rule out the environment, including the womb, as the cause of this concordance between brothers. What’s more, that fifty percent figure for identical twins who grew up together still leaves a lot of explaining to do.
Prop 2. Your gaydar may be for real. A number of studies have suggested that gay people exhibit certain physical traits that may actually be perceptible to the astute observer. A study published in Science Daily (9/12/07) compared body motion for gay and straight men and women and found that gay people of both sexes walked on a treadmill in characteristic ways. Researchers at NYU and Texas A&M used a 3-D motion-capture system like those used in Hollywood to create animated figures from live models, then analyzed the amount of shoulder swagger and hip sway in subjects’ gaits. They found that both gay men and lesbians tended to move in gender-incongruent ways. They also analyzed body types and found more “hourglass” shapes among gay men and “tubular” shapes among lesbians than in the general population. The question arises a propos of gaydar: do GLBT people actually look different from straight people?
Props 3–6. If you’re a gay man, chances are your index finger is longer than your ring finger, while if you’re a lesbian, odds are your index finger is shorter than your ring finger—ratios that reverse the norm for heterosexual men and women. The “whorl” of your hair around a central point on your skull could reveal your sexual orientation—clockwise if you’re straight, 
counterclockwise if you’re gay. You’re more likely to be left-handed if you’re gay than if you’re straight. And even your fingerprints can give you away: those of gay men tend to resemble those of straight women with respect to the density of ridges on the thumb and pinky. (Source: New York, 6/17/07.) While trivial in themselves, these odd correspondences with traits that clearly are genetic are interesting precisely because they’re so specific—and so seemingly unrelated to sexual orientation. Wouldn’t you know, gay people are more likely to be left-handed and have a counterclockwise hair whorl? Perhaps, as some have hypothesized, there really is some underlying blip in the gender continuum that gives rise to a variant (dare I say queer?) configuration of traits of which sexual orientation is only one manifestation.
