THE “NATURE–NURTURE” DEBATE has always been more about politics than about science. Notwithstanding the appealing alliteration, the two terms of this opposition go back to an ancient debate between biology and social learning. When applied to the problem of the etiology of homosexuality, the debate as it’s carried on today easily morphs into a conflict between genes and “choice,” as one side in the debate wants for political reasons to repudiate the biological argument in favor of one that assigns free agency to the practicing homosexual. But this is a separate position from the social learning model, which argues that sexual orientation is determined by environmental factors but not individual choice. Thus there are essentially three positions in play: biological determinism, social learning, and a choice model.
Complicating this debate is the fact that “homosexuality” can mean three, quite separate things corresponding to three distinct phenomena: same-sex desire, which is an internal state of mind; homosexual behavior, an external manifestation of desire; and gay identity, a signifier of desire with both verbal and non-verbal elements. Of these components, homoerotic desire precedes the other two and, in fact, drives them. Any causal mechanism must first affect homoerotic desire. While the social environment constrains the behavioral expression of desire, it is also true that the available vocabulary and set of cultural concepts constrain possible identities associated with individual desire.
Situational conditions, such as prisons, as well as economic factors, such as payment for sexual services, can cause some people to behave homoerotically without the corresponding desire, but not all people who are subjected to such constraints behave homosexually, suggesting some kind of self-selection process at work. For instance, someone in the bisexual range of Kinsey’s six-point continuum with relatively weak homoerotic desire may behave heterosexually when the opposite sex is available but homosexually when it is not. In the case of “gay for pay,” the willingness of the payee to feign homoerotic desire and to perform accordingly (to whatever extent this is possible) is based on a pecuniary motivation.Kinsey’s six-point scale classified sexual behavior along a continuum from exclusively heterosexual to exclusively homosexual. In contrast, Michael Storms’ model (1980) of sexual orientation treats homo- and heteroerotic fantasies as a dimension of desire that’s distinct from behavior. In Storms’ model, a preponderance of either hetero- or homoerotic fantasies is what constitutes a person’s sexual orientation, regardless of how these desires manifest themselves in the real world of social pressure and constraint.
And one final complication: both modern science and anecdotal reports from parents have noted signs of personality very early in newborns’ lives. But contemporary science and lay observers have also reported an ability to make major changes throughout the person’s life, especially in the formative years. People may be both more physiologically predisposed to certain behavioral patterns and more flexible than either side in this debate will acknowledge.
Historically, monarchists, aristocrats, sexists, and white supremacists have all based their claim to superiority on the heritability of advantageous characteristics. We can trace this argument backward for thousands of years. Regardless of the group arguing for its right to rule, heredity has been the justification. But there have also been oppositional groups that have embraced an egalitarian concept that such traits are not inherited; instead, at birth the mind is a blank slate upon which social learning will inscribe its influence.
Three of the major strands of thought in the 20th century developed a version of the environmental model: Marxism, Freudianism, and social constructionism. Marxism rejected the notion of an immutable human nature in favor of a more plastic person capable of transforming into the new Socialist Man. Freud contributed the idea of an undifferentiated polymorphous perversity that became focused on the genitalia of the opposite sex during psycho-sexual development. The work of Herbert Marcuse and Wilhelm Reich brought this notion of an undifferentiated sexuality into the New Left in the 1960’s. Both Women’s Liberation and early Gay Liberation rejected Freudian psychosexual development as oppressive hetero-normativity but did not challenge the blank slate model. Like Marxism, social constructionism rejected an immutable human nature, but, unlike Marxism, it rejected objectivity and historical determinism as well. Instead it upheld a continuous social creation of reality. These historic traditions and identities form the context in which this debate occurs.
If the deterministic side began with the defense of dominance and culminated at Auschwitz, the social learning side of this debate has its own shadow side beginning as elites manipulating infinitely malleable people in the name of progress and culminating in the Gulag. In the U.S., this tendency led to somewhat less extreme modes of control: advertising, behavior modification, behaviorist psychology, and social engineering of various kinds.
What’s unusual about the current debate is that the authoritarian position, exemplified by the religious Right, has adopted not a deterministic model of homosexuality but a free agency or choice model. This is because the GLBT rights organizations, adopting the argument of the Civil Rights movement, have staked their claim for equality on the premise that discrimination based on inborn characteristics is unfair and unconstitutional. So the religious Right has been forced to argue—against their traditional position, it might be noted—that homosexuality is a choice and not analogous to race or gender.
GLBT activists prefer a deterministic model of sexual orientation on the assumption that its adoption will erase anti-gay prejudice. Whether this is a reasonable assumption or not, it’s worth noting in passing that there’s also a leftist position that emphasizes free agency over determinism. Take the case of Noam Chomsky, the linguist who’s been a major figure in leftist politics. Chomsky challenged behaviorist psychology by positing an intra-psychic state (universal grammar) that drives language acquisition—a will to acquire language that everyone is born with. Behaviorism posits that language is acquired in humans solely based on its reinforcing consequences. Chomsky is credited with having launched a revolution in cognitive science by restoring agency to the individual subject in defiance of behaviorism’s model of the person as infinitely malleable. Chomsky does not identify with the Marxist left but with the anarcho-libertarian left. As far as I know, Chomsky has not commented on the origins of sexual orientation, but one could easily extrapolate his agency theory of cognitive development to this problem.
As for that favorite assumption of gay activists that a deterministic model will reduce anti-gay prejudice, this too is far from straightforward, as it were. Granted, polls have shown that a decline in anti-gay prejudice correlates with a belief in the determinist model of homosexuality. This decline has occurred as the politics of the GLBT community has embraced this model while promoting a normalizing agenda with same-sex marriage and “gays in the military” as the primary goals. If GLBT politics were again to move toward more “deviant” goals—reproductive rights for lesbians without men, defense of public sex environments and pornography, advocacy of sexual self-determination for adolescents—this support might evaporate very quickly.
Still, this optimistic view of GLBT equality fails to acknowledge the extent to which prejudice based on skin color and gender persists despite the fact that these traits are clearly not a “choice.” In fact, prejudice comes in both varieties: one type targets people based on inborn or “essential” characteristics, the other on behavior patterns regarded as deviant or “sinful.” Racism and sexism are examples of essentialist prejudices, and they’re undoubtedly out of fashion today (few people openly advocate a return to segregation). But behavioral prejudice is still fair game. Some examples might be defining dreadlocks as inappropriate for work or limiting the use of Spanish in political discourse.
Thus the determinist argument could backfire. Christian fanatics could label deterministic homoerotic desire as a “malfunction,” as indeed they already have, regarding it as a disease in need of being “cured.” Or it can be viewed as analogous to a permanent disability, in which case it falls under a particular social and legal definition. Disability covers a multitude of different conditions and degrees of possible independence. While based within the deaf communities, the deafness as culture argument may not even reflect the views of a majority of deaf people. It is, however, the most developed argument available against a malfunction in need of a cure. It would behoove us to become very familiar with the strengths and weaknesses of this argument for future reference.
Indeed we may have arrived at the point where the weight of scientific evidence is poised to overwhelm even the most determined faith-based opposition. Recent studies have focused on a variety of physical factors that tend to correlate with homoerotic desire, and they’ve actually been finding some significant relationships in measurable traits such as left-handedness, finger length, and fingerprint swirls. These studies examine whether certain physical traits appear more often than would be expected among sexual minorities than in the general population. These correspondences don’t tell us anything directly about the mechanisms that may determine sexual orientation, but they do lend credence to a genetic linkage of some kind.
Let me mention four studies in which significant correlations between homosexual desire (as self-reported) and physical traits have been identified.
Hand dominance. In a meta-analysis that compiled a number of studies touching on the relationship between hand dominance and sexual orientation (Lalumire, 2000), researchers found that in ten out of the 24 studies examined there was a statistically significant correlation between left-handedness and homosexuality. This does not mean that most gay people are left-handed—the overwhelming majority are not—only that they seem to have a somewhat greater chance of being left-handed than heterosexuals.
Fingerprint ridge patterns. Hall and Kimura found that the fingerprint ridge pattern of gay men displayed a greater degree of leftward asymmetry than it did in straight men. Researchers also found that this asymmetry co-occurred with left-handedness in gay men but not in straight men. Hall’s study found that this leftward asymmetry held among identical twins if both shared the same sexual orientation but did not if their sexual orientations differed.
Male Siblingship. A number of studies have found that the number of older brothers one has increases the likelihood of homosexuality in males. According to Lalumire (2000): “The older brother effect for homosexual men has been observed in a large number of diverse samples and is probably the most reliable finding in the literature on male homosexuality.” This finding points to a prenatal influence as opposed to a genetic one. One theory is that a mother carrying a male fetus develops antibodies against this intrusion of testosterone, so subsequent male fetuses will be exposed to less testosterone in the womb. (Researchers have found no parallel effect with older sisters and lesbians.)
Finger length. Among women as a group, the index and ring fingers tend to be the same length, but among men as a group the index finger tends to be shorter. Researchers have found differences in the ratios of index to ring fingers between lesbians and straight women but not between gay and straight men (Williams et al., 2000).
As strongly right-handed, first-born gay men clearly exist (including this writer), I’m well aware these correlations leave much leeway for explanations other than genetic ones. What they suggest is that homosexual desire does not constitute a unitary phenomenon with a single developmental pathway. Instead, it may be a label applied to multiple phenomena, each with its own developmental pathway. For political-historical reasons, Western society may have applied the label of homosexuality to a cluster of stigmatized and related desires and behaviors. As challenges to those stigmas grew, the challengers maintained the label as a badge of identity. Nothing, however, has been proved or disproved. The very wide variations in the manifestations of homoerotic behavior point to multiple phenomena with different developmental pathways. What, after all, links a monogamous lesbian couple of thirty years with, say, a twenty-something gay man on the prowl who enjoys multiple partners, sex with strangers, S/M, or whatever?
So even if science begins to uncover some tantalizing correlations between same-sex desire and physical attributes, we’re still a long way from understanding the range of sexual desire and behavior in all their complex permutations. Science cannot finally resolve the social and political questions raised by challenges to heterosexism and its defenders. No amount of scientific evidence seems capable of convincing some people that species evolve and were not created in six days. In contrast, religious homophobes might be perfectly content to accept the proposition that homosexuality is not a choice, after all, but a deeply ingrained characteristic subject to manipulation. At that point our best strategy might be to argue for the positive good that homoerotic expression brings to society at large.
References
Lalumière, M. L., et al. “Sexual orientation and handedness in men and women: a meta-analysis.” Psychological Bulletin, 126, 2000.
Storms, M. D. “Theories of sexual orientation.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 38, 1980.
Williams, T. J., et al. “Finger length ratios and sexual orientation” (Brief Communication). Nature, March 30, 2000.
Sean McShee is a writer based in South Florida.
