A LITTLE QUEER NATURAL HISTORY
by Josh L. Davis
University of Chicago Press
128 pages, $16.
IT HAS ALWAYS ASTONISHED ME, given the number of people attracted to their own sex in this world and the pain that being homosexual has caused a significant number of them, that so little has been done to find the “cause” of their divergence from the norm. Why, I used to wonder, did the parents of a friend of mine from Worcester, Massachusetts, produce four homosexuals out of five children—one of them the first openly gay judge in that state? Was it something about the mother, whether she drank alcohol during pregnancy, or the level of the father’s testosterone during conception, or the legendary “gay gene”? What determined the outcome of this exchange of DNA? It was ordinary curiosity, I suppose, to wonder about such things, except that I had a personal stake in finding out. It rankled me when homophobes claimed that I had simply “chosen” to be gay—presumably because homosexuals were sybarites who just wanted to have fun, to be free of the burdens of parenthood, to live for pleasure.
Homosexuals replied with a question of their own: Do you really think anyone would choose a life as difficult as this? If only we could find the “cause” of homosexuality, I thought, we could prove that it wasn’t a choice. That’s why I perked up in 1991 when a British scientist named Simon LeVay noticed that the hypothalamus glands of a group of male homosexuals he’d studied were smaller than those of women and heterosexual men. But this excitement did not last. The problem was that there was no way to know if the smaller glands were a result or a cause of same-sex attraction. The findings were attacked on all sides, and the attempt to explain why some of us are drawn to our own sex was replaced by the El Dorado of the “gay gene,” which inspired Jonathan Tolins to write a play called The Twilight of the Golds, in which a couple is informed by doctors that the child they’re about to have will be homosexual. So do they want to abort? In other words, homosexuality as a birth defect.
Andrew Holleran’s latest novel is The Kingdom of Sand. His other novels include Grief and The Beauty of Men.
