 Thank you very much, Dori. And thank you to PFLAG in general for honoring me with the invitation to speak in this series and in this wonderful Gain Lesbian Library Center here. My talk is basically on this question of why people are gay or lesbian or bisexual or straight. And this is a question that has concerned people a lot, let's say in the more distant past. One of the people who was very concerned with this question was Magnus Hirschfeld, the German gay rights pioneer who's going to have, apparently, an exhibition about himself in the center later. And Jim talked about a moment ago. Because Hirschfeld was not just a politician, not just a gay rights activist. He was a physician and a biologist who put forward a lot of theories about sexual orientation that rooted in his mind, at least rooted sexual orientation in biology, in genes, and brain development. But not everyone has kind of agreed with Hirschfeld, if you like, that it's a good thing or even appropriate or makes any kind of sense to ask these questions and specifically to ask them in the context of biology. Some people have said it's not a biological question at all. It's just not something that's appropriate to study with the kinds of techniques that I know about. Or that maybe it is, but it's not wise to do that because there are consequences of this kind of research that really you might not want to see. So in a sense, I have to sort of defend my status as a scientist talking about this topic at all and also defend the wisdom of addressing it. And maybe some of these issues will come out more in discussion after my lecture. The opposing point of view, if you like, came out particularly, I would say in the late 60s, when there was an early what they call homophiles period in the gay community, which was the gay organizations in Los Angeles and San Francisco, that to some extent fed into a pathological view of homosexuality. To some extent, organizations like Daughtercivilitis and the gay organizations in Los Angeles held to a view that there was something not quite right about homosexuality, that there was in some sense pathological. Perhaps we needed to invite psychiatrists to come and lecture us about what needs to be done about the situation. And there was a revolt against that in the late 60s, particularly led by Frank Kemeny on the East Coast, who said to hell with that all, if you think it's something pathological or something needs to be studied, you go and study it, you know. We're gay, we're happy with that, and don't bother us with your theories. And of course, I see a tremendous worth in that point of view, and it was a very necessary stage, if you like, for our community to go through. But I think that at this point, we are now, let's say, mature enough that we can come back and say, well, sexual orientation is a very central aspect of human diversity. And if we think that human diversity at all is something worthy to have and worthy to study, then we should study it. And sexual orientation is a very good example to study. So I think just to know something about this aspect of ourselves is worth doing. But in addition, I believe that understanding more about why people are gay or straight or in between, really in the long run will help improve relations, if you like, between gay people and the rest of society. And maybe again, we can talk more about why I think that's true, or why perhaps some of you don't think that's true at the end of the lecture. People have thought about these issues actually for quite a long time. If you go back, and if any of you ever read Plato's Symposium, for example, you'll see in that book a very famous section where Plato puts into the mouth of the playwright, Aristophanes, this extemporized creation myth where Aristophanes says that all human creatures are descended from these original double creatures who got cut in half by an angry god. And then sexual desires, basically the desire to be reunited with that ancestral other half. And some of those original double creatures were all male. And they then gave rise to gay men because they were seeking to find another male half. Some were all female, and they gave rise to lesbians. And some were hemaphrodites. And they gave rise to heterosexual people because they were looking to be reunited with an other half of the other sex. So that, if you like, was a purely genetic theory of sexual orientation because he was saying, your gale has been depending on who you're descended from. But just a few hundred years after that work, a St. Paul in that passage in Romans, which I get in the mail from time to time. So I should be able to remember it, but I'm not sure I can. Said something to the effect that basically everyone, this is how I interpret that passage. And I know not everyone does. But the plain text interpretation of that passage is that everyone is basically heterosexual. And that homosexuality is simply a behavior pattern that some straight people show out of, basically out of, because of evil intent or sinfulness. So it was a choice, basically. And it's funny, in those two accounts, you have already the beginnings of a connection between theories of sexual orientation and attitudes towards things like gay rights and everything, with the genetic theory being associated with a very gay-friendly society. Aristophanes himself actually was probably straight, but most of the people that's imposing were likely gay. And also, that was a gay-friendly society in some sense. And I know there's probably 10 people in this room who are saying I'm being very ahistorical in using these words like gay in terms of ancient Greek culture. And again, we can discuss that later, perhaps. But then the St. Paul's version, of course, saying that being gay is simply a chosen behavior pattern, was associated with a very negative view of homosexuality, that it was a mortal sin. And that association still exists today. There are a number of polls that have been done over the last few years showing that. And the polls, of course, are asking a very simple dichotomy. Is being gay something you're born to be, or is it chosen lifestyle, or is it a choice? And about half the American population believes the one, half believes the other. And when those two subgroups are asked separately about their attitudes to gay rights and everything, it's always the half who think that people are born gay or born straight, who are more favorable to gay people than those who think that it's some kind of choice. And to some extent, that connection makes some sense. For example, one of the questions that's been asked is, would you mind your child being taught by a gay teacher? And there, if you don't want your child to be gay and you think it's a choice, obviously you don't want that because this teacher is somehow going to inculcate pro-gay attitudes in his students. But some of the questions that are more a little bizarre, like there was one question in the New York Times survey where they asked, would you mind flying with a gay pilot? And there were many more. I think about five times as many of the choice brigade did not want to fly with a gay pilot compared with those people who thought that gay people were born that way. And that's not, how often does a pilot have an opportunity to influence the sexual orientation of his passengers? Probably not very often. So that makes it seem that that connection is not so much if you like a logical connection. It's more that people who believe that there's nothing more to homosexuality than a chosen set of behaviors that anyone could show, for some reason are more antagonistic to gay people in some sort of gut level. Either they want to deny them employment opportunities or they have negative beliefs about gay people, such as a gay pilot wouldn't be able to fly from one airport to the other without stopping to ask for directions or something like that. So that's the reason why this kind of research, asking these questions, if you like, is not simply asking a scientific question in a vacuum. It is inevitably, whether you want to or not, it's doing politics at the same time. And anyone who does this kind of work, obviously, is a scientist, tries to adhere to scientific principles and so on. And but still, there's always questions arise about whether you really can study a subject that is as loaded as this one without getting into incurable problems of bias and so forth. Well, so Herschfeldt put forward a theory of sexual orientation, which was very much biological. He believed that there were centers in the brain, he didn't say where, he didn't know where, that somehow, initially, a fetus had centers, if you like, for male typical development and female typical development. And that in, let's say, male fetuses that were ultimately destined to become heterosexual men, the male typical centers would develop further and the female typical centers would somehow regress and disappear. And vice versa for women. And for gay men and lesbians, it would be the converse. So you have a sort of inversion, if you like, of the brain organization of lesbians and gay men compared with their heterosexual counterparts. And Herschfeldt very much believed that sexual orientation was a lifelong affair. There wasn't just a matter of your sexual feelings when you were adult, but that you were gay from the word go and that gay kids, boys and girls who were gonna become gay or lesbian, were recognizable as such when they were two, three, four years old on the basis of not their sexuality, but on the basis of a package of traits that distinguished them from other children, the sorts of things you might guess, gay boys being less into rough and tumble sports, lesbian, pre-lesbian girls being more into that kind of activity and a whole group of things like that. Well, Herschfeldt's ideas were quite influential in his own period and he even developed this phrase for the third sex to sort of describe gays and lesbians as being kind of intermediate sexuality, if you like. And that even became a sort of icon in the gay culture in Germany. So if you read books like that Christopher Isherwood stories about Berlin in the 1920s and 30s when Herschfeldt was still active, you'll see that whole culture seems basically based on that notion of gay people as being in this, somehow in this no man's land between typical masculinity and femininity. Well, Herschfeldt's idea has basically died out in the 30s and 40s and particularly under the influence of the Nazi period which gave human biology such a bad name. Herschfeldt's ideas were complete forgotten and they were replaced by another set of ideas that had already come to birth at the beginning of the century and those were those of Sigmund Freud. So Freud said, no, you're not born gay lesbian and no, it's not a choice. It's something in between. It's actually to do with the relationships between a child and his or her parents. And the most well-known, he put forward a number of different theories actually to explain both male homosexuality and female homosexuality. But the most well-known one is that the one that explains male homosexuality in terms of a failure of resolution of the edible complex. So a young boy who's fallen in love with his mother like any other boy, but it fails to come out of that edible complex as he approaches puberty and instead stays in love with his mother basically. And then in adult life, he tries to reenact that relationship with his mother by putting himself in his mother's place and then seeking a boy or a young man or man to represent himself as he was in his childhood. It's a little convoluted, but that's Freud. And so he would basically try and reenact that early, edible relationship with his mother in his adult relationships with other men. And why would he do that? And a heterosexual man not go through that process? Well, Freud said it might be because the mother was too close-binding, basically would not let the child go. Or perhaps the father was too distant and hostile and did not provide an appropriate gender model in some way for that transition. Now, those ideas of course became very dominant in Europe and America, particularly in the middle of the century. And Freud himself wasn't especially homophobic. He was kind of neutral. He sometimes said some nice things about gay people, sometimes said some less nice things. But he didn't really try and get rid of homosexuality through psychoanalysis. The people who did that were his followers and particularly his followers in the United States from about 1940 onwards. So by the 1960s, this was a big industry, particularly in the East Coast of the United States, where people like Martin Doberman, if you've read his book Cures, will give you a really depressing account of his experiences with a chain of about three or four psychoanalysts, each more homophobic than the previous one, who tried to talk him out of this apparent childhood trauma that led to his adult homosexuality. Lesbians on the whole, I mean it's hard to generalize, but on the whole lesbians have been protected, if you like, from some of this medical homophobia by their relative invisibility in American society. And although that invisibility has had a lot of negative outcomes, one of the positive things about it, let's say, is that lesbians have been less exposed to all these various attempts to cure them than a lot of gay men. Now, the beginnings, if you like, of a new view of sexuality, based more in biology, came around more of that in the 1970s, particularly with research in animals, and one of the most key discoveries in this area was made by a neurobiologist at UCLA called Roger Gorski and his colleagues who discovered about maybe 15 or more years ago now that the brains of male and female rats are different from each other. You can tell the sex of a rat's brain by cutting it up and looking at it. And this was quite counter to previous wisdom, which is both in science, which most scientists have thought that we're not intrinsic brain differences with sex, and also in society as a whole. I mean, you can read books like The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer, for example, where she says very emphatically that there are no brain structural differences between men and women. Now, Gorski noted that there was a region of the brain called the hypothalamus, and which is at the base of the brain, right at the bottom of the brain, sort of above the roof of the nose, and it's a region of the brain which is involved in generating what we think of as instinctive behavior. It's sexual behavior, certainly, eating and drinking, keeping our body temperature correct, and things like that. And in one part of this hypothalamus, which is known to be involved in the generation of what we call male-typical sex behavior, that is, if you damage this area, you can produce a male rat that will not approach and mount females. In this general area, Gorski found a group of cells, what's called a nucleus in neuroanatomical parlance, a group of cells which is about seven times bigger in male rats than female rats. And this he called the sexually dimorphic nucleus of the anterior hypothalamus. Sexually dimorphic means differs in structure between the two sexes. And he showed, he and his colleagues showed that this structural difference comes about not because of genetic differences in the brains of male and female rats, but because the brains of males and females are exposed to different levels of sex hormones during the rat's early development. During late fetal life and the first two or three days of adult life, the male rats have circulating their blood much higher levels of the male-typical hormone, testosterone, than do female rats. And this difference in hormone level causes this particular part of the hypothalamus to develop much more in the male fetuses than in females. And he showed that by manipulating those hormone levels. And as you manipulate those hormone levels, you not only change these structures, you change the animal's ultimate sexual behavior. So you can take a male rat that would otherwise have preferentially mounted females and you can produce an animal that preferentially has sex with males. And similarly you can produce male rats that preferentially have sex with females. Female rats that preferentially have sex with females. Now, there's a lot of controversy about exactly what those experiments signify. And the early experiments that were done did not really address questions that we think about when we're talking about sexual orientation. Those early experiments were focused on what kind of behavior, mounting or being mounted, basically. Which is not, obviously, the same as preferring to have sex with men, preferring to have sex with women. More recently, though, a lot of those experiments have been replicated not only in rats, but in a number of other species, including pigs, even certain species of birds, ferrets, some other rodents. And replicating the way where the rat, the adult rat now, that was being manipulated hormonally as a fetus, has actually a choice, if you like, of sex object. So the rat goes in a team maze, goes up the maze, can turn left to have sex with a male, can turn right to have sex with a female. And you do that a hundred times, and you count how many times he turns left, how many times he turns left. Typical sort of experiment that you farm out to a graduate student. And the result of those experiments very much strengthen the idea that it's not just what kind of sex you wanna have to mount or be mounted, but it's also what sex or sex partner do you want to have sex with. So I think now there's a much stronger thought that these hormonal manipulation experiments that Gorski and other people did over the last couple of decades really might be in some sense parallel or address issues that are relevant when we're thinking about sexual orientation in humans. Now, Gorski did not extend his work to humans for quite a while. And the fact it was only in the late eighties that his graduate student Laura Allen set out to ask other sexually dimorphic structures in the human brain also in the hypothalamus specifically. And she found that there were, she found, and this was autopsy studies looking at the brains of dead men and women. And she found that in a roughly comparable region of the hypothalamus, there was at least one structure and possibly two that were on average larger in men than in women, about two to three times larger. And the one that showed the most reliable size difference was a structure with the rather unromantic name of INAH3, which stands for the third interstitial nucleus of the anterior hypothalamus. And since that works me down, there's actually a number of studies suggesting that nucleus is the homologous nucleus if you like the same group of cells in some sense as the sexually dimorphic nucleus in rats. So there's this structure in humans. Laura Allen also found, however, that it's not a hard and fast thing. You find there's overlap between the sexes with respect to the size of this structure. So the research that I did then that was published in 1991 was to ask whether there might be size difference here related to sexual orientation as well as sex. And that's in fact what I found, although my findings were limited to men. That is, I found differences in the size of this structure, INAH3, comparing gay and heterosexual men, but I was not able to find out whether there was such differences between lesbian and heterosexual women. The reason I wasn't able to was simply a matter of availability of autopsy tissue, but this was also an autopsy study. And it turns out, at least in my experience, that it's basically impossible to get autopsy tissue from women whose sexual orientation is recorded in their charts. Basically, it's never, I've never seen that. And even if heterosexual women is not recorded, so my feeling is that it will not be possible to address the same question in women until scanning techniques become available that we can look at some of these structures in living people. Now, so that was the difference that I saw and that got so much media attention in 1991. And of course, seeing that difference in structure actually raises more questions than its answers, because one thing that I could not say on the basis of my results was, is that structural difference something that developed during fetal life in those gay and straight fetuses, if you like, and ultimately, in some sense, influenced those men to become gay or straight? Or was it rather something that developed in postnatal or even in adult life, perhaps even as a result of people's sexual feelings or sexual activities? And obviously, that's not a question you can address simply by studying the brains of people who've already been sexually active. I tend to believe, I suspect, if you like, that these differences did come about in prenatal life. And my reasons for thinking that are based on the animal experiments. All these animal experiments support the same general notion, which is that it's very easy to manipulate the sizes of these structures in animals when the brain is first assembling itself, which means prenatally or in rats, maybe a day or two after birth, but not during the rest of immature or adult life. And if that is also true in humans, and I agree, of course, that's an if, because humans live for longer and have longer childhoods and so on, but if that same principle should be true in humans, then it would seem that these differences that I saw were, in some sense, a label or a record of some process that went forward differently in the brain development of these gay and straight fetuses. Now I also don't, of course, know that this particular part of the hypothalamus, in some sense, determines someone's sexual orientation. Actually, sexual orientation is a pretty complicated phenomenon, and I would be a little bit surprised if the whole of that complicated phenomenon were at the mercy of this few thousand cells in this little nucleus in your hypothalamus. So my suspicion is that this structural difference that I found is just one difference out of probably many that exist in the brain. In fact, we know that there are other parts of the brain that are different between the sexes, and it just hasn't been explored to see whether others of those might also differ with sexual orientation. We don't know. There has been a study, more recently, actually, from a Dutch group claiming that to find another structure near the hypothalamus, which shows differences not between gay and straight men, but between transsexual and either heterosexual or gay men. In other words, in this case, heterosexual and gay men have a large structure, and male to female transsexual men have a small structure. So if that result holds up, that might suggest that different parts of the brain are playing a role in different aspects of our sexuality, which certainly would, in general, make sense because, after all, the basic principle of brain function seems to be that different parts of the brain do different jobs. Well, so that was my finding, and I should emphasize that that particular result has not been replicated or refuted by any other lab so far in the subsequent five years. So it's not something you could really say is in the consensus mainstream of science, if you like it yet. Although there are now other labs working to replicate it. The other main avenue of exploration that's been used is the genetic aspect, which Doty briefly mentioned. Sexual orientation and specifically homosexuality runs in families, and that was known already to Hirschfeld, for example, who reported from a large survey that if you're a gay man and you have a brother, well, let's put it the other way around. If you're a man, you have a gay brother. The likelihood of you being gay are increased several fold. And he also brought forward various examples of identical twins, both male and female, where both of them were gay or lesbian. And he attributed that then to some common inheritance by those two members of the pair, which had predisposed both of them to become gay. Now these studies, which basically became neglected during the middle of the century, were kind of resuscitated over the last decade perhaps by a number of researchers who are trying to give more rigorous statistical analysis of that family clustering. One of the people who's worked on that is Richard Pillard, a gay psychiatrist who's in Boston, also being very much involved in gay rights issues. He was one of the people who played a big role in having homosexuality deleted from the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders. Another person is Mike Bailey, a heterosexual researcher at Northwestern University. What these studies basically have reported is that indeed homosexuality runs in families. Most of the studies are sibling studies and they typically, the typical way these studies are done is they recruit lesbians or gay men and they ask these individuals then about the sexual orientation of their siblings and then in the better studies, they go and interview the siblings themselves about their sexual orientation and then they have a control group of heterosexual men, they ask them about their siblings and then they look at the percentages and they do the numbers and apply the statistics and the result that comes out of that is that if you're a gay man, your chances, let's do it the other way, if you're a man and you have a gay brother that makes your chances of being gay about 25%, which is something like about five times what would be expected or what was found in the heterosexual control group. If you're a woman, you have a lesbian sister that makes your chances of being lesbian about 15 to 20%, again about five times greater than the control group. Now that sort of clustering among siblings, of course, doesn't in itself say that sexual orientation is genetic because you can have other causes that operate within families such as, you have a mother who's so close binding, she makes all her sons gay or you have a high-voltage power line that runs outside the street and it zaps everyone in the family. So all it says is that there is, there is a potential basis there if you like for a genetic factor that it doesn't prove that it exists. The second order studies that have been done to look at that more precisely are these twin studies that I'm sure you've heard about done by Bailey, by several groups actually around the country. And they then ask, they then recruit gay men or lesbians who are twins and ask, now what is the sexual orientation of your twin and they go and ask the twin also. And what these studies have reported is that the likelihood that the co-twin would also be gay or lesbian depends to a very large extent on whether you're talking about identical twins who share all the same genes or non-identical twins who have about 50% of their genes in common just like regular brothers or sisters. And the numbers that come out of the studies are a little bit different from one study to another but the sorts of figures they get are that about half the identical co-twins of gay men are themselves gay and whereas about only 25% of the non-identical co-twins of gay men are gay. With lesbians, the numbers typically mean a little bit lower, perhaps around 35 to 40% of the identical co-twin is lesbian and correspondingly less, maybe 15% for the non-identical co-twins. So taking on its face value at least, that kind of study is the classic study to look for a genetic loading for a trait and the geneticists to do this work then go through the math and try and get out a figure to express the degree of heritability of that trait meaning that if you like the fraction of the total causation of someone being gay or straight which can be attributed to genes and the sorts of numbers that people have banded about are something in the order of 50% for men and in other words about half the total reason why you're gay or straight or bisexual for that matter is genetic, the other half not and for women, perhaps somewhat lower, maybe the order of 30 to 40%. Now these studies are not without their flaws and one of the main issues that people have raised with the twin studies is that it might be what's called ascertainment biases which mean that when you put a notice in Bay Area reporters saying you know gay men wanted for studies of twins and homosexuality then there are more identical twins who volunteer who know that their brothers are also gay versus those who have brothers who are straight and there's some sort of biasing of the whole data because of that recruitment problem and so there have been attempts to get around that by instead of advertising for people to go to pre-existing registries of twins and the data on these studies, these more later studies are not published yet but the word in the grapevine is that the heritability factors deduced on these later studies are in fact somewhat lower than the 50% values that Bailey and Pilar initially reported. So it may be that, to wrap that up if like genetic loading for sexual orientation is substantial but it's far from being the complete reason why an individual is gay or straight or lesbian or straight. Now the work by Dean Hamer that Dodie mentioned is of course an attempt to go from this broader attack on the question of genetic versus non-genetic to ask are there individual genes that we can localize and identify and figure out what they do and Hamer and his group that included actually Angela Padatucci, a very out lesbian who's done also a lot of work on genetics of female homosexuality. They first did studies of extended families instead of looking at siblings, they went to look at across generations and between cousins, that is individuals who are not brought up in the same family environment and they reasoned that if they would find increased concordance, increased rates of homosexuality in those more distant relatives then that would argue better that it might be genetic because there wasn't the shared environment and they found that indeed for male homosexuality there were increased rates of homosexuality among the more distant relatives but funnily enough it was specifically among a certain class of relatives, it was among maternal uncles and the sons of maternal aunts and both those groups had a very significantly raised rate of homosexuality, you start with a gay man and you look at the uncles, you look at the cousins, you find that only those two kinds of uncles and cousins had an increased chance of being gay and what was particular about those groups was that it was those relatives who were connected to the index case through the female line so it was an uncle who was connected to the gay guy through the sister, a cousin who was related through his mother and his mother's sister back to the gay man and that kind of maternal inheritance can have various explanations actually but one possible explanation is that it's mediated by a gene located on the X chromosome, a chromosome which men inherit only from their mothers. If they inherited a Y, they would be a man, they'd be a woman, no I'm sorry, what am I talking about? If they, this is so confusing, if they inherited, I'm sorry, men have X and a Y chromosome and the Y chromosome of course they inherit from their father and the X chromosome of their mother so if they'd inherited an X chromosome from their father then they would be a woman, XX. So for this reason X linked traits go through the female line. So then with this sort of hint if you like, Hamer and Patuchi and their colleagues went on to use methods of molecular analysis to ask whether there were particular genes that might be involved and the way they did this was to take advantage basically of the human genome project and the fact that as a sort of beginning of the human genome project, scientists have discovered if you like or laid out a series of road landmarks across the whole genome which are called linkage markers. These are little regions that you can sort of recognize with easy chemical tests and became very famous in the OJ Simpson case and these markers then they used to go right across the length of the X chromosome looking for places where pairs of gay brothers would share the same markers in a way that was more frequent than statistics than the random basis would suggest and they found indeed there was such a location it was at one end of the X chromosome and that there was statistically speaking it seemed that there was very strong evidence that there was a gene or collection of genes at this location that was in some sense was influencing these men's ultimate sexual orientation. Now there's basically where that particular study stands at this point. Dean Hamer has replicated his own study but another group and it was an unpublished study from a Canadian group reported a failure to replicate that same linkage analysis. So that's a study again which is definitely not in the agreed on mainstream of scientific knowledge at this point. It needs to be further studied and further replicated. So that's basically where the genetics stands at this point and I think I would sum it up by saying this clearly genes are playing a role here that by no means the whole story what is the rest of the story. We don't really know. The rest of the story could be Freudian type mothers and fathers or it could be non-genetic but still if you like biological factors that play a role in embryonic and fetal development. Factors that really basically random things that happen during fetal development that make sure that individuals are different that don't have a rigid if like genetic predetermination. Now I mentioned well one of the ways in which people have tried to think about sexual orientation is in the sphere of a broader concept of gender and Hischfeld himself was very committed to that notion that being gay or straight is not simply a matter of who you want to have sex with but somehow it's part and parcel of a broader package of traits if you like with all of which he thought were biologically determined. And these are traits many of which we would today parcel under the aspect of gender. Some people use the word gender to mean specifically things that are environmentally inculcated but if you use the word gender more neutrally as I do to mean all these sex linked traits that go along with one sex, some very strongly connected, some very weakly connected and call that gender then Hischfeld would say gays and lesbians are not typical for their sex in terms of this package of gender related traits and he said that it was particularly in childhood that you could see that and there've been many studies since then which basically confirm that that belief and the childhood studies probably the strongest of the studies is the one you've probably heard of the one by Richard Green at UCLA where he simply took a bunch of very cross gendered boys ages from I think between about maybe six or something up to about 12 and interviewed them extensively when they were before puberty and apparently were not aware of any sexual orientation and then followed them through to adulthood along with a control group of boys who were not cross gender and these were not just your average sort of somewhat sissy pre gay boys these were really far out boys who you might imagine were destined to become transsexual so into sort of femininity in all its aspects and what he found indeed as you probably know was that a large majority maybe about 80% at least of these boys ultimately became gay men and not especially you know outrageously feminine gay men these are rather conventional gay men that most of these men became when they were adult it was as if there's a certain shift in gender characteristics at puberty from a more extreme gender nonconformity to a more conformist sex gender if you like in adulthood whether that's something to do with hormones kicking at puberty or whether it's something to do with the social pressures that are associated with high school life I don't know so there was one study that said that these traits that these kids had in childhood were not sexual traits these were traits like enjoying rough and tumble play kinds of toys that the child liked to play with the kinds of people the child liked to associate with whether boys or girls and many other things like that that were on the sort of periphery if you like of people's sexuality there have been no comparable studies of lesbian development that have followed a group of cross-gendered girls through to adulthood that have however been numerous retrospective studies both in men and women asking a whole bunch of gay men and lesbians and control groups of heterosexual men and women about their childhoods and those kinds of studies again strongly reinforce the idea that gay men and lesbians have gender atypical childhoods now it's hard to talk about this kind of thing without seeming terribly sort of stereotyping and I'm sure there's empty people in the audience who are going to say I was when I was a boy I was completely typical and I was into playing rugby football and everything like that there is tremendous overlap it's not like you can predict someone's child's ultimate sexual orientation on the basis of his childhood behavior but in a statistical sense there's a strong association between gender non-conformity and childhood and homosexuality and adulthood and to my mind, well there are several ways you can explain that one way is as Hirschfeld did and I also favor which is the notion that simply all these traits are in some sense a package of traits that are served by some circuits in the brain obviously and that these circuits in the brain themselves are influenced in some way in a sexual fashion during development they're most likely through differences in hormone levels or through differences in genes that operate in the brain to promote or retard the development of certain parts of the brain and that these processes sort of tend to shift one way or the other as a sort of group during development rather than in a completely random way so there's an association between sexual orientation and gender now so I tend to favor that if you like that simple hypothesis but it certainly has been people who've put forward more complicated hypotheses saying things like well maybe the child is born gay I think Richard Isay for example a psychoanalyst put this theory forward he said you know the boy is born gay he therefore in the edible phase he doesn't fall in love with his mother he falls in love with his father and then to make him, because he knows his father's straight so to make himself attracted to his father he becomes feminine I mean this is sort of crazy logic to it and it may be true but and other people have put forward other theories saying people are born with a gender non-conformity say and this ultimately leads to rejection by peers and this ultimately leads to homosexuality because they can't make proper connections with the other sex and so on so so seeing that connection between childhood traits and adult sexuality doesn't prove necessarily what's going on but it suggests to me anyway that there's some package of traits collectively called gender which are under some sort of biological influence not I hesitate to say that everything like this is totally controlled by what happened to us before birth I'm sure there's a large part to this you know which is influenced by parents and peers and schools and culture and movies and so on but I still think that there's an important part of it which is probably we're born with some of these um traits gender-related traits do seem to persist in into adulthood and some of the ones that been looked at are for example spatial abilities skills in navigating in three-dimensional space were typically men and in fact male animals in general have a have a have a sex advantage in do better at that kind of navigation particularly navigation involving distant landmarks uh women and female animals in general rats female rats tend to rely more on local landmarks when they when they navigate around and that's people in evolutionary psychologists say there's some sense to this because when you know during evolution the males who are going out to distant places hunting animals the females were near the home site and they needed more to depend on local cues that's you know speculation whether that's true or not they don't know but at least that's a pretty common of that's a robust observation I would say both in humans and animals uh... there've been a number of studies saying that gay men are worse at a lot of the spatial tasks than are um heterosexual men one of the studies that um particularly uh significant I thought in that way was a study by Dorian Camura and Jeff Hall at University of Western Ontario where they did a targeting task they simply recruited you know eighty straight men eighty gay men eighty lesbians eighty um heterosexual women they brought them into a sort of smooth like thing and they gave them these velcro covered balls and gone to throw them against a wall where there's a target right and they just gave them scores according to how close they were to the target the heterosexual men did way better than the heterosexual women which confirmed you know zillion previous studies gay men did worse than the uh... did gay men actually did about the same as the heterosexual women lesbians did better than the um than the heterosexual women so it was a converse arrangement however that result for the lesbians was not did not actually reach the usual criteria statistical significance so it was an equivocal result and you have to say that a lot of studies that have looked at these issues in men and women have have gotten clear results in men than in women and you keep getting the impression that there's something that's simpler and more straightforward about sexual orientation in men and more complex and more multi-layered and perhaps multi-factorial in women and that comes not only out of the science but simply out of asking people you know for example you know the advocate a couple years ago simply asked a lot of polled a lot of people gays and lesbians about why they thought they were gay or lesbian ninety six percent i think of the gay men so subscribe just press the button born that way just left everything else blank and the lesbians were sort of you know all over there i mean it's quite a few of them would also say you know emphatically born lesbian nothing else but the others who filled in the other blanks you know families circumstances a particular woman i met you know social political things i chose to be and so on it would seem that there's something a lot more complicated and probably take a lot longer to figure out sexual orientation of women than in men okay let me then uh... change tack in the last few minutes talk more about some of the social context of this kind of work uh... i mentioned at the beginning of this this connection if you like in attitudes towards uh... beliefs about why people again straight on the one side attitudes to gay rights on the other you see that a number of ways uh... for example one way that it plays itself out is in a legal framework so there's been a lot of legal cases gay rights cases over the years where this issue of what homosexuality is and what makes people gay or lesbian has been a very central aspect in that debate uh... one of the most famous cases recently was the uh... colorado amendment to case where um... there was several days of debate about this issue and were testimony by scientists such as dean hamer and was also a bunch of witnesses the other side of said no none of this is true and uh... that's always hopelessly bias because he's gay and so on so uh... the i've testified some of these cases not the colorado amendment to it's very striking that uh... you feel sometimes like getting up and saying in court uh... what the hell is this matter you know this uh... can't you you know give us our rights just because we're perfectly okay people and regardless of what makes us gay or straight but it does matter in the legal framework to some extent because there's some aspect of the cost constitutional law that very much asks about the origin of groups in society uh... as a precursor if you like to assigning the rights and the basic so legal thought there as far as i understand it if you belong to a group by some basically by fate if you like some sort of predestination to belong to a group so you can't choose to join it you can choose to leave it then uh... that kind of classification should not be subject to governmental discrimination unless there is some really pressing reason to state to do that uh... whereas other kinds of associations free associates people like clubs and so on i'm not entitled that kind of protection because people freely choose to leave or join those groups and that is a very uh... fundamental aspect of equal protection doctrine which is therefore being used by lawyers for gay and lesbian uh... side if you like to argue for gay rights and it has been uh... that argument has been of equivocal success if you like there's been some partial successes some failures and it it it's never been the case that the supreme court certainly has come out clearly and said yes gays and lesbians because they're born that way off any other reason are a classification that's entitled some sort of height and protection that does not exist and it's something that uh... the gay community is still uh... obviously trying to to obtain in the case of the colorado to case for example that was a victory for the gay side but the victory was not predicated on a victory on that particular point about the immutability of homosexuality was based more on other factors like the rights of gay people to participate in the political process this has been a legal issue but i think beyond that it's uh... it's also a religious issue actually in some extent i mean i've been asked to talk at a number of uh... really church based groups such as presbyterian conference where they were talking about whether they want to ordain gay and lesbian ministers and i came and i get my talk and i kept thinking to myself why in earth do you want to know this you know it's like surely you can decide about ordaining gay and lesbian ministers without knowing about the third interstitial nucleus of the anterior hypothalamus and um... and then that as soon as i finished my talk the guy from the other side gave his talk and i was expecting him to say you know this is completely irrelevant you know the bible says it's wicked so it's wicked and um... but no he goes into this long thing where he pulls out all these other scientific papers that allegedly you know completely refute everything that i said in the last uh... you know the previous hour so it seemed you know to those people it did seem important to understand whether being gay or lesbian really is something that that's part of your inner nature or that's something that's that's you basically choose to to to take on and i think that it has a more general significant social significance if you like when we think about what are the origins of homophobia why do people basically dislike homosexuality and gay people you can say it's something well because it's against the law or because the christian church or some other religions um... say that homosexuality is wicked and that all does play a role no doubt about it but i think also this if you like kind of instinctive homophobia which i think it's more like if you like the root of things than than these more culture-based things there's a sort of little bit of sympathy between straight men and lesbians if you like of course you know that's part of the reason is that that straight men like lesbians you know quote lesbian porn and on but in addition there's some way in which heterosexual men have a native aversion to male homosexuality whereas they're more distant if you like from lesbian sexuality and so i think what you have there is like a failure of distancing a failure of imagination of gay of seeing imagining gay people as being not you in you know in their shoes but someone who's distinctly different somebody who has a different world view a different set of attractions and so on so that it's more like let's say you know with animals you know we see animals all the time during these potentially disgusting things um but we don't hate them for it because we don't put themselves in you know we don't put themselves in our shoes doing those things if you like we distance ourselves we think that is some other creature who operates by their own rules and i think it's it's that failure to do that if you like with regard to gay people that is at a root of a lot of this problems root of a lot of homophobia and a root of the belief that homosexuality is nothing more than straight people sort of acting up so my belief is that this kind of science to the extent that it bolsters this notion that there's something to some extent something that gay people are born with rather than simply taking on will help to strengthen the the understanding that gay people have their own essences their own personhood their own their own development so so that i think of is that if you like the positive aspects of the science but i don't also deny that there are potential negative outcomes and and one of course is that this science maybe may portray gay people again as being pathological or somehow will say yes there's the that nucleus and i can't even see it in this gay man there's a whole bunch of cells missing and that let's go in and and and and put them back in and in fact i just had finished writing a novel that's coming out in a few weeks called all bricks gold which actually is a science fiction book which addresses you know some of the horrific scenarios that might follow from the attempt to do exactly something like that so i don't deny that there are potential bad things coming out of this science what i do think is that whether bad things come out of it or good things come out of it is something that's really up to us that we can through our own actions i'm basically saying you know gay men and lesbians but obviously parents and everyone who's well intentioned towards gay people have it in our power to to influence the course of events whether you know gay people are accepted or whether gay people are wiped out through cloning or other genetic manipulation we're able to influence that in every act in our daily life and in a sense i think that's more important than any amount of you know adjudication by expert biologists in what might be the cause of homosexuality or heterosexuality and that's part of the reason actually that i am no longer a scientist but that i'm involved in educational project in in los angeles the institute of gay and lesbian institute of gay and lesbian education where we're trying to make help gays and lesbians themselves become better ambassadors for their own community by knowing understanding more about their their own heritage and culture and of course that's what the gay and lesbian center at the library here is also trying to do so i'm very pleased to be able to give this message right in this in this location thanks very much i think the first hand was way at the back gentlemen there yeah okay can i um yes that's true i mean there's a there's a whole bunch of things that which seem to be different between gay people and straight people and some of them i would say you know the spatial clutsiness apparently of gay men is probably no particular advantage but there are you know there's there's several studies claiming increased verbal abilities in gay men for example compared with heterosexual men i myself think that the artistic abilities of gay men are are very significant um it hasn't really been studied in a statistical sense it's very much more difficult to study although i think there are clearly some fields of artistic expression particularly dance where it's just impossible to argue that other than gay men have preeminent skills that um so yes i agree with that and i i i think that myself my belief is that gays and lesbians both because of these unique package of characteristics have a very valuable contribution to make to society and if we were chosen to be cloned out of existence it would be a very sad world without us now your first question i think was about the different the sort of multi layered or the multi factorial i i mean i i basically agree completely with what you're saying and i'm i'm trying to point out the existence of some of these biological processes but not really to say you know it's a black and white thing some people have said there's interactions between biology and environment as you grow up so you may have a predisposition which then gets reinforced or or weakened by some environmental interactions um there's a whole range of possibilities at this point and i wouldn't want to necessarily um attribute everything to genes and biology yeah i think you and i think yes i mean i very much sympathize with what you're saying in fact you know for example connie norman uh a male female transsexual who died recently uh told me a couple years ago that um if she'd had the choice today she would not have had the operation because she said now it's okay to be nilly now i don't know if it is okay to be nilly right now but but but at least this means some change if you like in in attitudes towards femininity in men then there was at the time when when when uh richard green was doing that study the actually the worst it meant the worst things that happened in that study were not actually what richard green himself did what what happened was that some of those kids were shunted off into a program to basically beat the femininity out of them i mean that's about what it came down to this was a study by a guy called george rica so at that time unbelievably was a graduate student at ucla and then he became a very homophobic um psychologist and he instituted this program of our spankings and and rewards and punishments to try and make them into regular little men and that traumatized these these boys tremendously and we know this the same sort of things happens for cross for very masculine girls in high school even today we see cases on tv of these girls who go through terrible abuse at school but teasing and affects attempts at therapy so i hope i didn't give the impression that i that i sympathize with that i i hope that um some of this work will lead to a greater appreciation that that there is a spectrum of gender and sexual orientation all of which it should be respected well okay well thank you very much for for the point of view anyway i think you are probably next my particular study was um about as racially diverse as um the general population of the united states um but that of course is not very diverse in terms of the whole you know spectrum of humanity and particularly the the history of human culture so i would not be able to say at this point how much my study can say it make a generalization about the entire human race particularly over history nor can for example dean hamer with the genetic study people know now very well that genes can operate differently depending on what genetic background they're on you know one gene doesn't work by itself it works with many other genes genes can also operate differently depending on the social environmental background that that organism is or that person is exposed to so it might be that genes that make you gay today might you know even make you you know straight in in in some other culture we don't know and that'll be a a task of the future to broaden out that that field of inquiry yeah mm-hmm yeah um it's certain that a part of gender differences are socially imposed i'm sure of that but still there seem to be some other parts that seem very widespread if not universal for example the increased the relative aggressiveness of men compared with women is something that seems to have been documented in almost every culture that's been looked at and in many different so social circumstances so i think there are some aspects if you like of gender that that may be you know part of the package you're born with whereas i'm sure as you say there are other aspects that are very culturally dependent and we don't yet know what all those are yeah i think as far as your first question goes um which was um do we know what these little nuclei in the hypothalamus do not really there have been lesion studies done in monkeys from the group in madison particularly have gone down made little damaged small areas in that general part of the hypothalamus although not necessarily specifically in in my nucleus if you like and uh they have produced monkey male monkeys for example which seem to lose interest in um in females as sex partners although naturally they didn't test to see whether they you know gained a sort of previously non-existent interest in male sex partners but so it may be that there is some strong influence of these structures on our sexual appetites if you like and we know that these reasons the hypothalamus feedback to the cerebral cortex so the whole you know your whole thinking apparatus if you like is a little bit under the influence of the hypothalamus just like you know just next door there's a little structure that influences your thirst you know and that then influences your whole cortex and you say hi you know pine again is what i need right now and that's your cortex talking because your hypothalamus has sent a little instruction right so even a little reason of the brain can can have widespread effects and we we but we don't yet know exactly you know how that works um and so the other question was about um oh well i just had you know the opportunity to do some other things with my life i suppose it was in some sense a sort of standard midlife crisis i i inhaled enough formaldehyde for 10 lifetimes probably and was ready to um do something else uh of perhaps a little more relevance to my identity as a gay man than um i had been previously yeah uh well in my the particular group of cells on nucleus that i looked at in gay men it was more like or actually statistically indistinguishable from the women in my in my sample who i don't know what the sexual orientation was but i'm assuming most of them were heterosexual so yes that that particular structure in the brain was sex atypical in the man it was it was feminine if you like um now whether all structures in the brain had a similar if you like um sex atypicality i don't know and i kind of doubt it because i think that that even though there's there's clearly signs of gender nonconforming gay men there is still no way you could say that gay men are in in right there with women in terms of most of these tests you can do this in most of these tests apart from that throwing test that i mentioned that gay men tend to fall in some sort of intermediate and sort of lesbians this is a kind of mosaic if you like and it's more of a spread of sex of sex linked characteristics than a than a complete flip if you like well um that that's yeah mm-hmm well this yeah someone gets away from the from the main target in my talk but still um this issue of of who gay men find attractive what kind of men gay men find attractive there's quite a lot of research being done on that right now and of course there's a long history of of people's ideas on that topic and most of the studies say that gay men in general go for masculinity in men and that that um femininity is if you like some has a lower status you like in the ranks of attractiveness to gay men in general now i find that a bit surprising is that that doesn't correspond to my own experiences but statistically that seems to be what people answer when they when they question whether that's really something to do with you know the size of the hypothalamus or whether it's simply that you know in our society there's so much um you know idealization of of masculinity and so on i would think it's mostly more likely some of you are the latter but um i really don't know uh yeah okay sorry i'll get you off this yeah well there's some yeah i mean i basically i'm simply there are some aspects of this struggle if you like where causation is important as an equal protection doctrine is one where it is but there are other aspects where clearly it is not important and one these would be issues like you know right to privacy right to freedom of action and association that that you know is so central to being an american you know and and these are things where we don't have to worry about um why we're gay and similarly you know showing it's a question of worth whether gay people worth having whether they contribute something to society or whether they're a drag on society you know to um well no it's sorry in terms of yes in terms of constitutional law that's true but in i was talking about that in a more broader picture you know whether we're going to abort you know gay fetuses for example depends in the final judgment you know as to whether we want gay people or not and that's a matter of whether they they are worth having or not future people not present people is the whole difference if you like ethical issue well yeah well that's a very valid point of view which i don't completely agree with but i think you know it's a it's a good that you express it anyway and could we have one more question because this gentleman had his hand out for a while and i hate to cut him up yes so so so they say yeah no um yes supposedly there are these these pheromones which are byproducts of sex hormones that gets that are volatile and they're secreted like for the armpits again and so on and and these become the basis of these perfumes realm men and realm women that are the product of the iraq's corporation which did a whole bunch of supposed science on recording the action potentials in the nose and so on a lot of this could be pretty pretty fake stuff and i don't really know how strong this whole story is it could be true and it's certainly true that people in general have no problem identifying the smell of men and women and identifying the sex of a person purely on the basis of smell that that ability is being well documented whether there are differences with gay people it's an interesting question i mean some people say yes there's a biological basis for sexual orientation and it's all in the nose you know that there's simply different receptors linked up to different fibers that go to different parts of the brain or something like that to me that's a little bit too slick and i think it wouldn't explain a lot of things like why gay boys don't like to play with trucks as much as their straight brothers and so on but anyway on that note maybe we should close thank you