Seven is larger than Zero

I was saddened and frustrated with your comments regarding people of faith and their perpetuation of bullying. As someone who loves the Lord and does not support gay marriage, I can honestly say I was heartbroken to hear about the young man who took his own life.
If your message is that we should not judge people based on their sexual preference, how do you justify judging entire groups of people for any other reason (including their faith)? There is no part of me that took any pleasure in what happened to that young man, and I know for a fact that is true of many other people who disagree with your viewpoint.

October 13, 2010 : Savage Love | The A.V. Club
http://www.avclub.com/articles/october-13-2010,46294/?utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=feeds&utm_source=type_savage-love

The above quote was posted on the Savage Love blog. My partner brought this to my attention and I immediately asked “to your knowledge, how many Christians have committed suicide in the last, say, 30 days because some queer person said something harsh about Christians?” Her response was, “None that I can recall.” In the last month, however, seven queer young people have killed themselves because they were queer. They killed themselves because they live in a society where people think it is perfectly acceptable to put homosexuals in the same category as rapists, murderers, pedophiles or practitioners of bestiality. They killed themselves because either their churches or churches in their communities teach that homosexuals are less-than, less-worthy, that our relationships are not real relationships and that our love is not actually love. They killed themselves because they grew up in a society where the dominant religion teaches that God hates them. Seven to zero. Now, I’ll admit that I have not gotten better than a “B” in math since I was in elementary school but I’m reasonably certain that seven is larger than zero. Seven queer suicides because of the teachings of Christianity and the actions of Christians and zero Christian suicides because of the actions of queers.

Now, I understand that as a West Coast liberal, I’m supposed to be ‘nice’ about this. I’m supposed to either dance around the issue and pretend that it isn’t the teachings that these poor, dead kids heard in the church pew that contributed to their deaths or I’m supposed to chalk it up to an unnamed and ill-defined ‘worldview’. But I’m not going to do that. Of course, it should (but won’t) go without saying that I’m not submitting the butcher’s bill to every Christian on the planet. I’m not saying that all Christians hate gays and I’m certain that a lot of Christians believe that homosexuality is morally wrong but still have queer friends. I know that because I have friends who are Christians and who believe homosexuality is wrong.

However, it would be dishonest to pretend that religion had nothing to do with this or to pretend that I have no idea what these kids went through. I’m generally loath to talk about my deep personal experiences on this blog because I think that my thoughts on matters are more interesting to others than my emotional states. However, this situation demands an exception and for me to step out of my comfort zone.

Three times between the ages of 15 and 22, I walked right up to the door of suicide, knocked and for different reasons each time, turned back at the last minute. The first time, I was 15, and was on a medicine that contained belladonna to settle my stomach because I had stressed myself out so much that my stomach was overproducing acid--at fifteen. I did some research, found out what belladonna was, realized that the remaining fifteen pills would probably be enough to do me in, and so I laid my pills out in a row on my chest-of-drawers that also served as my nightstand with a glass of water, turned out the lights and, because I was fascinated by the code of bushido at the time, prepared myself to die. I fell asleep. It was the first time I could remember falling immediately asleep in years (normally it took me between one and three hours every night to fall asleep). The second time, I had just gotten divorced, at this point I was really wrestling with my sexuality. I went up on the roof of the office I worked at, got on the ledge, and then was staring down at this beautiful blue Mustang which was what I was going to impact when I jumped. One of the security guards passed underneath my shadow, he called his opposite number inside, who called the cops who came and took me to the hospital which let me go home. The last time it was near the end of the year, the first one since the divorce and the last one I had in the closet. I was alone in my apartment and I sat down in front of the oven with my Zippo lighter in one hand, the phone cradled against my shoulder and my other hand on the knob of the stove talking with this wonderful young man named Peter at suicide prevention. He asked me if I could think of a single reason NOT to turn the knob and blow myself to kingdom come. The only thing I could come up with was that Christmas had just happened and my little 8 unit apartment building was old and wood-framed. It would’ve gone up like a stack of tissue paper. I told Peter that none of my neighbors had done anything to deserve losing all their stuff and their Christmas presents and being thrown out on the street in the coldest winter in 20 years. Peter told me that if I could see how my actions would affect others even in the midst of pain so great I was willing to die to make it stop, I was a compassionate human being and that the world could use more compassion. That was enough. It caused me to turn around and walk away from death one more time.

I wanted to kill myself because I was queer and because my culture and my church told me that being queer was just about the worst thing one could be. It was a sin before God and a betrayal of the black community (because I wouldn’t be making strong, black babies). I wanted to kill myself because at school I was teased mercilessly for being different--even though I was not out to myself, I was sufficiently gender non-conforming to be targeted for the full treatment. I wanted to die because I thought it was the only way of preventing God from hating me for being queer.

Now, it’s been two decades since that last, long winter’s night but I recall the whys of my mental state with clarity. One does not spend a decade suicidal and not recall why. To say that religion had no part to do with what I endured would be to lie--religion had everything to do with it. I understand that some of you Gentle Readers may find this uncomfortable--so be it--it does not change the facts on the ground in any significant fashion. It was religion that drove me to the brink of suicide and rational thought that brought me to wholeness.

I understand that the really virulently anti-gay people don’t want to be labeled as bigots. I get that. However, the segregationists didn’t think they were bigots either and yet they were bigots.

This post is dedicated to the memory of Asher Brown, Justin Aaberg, Billy Lucas, Cody Barker, Seth Walsh, Raymond Chase, and Aiyisha Hassan. None of them lived to see 25.

Stay rational.

Should Gays and Lesbians be Thanking Mother Nature for the Genes?

I wanted to address the idea of whether or not homosexuality is a question of ‘nature’ or ‘nurture’. To put it in more modern words, whether or not homosexuality is caused genetic or a choice. Firstly, the question may be meaningless. By that I mean that there is no satisfactory solution to the question as it is stated. Why? Because whether a given behavioral trait is genetic or environmental is, for any practical purpose, unanswerable. We are not products of traits that either are imposed on us by our genes or produced by our environments. Our genes do not, in any meaningful way, operate isolated from our environments. Our environment, although seemingly separate from our genes, is still influenced by them. So to suggest that homosexuality must be either genetic, in its entirety or environmental, in its totality, is to miss something exquisite going on in nature. Nature, once you look beneath the surface, is usually cleverer than we are.

There are a couple of issues enclosed in the question of ‘is homosexuality a choice or not’ and before I go about trying to answer them, I’d like to try to tease out the separate questions. Question #1 goes like this: “What causes homosexuality. Why are some people gay or lesbian”? Question #2 is best phrased like this: “If homosexuality is not a choice, what possible evolutionary reason would keep those genes around”. Question #3 goes like this: “If homosexuality is proven not to be a choice, what does that mean for the gay rights movement”? I’ll answer each one individually.

What causes homosexuality?

I will own, up front, that this is going to be a really cheap answer. No one knows, definitively, why some people end up being gay or lesbian. There is, however, a convergence of evidence that points to it being a, more or less, innate trait. At some level, it would appear that people are born gay or lesbian. This, however, is a very different statement than saying that something is entirely determined by our genes. Although what filters through to the popular media gives the impression that there is a gene ‘for’ any given trait that is not exactly the case. Certainly, no working biologist would suggest that there is a gene ‘for’, to take one example, risk-taking. So, part of the purpose of this article is to introduce you to a different kind of language for talking about our genes. What is more accurate is to say that there are certain genes (genotypes) that express (phenotype) a particular behavior, in interaction with their environment.

Now, before someone should take the last part of the above sentence to mean that I am suggesting that environment means the usual (and hopelessly outdated) tripe of ‘absent father’ or ‘overbearing mother’ or childhood sexual trauma or any other such pseudo-psychological babble, that is not what I am talking about. By environment what I mean is the complete set of historical experiences that any given individual passes through from the moment they are conceived. Make absolutely no mistake, the womb is part of our environment and is as much part of our history as any house we ever live in. So, for example, if your mother was malnourished during her pregnancy with you, you may (counter-intuitively) have more of a tendency to put on weight.

So, returning for a moment, to the question of gene-environment interaction I’d like to talk a moment about what genes do and do not do. It is, generally, thought that genes code for particular traits. Therefore we’ll say that one has a gene ‘for’ brown eyes or that one has a gene ‘for’ such-and-such malady. In most circumstances, it is convenient but not accurate to talk about genes in this way. Our genes code for proteins. Proteins are little molecular machinery, of various chemical natures, that go about the business of building bones, tissue, cells, brains, etc. If you have, for instance, brown skin your body produces significant quantities of a substance called melanin. Your genes code for proteins that are in charge of melanin production and you will have, on average, darker skin than someone who has genes that do not code for as much of that substance. If you then live in a place that does not get as much direct sunlight then your skin color will be, on average, lighter than someone with similar genes who lived in a place with high direct sunlight. This might sound like I’m stating the painfully obvious but note the language. Specifically, note the use of ‘on average’. In biology, it is useful to think of things happening on a gradient and each individual lies somewhere along that continuum. So, is there a gene for brown skin? Well, yes and no. There’s a gene that produces greater or lesser amounts of melanin. Everyone, who is not an albino, produces some amount of melanin. It would be slightly more accurate to say that there is a gene ‘for’ albinism, but most accurate would be to say that albinos lack the gene that produces melanin.

Another example, before we move on to the heart of the question of some kind of proximate cause of homosexuality. Take height. If you have been to Europe or have been in a really old (older than the 19^th century) building, you might notice how low the ceilings are. In London, one might think that one has stepped into a village of Tolkiens’ hobbits. But you know better and you realize that the average height of people really was shorter than Westerners are today. Why? It is not, as intuition might suggest, because humans have evolved such that the average height for European women has increased from just under five feet tall at the start of the Industrial Revolution to around five-foot five-inches at the start of the Information Revolution. Rather, what has happened is that people in the West eat much better, are exposed to far fewer childhood diseases, and generally are healthier as children and growing adolescents than they were a few hundred years ago. What that has created is a situation where human height has been allowed to increase closer toward the maximum allowed for by our genes (which code for the proteins that make up calcium and muscle mass). So, lurking within the genes of your long lost relatives from the Old Country was the potential for a five foot ten inch woman, but chances are very few of your ancestors grew to that height. However, because you are fortunate enough to have been born in the Twentieth century, your genes had more of an opportunity to express them.

This is what biologists mean by gene-environment interaction and I hope that my two illustrations shine some light onto how these factors dance together.

So, back to the central question. Is homosexuality genetic? Most probably yes and not entirely. Since sex, desire and romance happen primarily in the brain here is my speculation. There is probably some sequence somewhere on our chromosomes that causes a particular protein to either express or not express while the fetus is in utero. The mother’s body, responding to this chemical presence turns on or fails to turn on some other chemical cascade that results in the brain forming in such a manner that the person, when their sexuality really kicks in, has a predisposition toward homosexuality. Because of the social stigma placed on homosexuals, the individual with this particular genetic-environmental mosaic then has some variety of responses to their emotions and at some point, hopefully, comes out and accepts themselves. That’s the best answer I’m comfortable giving and I’m sticking to it.

All of this, however, begs question number two. So onto that issue.

Passing through the sieve—Does Darwinism preclude homosexuality being genetic?

If you are not willing to concede that Darwin might have had some clue as to what he was talking about then not a great deal of this will make sense. Again, because I feel the need to own my own bias, I will say that I’m an absolutely unrepentant Darwinian. I think Darwin had one of the best ideas anyone has ever had and I know that, to use the phrase of one eminent biologist “nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution”. So, if we accept that there is probably some level of genetic component to homosexuality then it begs the question of how it could survive the ruthless winnowing of natural selection.

I’m going to suggest a hypothesis, and own that it is only a hypothesis but one that makes the most sense to me. Homosexuality has passed through the sieve of evolution not because it, in and of itself, is adaptive but because whatever genes that influence homosexuality are themselves adaptive when expressed in a certain kind of body. By adaptive, I mean it in a very strict sense, namely in the sense that it enhances the reproductive fitness of whomever is carrying that gene. Reproductive fitness simply means whether or not an organism leaves around more descendants than someone else.

That’s just one possibility but it is the one that makes the most sense and doesn’t get into the messy (and discredited) arena of group selection.

That said, let’s remember that being homosexual does not preclude reproduction and so there’s still potential for whatever genes ‘for’ homosexuality to pass through generations in that manner. Lastly, it is important to remember that, according to what is called ‘kin selection’ one need not reproduce oneself in order to benefit one’s genes.

If one is a sibling (or a non-identical twin) then one shares one half of your genes with your siblings. This means you share a quarter of your genes with their children. So let’s say your sister has four children, you have none. Something happens to your sister and you raise her children, you have now ensured that four times the amount of your genes will pass on to the next generation than you otherwise would have. So, even if homosexuality really were a reproductive dead-end it would still have any number of paths it could take from generation to generation.

Where the rubber meets the road—What does all this mean for gay rights?

So, having demonstrated that homosexuality really could pass through the merciless sieve of natural selection and having presented a plausible (although almost certainly too simplistic to be accurate) model of what might cause homosexuality we leave the relatively non-controversial arena of biology and enter the world of politics and culture. We have come to question #3: If homosexuality is proven not to be a choice, what does that mean for the gay rights movement?

One answer is that it might not mean anything at all. Those who are against gays and lesbians existing are going to remain so regardless of any findings of science. But for the larger society, what might it mean? As a rule, in America we have the idea that we are compelled to be tolerant (in both personal and legal matters) of those who have an inherent difference. Homosexuality is probably inherent enough that to speak of any ‘change’ is quite meaningless. However, does that mean that if a smoking genetic gun is found the NGLTF can close up shop and go home? Probably not.

What it might mean is that parents might not guilt trip their children when they come out. Schools would be compelled to not tolerate harassment of gay or lesbian students in the same way and for the same reasons that they cannot tolerate harassment of Latina or Chinese students. Businesses might become compelled to not fire homosexual employees because they are homosexual. It might even create the circumstances for full recognition of same-sex marriages. However, it would be a mistake to think that the entire architecture of heterosexism will come tumbling down should some biological Einstein come up with a gene-environment interaction that survives the scientific vetting process.

Although I understand the desire for us, as gay and lesbian people, to once and for all put to pasture the idea that we ‘choose’ our sexual orientation I would suggest that, perhaps, we are missing a point. Religion is ‘chosen’. No one is born Catholic and yet we protect Catholics from discrimination in employment, housing, etc. We are very right to do so, so it is not ‘choice’ qua choice that has created the circumstances we face. It is some other cultural baggage that we need to address.

That said, finding the smoking gun would be a triumph of biology. Understanding why some people are gay or lesbian would shed light into the whole arena of human sexuality. And, perhaps, the discussion of gene-environment interaction will finally put the tired and outdated ‘nature’ versus ‘nurture’ debate out to a well-deserved rest in the pastures of intellectual history.