The Rise and Fall of the “Gay Gene”

And why it’s more mysterious than being “born this way,” with Professor Joanna Wuest

With attacks on LGBTQ+ rights exploding, I spoke to Professor Joanna Wuest about scapegoating of the LGBTQ+ community over the years and how science has helped hasten reform — even if, sometimes, the science hasn’t been so sound.

Joanna Wuest is an Assistant Professor of Politics at Mount Holyoke College and a sociolegal scholar specializing in LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights, religion, and health. Professor Wuest is the author of Born This Way: Science, Citizenship, and Inequality in the American LGBTQ+ Movement.

A condensed transcript edited for clarity is below. You can also listen to the audio of our conversation, which includes discussion of why bisexual and trans-based political communities have historically developed at some distance from gay and lesbian ones; some, shall we say, diplomatic pushback on Amy Coney Barrett’s views; me describing my gym outfit; and more:

That’s it, I’m never taking scientific cues from popstars again

Ben: Professor Wuest, I’m excited to explore the development of the idea of “born this way” in LGBTQ+ advocacy.

Let's begin in the 1960s. How and why did activists begin to partner with reformist scientists and clinicians?

JW: The 1960s were an incredibly fruitful period for gay and lesbian advocacy. Groups like the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis pushed back against the reigning idea in science, culture, and law that to be gay was to have some sort of mental illness; that gays and lesbians were social contagions dangerous to vulnerable, innocent young people — a trope that I think we're all familiar with today. 

To contest these longstanding ideas, activists realized they were going to need scientists and medical professionals to help them. And they were in luck. Some scientists and physicians were working in related fields, most famously Alfred Kinsey, who said homosexuality is a normal variant of human sexuality. He had some like-minded scientists amenable to going to court to testify as expert witnesses on behalf of gay and lesbian advocates. 

Together, they were able to win some early employment protections in the federal courts. At the state level, they were able to fight the shutdown of queer nightlife.

Ben: You talk about 1973 as a watershed moment in this history. What happened then?

JW: 1973 is huge, both in the history of psychiatry and psychology and gay and lesbian activism: the year when the American Psychiatric Association (APA) revised its longstanding code in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM).

In the DSM, there's a list of every kind of mental disorder. In 1973, a combination of activists and reformist psychiatrists, influenced by the sexual revolution, pushed back against the old guard of the psychoanalytic community to get homosexuality stricken from the DSM. So at this early period, they began saying that to be gay is to not necessarily have some sort of mental illness.

Ben: Which then raised a new question.

JW: Right: what exactly is homosexuality? 

At the same time, there were increasing resources for scientists to probe things like genetics, hormones, and brain structures to give us a story about what it means to be gay or lesbian. In the ‘80s, we really began to see a shift from environmental or social explanations of homosexuality to new biological hypotheses. 

Ben: Broadly speaking, you talk about mania at the time over pinpointing the genetic origins of all of humankind's inner workings. It was like the Wild West of genetic theorizing.

JW: Definitely. Gay and lesbian advocates were early to this idea that maybe the most important parts of ourselves are biologically grounded—because, well, if they could biologically explain why someone was gay, then maybe that’d make it easier for people to accept them.

By the time we hit the ‘90s, the whole country was starting to entertain similar ideas about genetics.

Ben: Can you describe the subsequent rise and fall of the “gay gene”?

JW: In 1993, a geneticist named Dean Hamer published a paper in Science, and he purported to discover the first major evidence for a gay gene. To Dean Hamer's credit, he qualified his research, but everyone from mainstream media to the mainstream gay and lesbian organizations ran with this idea and said oh, there’s evidence of a gay gene.

Well, what's happened in the last two decades is that the very weak evidence that Dean Hamer employed has proven to be even weaker. In 2019, researchers performed the largest genetic study to date on sexual orientation. The study had maybe over half a million participants' genetic material, and they found that maybe somewhere from 8-25% of your sexual orientation can be traced back to genetics. 

But then when they went to look where in the human genome those parts of your genetic material that code for sexual orientation might be, they could pinpoint less than 1% of that 8-25%. It's very difficult to tell a story about gay genetics and a “gay gene” if that's the evidence that you're running with. 

But that’s no big surprise. What it means to have a sexual or gender identity may be more complicated than merely pinpointing something in our genetic code. And importantly, that’s not to say we're going with what conservatives have said for decades: that being gay is a choice. It's just that this stuff is more mysterious than merely isolating one neat and tidy story about why we are the way that we are.

Ben: So basically you're saying that Lady Gaga was wrong about being born this way. 

JW: She was wrong to go disco, and she was wrong about the “gay gene.” 

Ben: Next you'll tell me that oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, she was in a good romance.

JW: Ha!

Ben: Can you explain how the “born this way” argument helped hasten reform — to some extent? 

JW: The idea that sexual orientation is innate or fixed shows up in the marriage equality ruling in 2015, Obergefell v. Hodges. Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote the opinion for the Court and said things like gays and lesbians deserve to marry because their identities are “immutable.” So we can’t at all discount the force of that idea and the force of the marriage equality ruling, a massive win for LGBTQ+ civil rights.

But then if we look at ongoing conservative attacks, particularly on trans rights, and against so-called conversion therapy bans (the preferred term these days is “change efforts”), conservatives are realizing that they can’t really challenge the science. Instead, with increasing success in front of conservative federal judges, they’ve questioned the science that shows conversion therapy causes harm, or that gender-affirming care for trans youth is efficacious and safe.

It’s a climate change conspiracy approach to doing politics. If you can’t challenge the science, you cast skepticism on it. There are direct links between some of the conservative climate change groups and those who are defending attacks on LGBTQ+ rights today.

Ben: The Heritage Foundation among them. You also mention how conservative medical organizations have organized against LGBTQ+ rights, like the American College of Pediatricians — a right-wing group of 500 physicians that broke away from the 67,000-member-strong American Academy of Pediatrics.

JW: It’s such a small little splinter group. 

Ben: Maddening. It’s like my neighbor who always reads me the weather from his phone garnering influence because he says he’s a graduate of the American College of Meteorology.

On a concluding note, can you explain why in your estimation, until we take a more social democratic turn, we’ll see more sex panics and scapegoating?

JW: If we look at when waves of LGBTQ+ oppression occur, we can see that it's not just because all of a sudden folks decided to be extremely bigoted, even if that's clearly the effect. Rather, the waves have occurred when an organized, conservative coalition has sought to topple a progressive social order and progressive institutions.

In the early Cold War era, we saw Republican senators fearmongering about homosexuals in the federal bureaucracy — the same Senate Republicans, backed by business donors, who were trying to create animosity toward the government and the New Deal. 

The next big attack on queer people's rights occurred in the late ‘70s and ‘80s with the Reagan revolution. With money from the manufacturing industry, conservative groups attacked gays and lesbians, arguing that big government and social spending were leading to the destruction of the Christian family and the liberty to be your own entrepreneurial person.

And now lastly, in our present era, we’re seeing an extremely aggressive variance of conservatism in the Republican party scapegoating trans people, trans kids, and public school teachers in an effort to destroy the teacher's unions that organize against their anti-government agenda. 

In my view, if we don't have effective organizations or government programs to ameliorate the social instability and inequality that leads folks to vote for those conservatives who promise to get rid of the rot and restore us to some kind of former glory, then I think that queer people are going to consistently be good targets for right-wing forces that have a much broader agenda.

Ben: A well-synthesized 80 to 90 years of history. 

Professor Wuest, this has been a pleasure. Thank you so much for your scholarship and for speaking with me today. 

JW: Thanks so much for having me.