Gay by Choice? The Science of Sexual Identity

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"Well, just for the sake of argument," I ask, "what's wrong with that?"

"I'm sure the people who follow that agenda believe what they believe, but they don't realize that they're pawns in a great cosmic battle, that they are perpetrating a lie."

"Pawns of?..."

"Satan," he informs me, "is the author of lies, chaos, and confusion."

But the men of narth (nearly all the 75 attendees are white men) aren't spewing nearly as much hellfire and brimstone as I expected. They do seem to hug a lot—many reparative therapists are ex-gay themselves, and, someone explains, part of being ex-gay is learning to be same-sex affectionate without being same-sex sexual—and maybe some of those hugs last a little too long, but it's mostly like every other convention: bad coffee, worse Danish, dry-as-dust lectures. narth's president-elect, A. Dean Byrd, a psychologist and professor at University of Utah Medical School, methodically lays out his case that sexual orientation is malleable in his daylong seminar on how to treat unwanted same-sex attraction.

If narth's strategy is to seek a place at the table by demonstrating its scientific seriousness, Byrd's modulated approach, tedious as it may be, is just what the doctor ordered. Sometimes he's puckish—as when he says, "When it comes to homosexuality, I'm pro-choice"—a comment sure to get a rise out of a crowd well versed in the other moral disaster of 1973—and sometimes glib ("the proper answer to the nature/nurture question is yes"), but mostly he's just workmanlike as he reviews the research—much of it, he is delighted to point out, conducted by the "activists themselves." He cites a study from Denmark—the first place that legalized civil unions and perhaps, he says, the most gay-friendly place in the world—in which gay people turned out to have mental illness at a higher rate than straights, which proves, he says, that an intolerant society is not the culprit when gay people suffer. He describes studies that show that the identical twin brother of a gay man has only a 50 percent chance of being gay himself, which may be twice the rate among fraternal twins, but still, he argues, far from the 100 percent you would expect if sexual orientation is purely genetic. He even shows us video of one of his treatment sessions, and gives a plausible-sounding assessment of the prospects for patients of reparative therapists—that one-third of them will become heterosexual, one-third will remain gay, and one-third will move a few notches along the Kinsey scale, enough to leave the lifestyle and limit their unwanted feelings and behavior.

Byrd, like everyone else here, is very excited about an article that appeared in Archives of Sexual Behavior in 2003. It was a small study—200 subjects—but it concluded that gay people could indeed change their sexual orientation, that the change was not merely religiously motivated repression or politically motivated bluster but rather some fundamental shift in desire. The researcher concluded that even the people who showed little benefit from reparative therapy didn't seem to be harmed by it, and that much more research needed to be done. The study was full of caveats and received withering criticism from scientists who claimed that it relied on a skewed sample—mostly people handpicked by reparative therapists like Byrd—but it had passed peer review, and, even more importantly, it had been conducted by none other than Robert Spitzer, the same psychiatrist who had brokered the deal that deleted homosexuality from the dsm.

Spitzer also called for an end to the ban on research into reparative therapy, and one psychologist who has taken him up on that call is welcomed in Orlando like a conquering hero. Elan Karten is an unassuming young man who wears a yarmulke and recently got a doctorate from Fordham after writing a dissertation on ex-gay men. Karten only got the go-ahead for his study by positioning it as an inquiry into the type of people who seek reparative therapy rather than as an exploration of its efficacy. He did manage to sneak in some of that research as well, and reached conclusions similar to Spitzer's—though peer reviewers objecting that it revives the notion that homosexuality is a mental illness have thus far prevented Karten, an academic unknown, from publishing his work.

By Saturday morning, gay activists have begun to gather outside the hotel to protest narth. We are instructed not to respond to them ("Sing a hymn or pray instead") as they put on duck outfits, hoist their signs (Stop Ducking the Truth; narth Is Goofy), make quacking noises, and yell "Shame!" in our general direction. Byrd looks out the door, shakes his head, and laughs when a man behind him says, "Quack, quack? They're the queer ducks."

I wait until the foyer is empty before I head out to talk to Wayne Besen, a tall man in a polo shirt, who is pulling the props and costumes out of his car trunk. He runs Truth Wins Out, an organization devoted to debunking the research of the ex-gay movement. He minces no words about Spitzer's research—"one of the most poorly constructed studies in the history of science, a travesty"—and he calls reparative therapy "intelligent design for gay people." Besen thinks the stakes of the scientific battle are impossible to overstate. "Americans are not cruel. If they think that being gay is inborn and can't be changed, they are going to be very sympathetic to full equality for gay people," he says. "We win this argument, the gay rights struggle would be done."

Besen is sure that science is on the verge of giving gay people their slam dunk. After all, he says, study after study shows that homosexuality is biological in origin. In the last 15 years, researchers have discovered differences in brain anatomy between gay and straight men—and found that the 6 percent of rams that have sex exclusively with other rams (just one of hundreds of species in which homosexual behavior has been observed) have a similar neuroanatomical difference; identified a gene sequence on the X chromosome that is common to many gay men; traced genealogies to show that homosexuality runs in families, on the maternal side; proved that a man's likelihood of being gay increases with the number of older brothers he has, which scientists attribute to changes in intrauterine chemistry; and learned how to use magnetic resonance imaging to detect sexual orientation by watching the brain's response to pornography. Findings in the field of anthropometrics have yielded intriguing results: Gay men's index fingers, for instance, are more likely than straight men's to be equal in length to their ring fingers; gay men have larger penises than straight men. These findings all seem to support Besen's contention that being gay is essentially biological and should remain beyond the reach of law, morals, or medicine.

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