[This review was published in Radical Philosophy, 1998; 87: 48-49. Simon LeVay, Queer Science: The Use and Abuse of Research into Homosexuality, MIT Press, Cambridge MA and London, 1996. x + 364 pp., £16.95 hb., 0 262 12199 9.
Simon LeVay, a neurobiologist and former faculty member of the Salk Institute, gained fame and some would even say notoriety for a paper he published in Science in 1991. There he claimed to have found evidence that the 'development of sexual orientation, at least in men, is closely tied in with the prenatal sexual differentiation of the brain' (p. 143). Even though the scientific debate about a biological cause of homosexuality forms and important part of the book, it is not the central issue LeVay discusses. He has adapted Magnus Hirschfeld's idea that homosexuals constitute a third sex, possessing traits of both sexes.
Queer Science is an extremely well-written attempt to justify aetiological sexual orientation research against its critics. Some authors have suggested that the century-old history of the abuse of the results of sexual orientation research indicates that gay people have much to lose should a biological cause be found.
For this reason the German sex research societies have called for a moratorium on such research. LeVay, like other sexual orientation researchers (e.g. Dean Hamer and Peter Copeland in The Science of Desire), basically tried to justify his own work against these critics.
LeVay's political motivation for trying to show that homosexuality is biological is not exactly new. Nineteenth-century champions of what would today be considered in Anglo-Saxon contexts as 'gay rights' provided similar lines of argument. The German lawyer Karl-Heinrich Ulrichs argued that homosexuals should not be punished, because they do not choose to develop desires for people of the same sex. Hence they should not be held responsible for living homosexual lifestyles. Legislation directed against homosexuality would actually require homosexuals to 'live a life against their nature'. The ethically interesting question is, of course, whether the argument of innateness and/or choice actually matters. After all, this excuse for being homosexual is not really needed should one conclude that there isn't anything wrong with being gay in the first place.
LeVay speaks and reads reasonably good German. This is important in the context of his attempts to use the Nazi experience to justify genetic research on sexual orientation. He claims that the Nazis were far more supportive of psychological research on sexual orientation than they were of genetic research. This argument is employed to suggest that genetic research isn't really that problematic. The problem with this argument is that it is a historical. LeVay can consider himself lucky that most of his English-speaking reviewers are unable to check his German references, because it would have emerged that in Nazi Germany research to eradicate homosexuality was conducted with high-level scientific support in genetics, as well as in psychology and psychiatry. Contrary to LeVay's assertions, there was no political preference for the aetiological origin. What mattered was the eradication of homosexuality and not the political correctness of its cause.
LeVay has a clear idea as to the role of science in attempts to achieve what he considers to be 'gay rights'. He hopes that science will deliver sufficient information to bring about a situation where gays and lesbians in the USA will be 'recognized as a protected class, and laws permitting discrimination against them will be overthrown' (p.251). This thinking is a consequence of the adaption of Hirschfeld's construction of homosexuals as a third sex. LeVay realizes, however, that science is unable to deliver an answer to normative questions such as whether homosexuality if 'normal' or 'natural', and whether in a moral sense it ought to be (p.295). Nevertheless, he devotes a full chapter (10) to discussing the issue of naturalness, which he interprets in good scientific fashion as the occurrence of same-sex activities in non-human nature. He seems to have missed the point that religious arguments to the effect that homosexuality is unnatural are based on a normative account of what human nature ought to be like. In a way LeVay is conducting a Quixotic crusade here: one which he cannot win by demonstrating that seagulls, and even some monkeys, do it every now and then.
In any case, LeVay's basic argument is that scientific research may help gay people to become acknowledged by society as a distinct sex. This might help to reduce societal homophobia. Indeed, LeVay offers anecdotal evidence that this may actually be the case in some segments of the US population. The problem with this book, as for much US gay activism, is that it ignores the likely impact if such research outside the USA. Singapore medical journals are already discussing whether a 'prenatal test for homosexuality should be used in the absence of treatment'. The Chinese Classification of Mental Disorder still lists homosexuality as a mental illness, and gay people are subjected regularly to 'therapies' such as electric shocks, hormone injections and the like. Like other American researchers and gay activists, LeVay displays no concern (either in this book or in his other publications) about the impact of such research in non-Western cultures where homosexuality is interpreted in a quite different manner. Amniocentesis and ultrasound as means to detect the biological sex of foetuses have resulted in what can best be described as female foeticide in India and elsewhere. We have little reason to assume that the results of aetiological sexual orientation research will not be used in a discriminatory manner in homophobic societies where gays and lesbians do not have the standing to demonstrate against such abuse. Queer Science is another sad example of the myopic insularity of the debates within gay/lesbian scholarship in the USA.
Udo Schüklenk
Monash University
Centre for Human Bioethics
Melbourne, Australia