Sep 8, 2023
Transcript
[RADIOLAB INTRO]
LULU MILLER: Hi, Matt Kielty.
MATT KIELTY: Hi, Lulu Miller. Let me tell you what I've been thinking about.
LULU: Hey, I'm Lulu Miller. This is Radiolab. And a little while ago, our reporter Matthew Kielty came to me with the story of an idea.
MATT: Yeah, the idea that you were born into a sexual orientation.
LULU: This is like the "born this way idea?"
MATT: Yeah, the "born this way" idea.
LULU: Okay.
MATT: Which I always believed to be true for much of my life, but in the past few years that idea felt essentially like under assault.
LULU: Hmm.
MATT: And in these, like, pretty public ways, and ways that were happening on both the right and the left. And so it's like on one hand you have something like the bill in Florida.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ron DeSantis: ... 57, the Parents' Rights and Education Bill.]
MATT: The Don't Say Gay bill.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ron DeSantis: The bill prohibits classroom instruction ...]
MATT: Where you can't teach kids third grade and below anything about sexual orientation or gender identity because the logic there is ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ron DeSantis: And so in Florida ...]
MATT: ... that by talking about sexuality and gender or reading a book about it or whatever ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ron DeSantis: ... we will make sure that parents can send their kids to school ...]
MATT: ... that those things will, like, change a kid's identity.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ron DeSantis: ... to get an education, not an indoctrination.]
LULU: Yeah.
MATT: And the foundation of the thing is just this idea that, like, tiny little things in a kid's school environment is gonna change them radically. So that's going on on the right.
LULU: Uh-huh.
MATT: And on the left ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Judith Butler: So there are many different theories of gender, and mine is just one.]
MATT: ... in the past several years, you've had these ideas that have become much more mainstream. Ideas like how social norms and cultural values and politics and history, how all these things are maybe the most important thing in shaping your own sense of self and your own sexual preferences. That again, like, that it's the environment outside you that is really the thing that is making you.
LULU: Yeah. I will—and I don't know if this matters, but I will just say here that as a queer lady married to a lady who identifies as bi, and someone who's, like, read about this stuff and thought about it a fair amount, this is the idea that makes sense to me, that sexuality, that desire, sexuality is shaped by this whole swirl of factors. Like, that really makes sense to me. It pretty much lines up with my experience.
MATT: Right. And I think for me as a cis-straight man, like, I—my identity always felt very consistent, and I just never really had to think about it. And in part, you know, maybe embarrassingly, like, I never had to think about it, it was just like I grew up in a world where "born this way," the "born this way" idea was the thing. It was the thing that I thought you were supposed to believe if you were a good ally to gay rights. It was the thing that you use as an argument against the idea of conversion therapy, that you can just take a kid and, like, change their environment and make them into something.
LULU: Hmm.
MATT: And it was a thing that I always just, like, vaguely understood to be something rooted in science.
LULU: You had a sense you'd been told, like, "This is how it works in the science."
MATT: Yeah, they're like, "The science is at the root of this." And I think—I think I should underline that this is just like—the "born this way" idea was a thing that millions and millions of people believe.
LULU: How do you—how do you know this? Like ...
MATT: Well, so I went Googling because I was just like, "Am I alone now on an island? An old man on an island?" And there's a Gallup poll from 2018 that shows that 50 percent, half of all Americans, believe that somebody is born that way.
LULU: Huh!
MATT: And so I felt like I was witnessing all the ways in which this "born this way" idea was maybe unraveling. And I just started wondering, like, why is this even an idea that I believe?
LULU: Like, okay. So why do I—where did this belief come from? Why do I believe it so certainly?
MATT: Right.
LULU: And why do so many other people believe it?
MATT: Yeah. Because, like, it's clearly—like, it's clearly an idea. It's an idea constructed by human beings that must have some sort of, like, history. And I just didn't know what the history was. And I didn't know how this thing became as pervasive as it did. But yeah, like, for me personally, like, why do I believe this? What is the truth to this? And is it—like, is it true? And if it's not true, what does it mean for it not to be true, because if you have a right-wing front that is making these environmental arguments, trying to, like, annihilate certain types of identities, like, what argument do you then make in the face of that?
LULU: Yeah. No, I wonder that. Like, I feel that, I worry about that. And I don't know. I mean, is this because of that? Like, I'm interested in this story, but is this the moment to look into this history, to talk about this unraveling if there is so much real harm at stake?
MATT: Yeah, I think—you know, talking to a lot of different people, the point is, like, it's—it's unraveling whether or not we talk about it. And some of the people I talked to, what they said is it doesn't have to be so frightening or it doesn't have to be so scary, or that, like, the unraveling itself, like, staring at it and understanding why it's happening is actually possibly the path towards a greater and, like, more durable protection.
LULU: Huh. Okay. Okay, well I don't understand how that could be, but I am curious to find out. So where do you—where does this—where do you—where do you want to start?
MATT: Well, okay. So I started trying to figure out where this idea actually came from, like, the birth of it.
LULU: Mm-hmm.
MATT: And almost everything I came across ...
[NEWS CLIP: The research team's leader ...]
MATT: ... everything I read ...
[NEWS CLIP: ... Dean Hamer ...]
[NEWS CLIP: ... Dean Hamer ...]
MATT: ... everybody I was talking to ...
JOANNA WUEST: Dean's motivations are what Dean's motivations are.
MATT: ... that rightly or wrongly ...
MATT: Are you talking about the Dean Hamer paper from '93?
JOANNA WUEST: That's it, yep. Mm-hmm. That's him.
MATT: Oh, interesting.
MATT: ... people kept pointing to this one ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Chandler Burr: All Dean is saying is ...]
MATT: ... guy.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Chandler Burr: ... nothing in science is a fact with a capital F.]
MATT: That he was essentially this sort of linchpin ...
JOANNA WUEST: I think that Dean Hamer is ...
MATT: ... to the idea that you are born this way.
JOANNA WUEST: ... kind of the culmination of a particular project. A several decades-long process.
[NEWS CLIP: About the origins of homosexuality.]
MATT: Okay, that's on.
DEAN HAMER: Hello?
MATT: Yeah.
DEAN HAMER: Oh, shoot.
MATT: Uh, can you hear me?
DEAN HAMER: I can hear you very well. How is my mic?
MATT: Your mic sounds pretty good.
DEAN HAMER: Good.
MATT: So last summer, 2022, I began interviewing Dean.
MATT: How are things over there?
DEAN HAMER: Things are wonderful here, as always.
MATT: He's 72. Lives in Hawaii.
DEAN HAMER: It's, you know, 85 degrees and blue skies and the trade winds are blowing.
MATT: Oh, that's lovely.
DEAN HAMER: So not too bad.
MATT: And actually, the first thing I ever came across of Dean was an oral history that he did.
LULU: Mm-hmm?
MATT: And the thing that grabbed me about it is how there are these moments from his life that are almost like these little precursors to the "born this way" idea.
LULU: Okay. Hmm.
MATT: So I think, like, one of the things is kind of like one of his earliest memories.
DEAN HAMER: So I was in preschool ...
MATT: This is in Montclair, New Jersey, just outside New York.
DEAN HAMER: ... and every day they would make us take a nap. And they would give us little mats, and we laid down. And I would lie on my stomach, and then I would start sort of rubbing around and having fantasies. And I always fantasized about ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP: The Lone Ranger!]
DEAN HAMER: ... The Lone Ranger.
MATT: That mythical lawman from TV with the black mask.
DEAN HAMER: ... which I thought was very sexy.
MATT: Crisp white cowboy hat.
DEAN HAMER: And had a nice pouch in his Levi's.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, The Lone Ranger: Hi ho, Silver!]
MATT: And in this little fantasy, Dean would hop up on the Ranger's horse, wrap his arms around him ...
DEAN HAMER: ... and ride around the range with him.
MATT: The way he said it he was like, I just knew I wanted to be his friend.
LULU: Aww!
MATT: And so there he'd be, face down in his preschool, on his nap mat ...
DEAN HAMER: And I would gyrate into the mat and get a little tiny boner.
LULU: And he's like three. Three years old?
MATT: He's like five. Five years old.
LULU: Five. Five. Five.
MATT: But eventually one of the preschool teachers would come over and be like, "Dean ..."
DEAN HAMER: "You are definitely not supposed to do that." [laughs]
MATT: But he says over the next few years, when he'd be on something like a school field trip ...
DEAN HAMER: I would fantasize about guys that I was rooming with or that we were on the bus with.
MATT: And still, it wasn't sexual.
DEAN HAMER: It's more about friendship.
MATT: It was just like those first little inklings of desire.
DEAN HAMER: You know, what we might call puppy love.
MATT: That thing that just sort of bubbles up.
DEAN HAMER: Attraction.
MATT: And during any of this, are you confused by it at all? Does it ...
DEAN HAMER: No. I never questioned the direction of my attraction. It just swelled up in me. It was just there.
MATT: But this is the suburbs. 1950s.
DEAN HAMER: Middle-class, heteronormative type of environment.
MATT: So Dean in middle school would, like, make out with girls.
DEAN HAMER: Because that's what everybody was doing.
MATT: Had girlfriends in high school.
DEAN HAMER: Including the queen of the prom.
MATT: Oh!
DEAN HAMER: We went to the prom together. But I felt like I wanted to be with boys, and I knew I wanted to be with boys, but just had no way to realize that.
MATT: But then one night Dean's at home, he's 15.
DEAN HAMER: And I saw a TV program called ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP: The Homosexuals.]
DEAN HAMER: ... "The Homosexuals."
[ARCHIVE CLIP: With CBS news correspondent Mike Wallace.]
MATT: It's this hour-long TV news report from 1967.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: Most Americans are repelled by the mere notion of homosexuality.]
MATT: And in it there are gay men ...
DEAN HAMER: ... lit indirectly so that you couldn't see their face.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: This man is 27, college-educated.]
DEAN HAMER: Talking about how horrible it was to be a homosexual.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: I had one friend who was beaten savagely by his father.]
MATT: About violence they endured.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: And he beat him in fact with bricks.]
MATT: About how they couldn't maintain relationships, about how they felt like they had to hide.
DEAN HAMER: That it was a sickness.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: I know that inside now, I am sick.]
DEAN HAMER: And ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP: I'm sick in a lot of ways.]
DEAN HAMER: ... I looked at that and thought, oh, gosh, that's who I am that they're talking about. And it was truly frightening.
MATT: Did it make you feel some sort of shame? Or, like, I would think I'm ill or something.
DEAN HAMER: I didn't feel that. I felt really angry, because it—it wasn't right, and it was who I was, but I couldn't think of any way around it whatsoever, and I knew I better keep my trap shut.
MATT: But then 1969, Dean graduates from high school ...
DEAN HAMER: I was smoking a lot of pot.
MATT: Once he finishes his undergrad he applies to Harvard Medical School.
DEAN HAMER: To my surprise, get in there. So I head off to Boston.
MATT: And it's in Boston that Dean encounters these two very, very important things: the first?
DEAN HAMER: Gay liberation.
MATT: This very new part of the gay rights movement that is about being out, that is about gay pride.
DEAN HAMER: My sort of first taste of activism.
MATT: And it's not as though Dean would become an activist, but ...
DEAN HAMER: I went to my first gay pride parade. Literally scary, people throwing beer cans and the like.
MATT: In Boston he's sort of swept up in this sea of a movement where you can ...
DEAN HAMER: And I was like, "Oh!"
MATT: ... go to gay bars.
DEAN HAMER: "This is pretty good."
MATT: You can have a boyfriend.
DEAN HAMER: At one point I fell in love.
MATT: How was it?
DEAN HAMER: It was amazing and fantastic.
MATT: But the other thing Dean would encounter in Boston was something that, for better or for worse, a part of this very gay rights movement would come to rely on him for.
DEAN HAMER: Genetics.
MATT: He basically stumbled into it at Harvard. Fell in love with it.
DEAN HAMER: Because you're studying the blueprint of life. It explains everything. I mean, when you start, you're nothing but a little spool of DNA surrounded by a coat. That's all that you are. So all of the instructions for everything that we develop into is hidden in that piece of DNA.
MATT: That was the promise of it. And that promise would end up entwining Dean and the gay rights movement.
DEAN HAMER: So I decided to go work with ...
MATT: So mid-'70s, Dean gets his PhD from Harvard. He goes down to DC ...
DEAN HAMER: ... to National Institutes of Health ...
MATT: ... to do genetics work there.
DEAN HAMER: It was all very basic science.
MATT: Figuring out how genes turned on and off.
DEAN HAMER: How your blood carries oxygen.
MATT: Really technical stuff.
DEAN HAMER: How copper ions induce the metallothionein gene in Saccharomyces cerevisiae.
MATT: [laughs]
DEAN HAMER: Why are you laughing?
MATT: It sounds so—it sounds very boring. Very boring.
MATT: And he was actually like, it was kind of big and important work, but the details of it were horrendous.
DEAN HAMER: And uninteresting.
MATT: But he does the boring stuff ...
DEAN HAMER: For a good 10 years.
MATT: And so cut to ...
DEAN HAMER: I'm 40 years old.
MATT: It's now 1991.
DEAN HAMER: I have a stable career at the National Institutes of Health, but I don't really want to spend the rest of my life working on something that fewer than a dozen people in the world appreciate, and that I want to do something that's bigger than that and that's more important than that.
MATT: I mean, it was the whole reason he got into this, to uncover something fundamental about nature.
DEAN HAMER: At the same time ...
[NEWS CLIP: So far tonight, we've been bringing you news of the world around us.]
MATT: There's this revolution happening.
[NEWS CLIP: Now we have news of the incredible world inside us.]
MATT: The very beginnings of ...
[NEWS CLIP: ... what is called the Human Genome Project.]
MATT: ... the Human Genome Project.
[NEWS CLIP: A vast effort to map man's entire genetic system.]
MATT: Scientists begin mapping out and identifying every single gene ...
[NEWS CLIP: The very building blocks of life.]
MATT: ... in our chromosomes.
[NEWS CLIP: It's essentially like having an encyclopedia of man. In principle, we'll know the complete set of instructions which make people.]
MATT: And for people like Dean ...
DEAN HAMER: ... it was new and exciting.
MATT: The belief was this is the thing that is actually gonna unlock all of that mystery ...
DEAN HAMER: ... hidden in that piece of DNA.
MATT: And not just the basic stuff ...
[NEWS CLIP: From hair color to height.]
MATT: ... but ...
DEAN HAMER: ... personality traits ...
MATT: Shyness, aggression.
DEAN HAMER: Empathy.
MATT: Thrill seeking.
DEAN HAMER: Alcoholism.
MATT: Intelligence.
DEAN HAMER: Mental illness.
MATT: Depression.
DEAN HAMER: Everything about life. And so I started thinking about, you know, what are big questions? And it just occurs to me that, wow, attraction ...
MATT: Desire.
DEAN HAMER: Sex. It's so important.
MATT: To Dean, it has to be encoded in us.
DEAN HAMER: Because the driving force of evolution is to make organisms that can have more organisms.
MATT: In other words, sex drives everything.
DEAN HAMER: What could I learn about that?
LULU: And so is he immediately like, "Oh my gosh! Is there a—is there a genetic component to homosexuality?
MATT: Well actually he says, like, no. Dean says he really just wanted to learn about genes and sexuality. And the first thought, he said, wasn't even about himself, it was ...
DEAN HAMER: Hmm. You know, because I'm gay, I know where I can get subjects.
MATT: ... other gay people.
DEAN HAMER: Because whenever you're interested in a trait, the only powerful way to study it is to study the minor version of the trait. Because if you study something that everybody has, it's almost impossible, through genetics, to figure out how it works.
MATT: So the hope is by studying gay people, like, that's actually the path into understanding the genetics of sexuality more broadly.
LULU: Huh! So then really he says it wasn't at all about, like, homosexuality or trying to figure out what makes him the way he is?
MATT: No. I mean, everything I read of or from Dean, everything I've seen him say publicly and what he told me is no, like, it was just trying to understand sexuality, and this being kind of the only way to do it. And so he and his team, they decide they're gonna start with gay men.
LULU: Okay, so dudes. Just dudes first.
MATT: Right. So basically, he pitches this to his bosses at the NIH.
DEAN HAMER: I got the green light.
MATT: And he began.
DEAN HAMER: So we started placing advertisements ...
MATT: In gay papers.
DEAN HAMER: Going to the HIV clinic right at the NIH.
MATT: Went to a group called PFLAG ...
DEAN HAMER: Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays.
MATT: And Dean said when he would interview these gay men ...
DEAN HAMER: Right off the bat ...
MATT: Almost all of them would say ...
DEAN HAMER: It was just there.
MATT: Like Dean, they'd always just felt this way. But if you're gonna show that that has anything to actually do with genetics, what you need ...
DEAN HAMER: ... are families.
MATT: And so he's like, okay, do you have any brothers? Do you have any sisters? Are they gay? What about Mom? What about Dad? Cousins? Aunts? Uncles? Grandparents? Do you think any of them are gay?
DEAN HAMER: And I started traveling ...
MATT: ... all over the country.
DEAN HAMER: California. Pennsylvania.
MATT: To the Deep South.
DEAN HAMER: To the Great Heartland.
MATT: And he would sit down with these family members and ask them all these questions.
DEAN HAMER: Basic information about their age and their birth. Then I would ask about their own sexuality.
MATT: You know, when was your first sexual fantasy? What did you fantasize about?
DEAN HAMER: For example, if you masturbate ...
MATT: Who do you think about?
DEAN HAMER: Is it another guy or is it a woman or both? How many different people have you had sex with?
MATT: How many men? How many women?
DEAN HAMER: How frequently?
MATT: How do you have sex?
DEAN HAMER: Do you do oral? Do you do anal? Do you do masturbation? Do you do rubbing? Yeah, that's the basics of a sex interview, right there.
MATT: [laughs]
DEAN HAMER: And it was easy with a gay guy to ask, "How often do you have sex?" and "Do you have anal or oral?" It was a little bit tricky doing that with their great aunt in Duluth.
MATT: [laughs]
MATT: But so Dean does all these interviews. He collects blood from everybody. Eventually goes back to DC.
DEAN HAMER: Mid 1992 or so ...
MATT: This takes him like a whole year.
DEAN HAMER: By that time I have about 100 or so families, a little bit over that.
MATT: He starts drawing out by hand these family trees.
DEAN HAMER: With squares for men and circles for women.
MATT: Fill in the circle or the square if definitely gay ...
DEAN HAMER: Blank if definitely heterosexual or thought to be heterosexual, and a big question mark if we're not sure.
MATT: And when he's looking at them, he notices this thing, which is that the gay men in a family ...
DEAN HAMER: There's virtually none on the father's side of the family.
MATT: They're on the mom's side of the family.
DEAN HAMER: And it was like a lightbulb went off, because for geneticists, if you see something coming down the mother's side of the family, it means it could be on the X chromosome.
MATT: So oftentimes—not always, but oftentimes—a man has an X and a Y chromosome. The Y comes from the dad. The X comes from the mom.
DEAN HAMER: So anything on the X chromosome tends to come down the mother's side. To get DNA, you just take a little blood.
MATT: They do a bunch of fancy science.
DEAN HAMER: Add a couple of reagents, shake it, pass it through a filter ...
MATT: And he starts combing through many of these gay mens' X chromosome ...
DEAN HAMER: The entire chromosome.
MATT: When he finds this tiny little ...
LULU: Rainbow. [laughs]
MATT: [laughs] No, Lulu! No.
[NEWS CLIP: Tomorrow's issue of Science magazine contains the results of a National Institutes of Health study ...]
MATT: He finds this little genetic tweak.
[NEWS CLIP: ... which shows that male homosexuality may be genetically determined.]
MATT: And it was this ...
[NEWS CLIP: New evidence today about what causes a man to be homosexual.]
MATT: ... little bit of DNA ...
[NEWS CLIP: The origins of homosexuality.]
MATT: ... that would become to some a source of comfort or a confirmation, to some a misstep towards greater injustice, but maybe most importantly to some, it would become this very powerful weapon.
[NEWS CLIP: Is it something that happens at birth, or is it a lifestyle?]
[NEWS CLIP: Gays in the military ...]
[NEWS CLIP: 58 percent are against legalizing gay marriages.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP: You deserve no rights!]
[ARCHIVE CLIP: It is a culture war.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP: We're mad as hell and we're not gonna take it anymore!]
[ARCHIVE CLIP: This war is for the soul of America.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP: We're sick and tired of being abused!]
[ARCHIVE CLIP: It is an abomination for a man to lie with a man.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP: We are going to fight back!]
[ARCHIVE CLIP: This is not a moral issue. This is a human rights issue.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP: We will be free.]
LULU: All that in just a moment.
LULU: Radiolab. Lulu. Matt.
MATT: Uh-huh.
LULU: Okay.
MATT: That feels like a bit of a short shrift.
LULU: Matt Kielty.
MATT: Thank you.
LULU: Straight reporter.
MATT: [laughs]
LULU: Okay. All right. So we are—we are here talking about the birth of the "born this way" idea, where it came from, how true it is, all that.
MATT: Yeah.
LULU: And we left off, Dean had found some genes, like, genes that he thought what, exactly? Like, did he think that these genes fully predetermined a sexuality—a person's sexuality?
MATT: Okay, so actually—I mean, well technically what he found is like, a little region that maybe contained a gene, some genes, that's sort of the question. Like, what do the results actually show? And I spent a long time looking into this, into the science of this—Dean's science, other science, but then I stumbled across this paper that made me realize how the science, like, isn't just the thing here. And in fact, to understand why the born this way idea really took off, you have to understand the world outside of the science.
MATT: So exciting for me to talk to you, truly.
MATT: And that the "born this way" idea ...
JOANNA WUEST: ... is kind of the culmination of a particular project, a several decades-long process.
MATT: Oh, two things before we really jump in. One—because I always forget this—if I could just have you say your first, last name and then however you want to ID yourself, like title at work or whatever.
JOANNA WUEST: Oh, sure. So it's pronounced Joanna Weast.
MATT: ... Wuest. Wuest. Great.
JOANNA WUEST: And I am an assistant professor of politics at Mount Holyoke.
MATT: So Joanna wrote a dissertation, which is the thing that I saw, about how the true origins of "born this way" go back to much earlier than Dean.
JOANNA WUEST: Exactly. Yeah.
MATT: Okay, so where would you want to start?
JOANNA WUEST: So I think that the natural place that I would begin is in the 1950s, because that's when we see the founding of the Mattachine Society.
MATT: One of the first nationwide gay rights organizations.
JOANNA WUEST: Also the Daughters of Bilitis, a lesbian organization.
MATT: Both of which were ...
JOANNA WUEST: Predominantly white, middle class.
MATT: They had dress codes on the books: men had to wear ties, women couldn't wear jeans.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Del Martin: It's hard in terms of today to really understand what was going on in the '50s.]
MATT: This is from an oral history of Del Martin, who was one of the cofounders of the Daughters of Bilitis.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Del Martin: I mean, the fear and the paranoia was just something fierce.]
MATT: Thousands of suspected gay people were being kicked out of the government.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Del Martin: There was, you know, fear of losing your job.]
[NEWS CLIP: He's been in jail three times for committing homosexual acts.]
MATT: Of being arrested, thrown into jail.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Del Martin: Or thrown into a mental institution, yeah.]
MATT: Because at the time ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP: Homosexuality is, in fact, a mental illness ...]
MATT: ... the argument was that homosexuality was a psychological defect.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: ... which has reached epidemiological proportions.]
MATT: That was literally the American Psychiatric Association's definition: homosexuality was a mental illness.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Del Martin: It was all the parents' fault.]
MATT: The idea was ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP: Relationships with the father and the mother ...]
MATT: ... that it was caused by the environment at home.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: ... as having a profound effect on the final pattern of the individual's sexual behavior.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Del Martin: And so at that point we needed validation.]
MATT: Del says that she and most of the gay people she knew were like, "We know we aren't mentally ill."
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Del Martin: But we still have to deal with—with the rest of society.]
MATT: And Joanna says that these early gay rights organizations decided that the way to deal with the rest of society, to fight off the argument that homosexuality was a mental illness in the minds of the public, was to turn to science.
JOANNA WUEST: ... and start collaborating with ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP: I feel, from the many years of work ...]
JOANNA WUEST: ... psychologists and psychiatrists.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: ... that a homosexual is first of all a human being.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP: You know, we were guinea pigs for a lot of researchers. The research being a way to get rid of the sickness label.]
JOANNA WUEST: And so ...
MATT: They start going to psychiatric conferences ...
JOANNA WUEST: Sitting on panels.
MATT: ... making inroads with more researchers.
JOANNA WUEST: To say that these people aren't sick.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Del Martin: And I do not look upon homosexuality as a neurotic problem.]
JOANNA WUEST: That being gay is not a mental illness.
MATT: That being gay ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Del Martin: Lies deep in the individual's nature.]
MATT: That it has nothing to do with your parents. That it's essentially natural. And then you would hear this idea ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Hal Call: Well, I was going to add that ...]
MATT: ... from somebody like Hal Call, who was the president of the Mattachine Society ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Hal Call: ... that this whole business of homosexualism is just one of the things that exists in nature.]
MATT: ... that it's essentially a natural variation of the natural world. Which, you know, no one's saying that a homosexual person is "born that way" in a strict sense, but it's that word "nature." It's that word "nature" showing up and starting to put some sort of boundary between the environment and something else that's going on inside of a person. And what happens is over the next 20 years, psychiatry and psychology starts to undergo this really big shift, so when we get to 1973 ...
JOANNA WUEST: It's huge. It's so pivotal.
MATT: ... the American Psychiatric Association drops the definition of homosexuality as a mental illness.
JOANNA WUEST: And those prominent gay rights activists who had made these relationships with folks in psychology and psychiatry ...
MATT: They would lean on those allies to start trying to make bigger changes.
JOANNA WUEST: Exactly.
MATT: And so Joanna says all throughout the '70s ...
JOANNA WUEST: Gay rights litigators are bringing all of these scientific experts into court to serve as expert witnesses.
MATT: Now what you see on the other side, like the anti-gay conservative side, is that their rhetoric in these court cases also starts shifting.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: He was relieved of his classroom duties because he is a homosexual.]
MATT: So, like, a teacher would be fired for being gay ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP: We are modeling behavior all the time by what we do as well as by what we say or teach in the classroom.]
MATT: ... because their homosexuality ...
JOANNA WUEST: Is kind of seen as a contagion.
MATT: Like, that's the rhetoric. Which feels very much like ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Greg Gutfeld: One word, groomer.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Tucker Carlson: They're grooming seven-year-olds.]
MATT: ... what you see from conservatives today.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Laura Ingraham: This is propaganda for grooming.]
LULU: It's groomers pre-groomers.
MATT: Yeah, exactly. This idea that ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP: There are definite overtones that children will catch, yes. Particularly children today.]
MATT: ... if sexual orientation is modeled, it is learned. And the response to that ...
JOANNA WUEST: Pioneering scholars and clinicians ...
MATT: ... would come into the court as expert witnesses ...
JOANNA WUEST: ... to say things like, "This high school teacher couldn't change the identities of these students because whatever is causing those identities, those ideas are already going to be set in stone within the first few years of a child's life."
MATT: Which doesn't mean that the environment still couldn't be playing a role here, but it is pushing the origins of sexual orientation to something much closer to, like, birth, implying that homosexuality or even heterosexuality is essentially innate.
LULU: But you're saying in the context of these court battles, that, like ...
MATT: Yeah, but it's not just, like, court cases. Like, these scientists are coming to annual conferences held by gay rights organizations ...
JOANNA WUEST: To teach them about the science of sexual orientation.
MATT: And that the origins of sexual orientation might not be rooted in psychology, but rather biology.
LULU: That's interesting. So you're saying there's almost like this gradient. It's like a gradient.
MATT: Yeah, exactly. It's like this shift from psychology to biology. And not just biology of, like, the natural world of nature but, like, human biology.
JOANNA WUEST: Which is the beginning of what we eventually will see as a "born this way" rhetoric.
MATT: Also, did you come across Carl Bean during your research?
JOANNA WUEST: The disco song?
MATT: [laughs] Yeah.
JOANNA WUEST: [laughs] Yeah.
MATT: Okay. Carl Bean. Have you heard of Carl Bean?
LULU: No, I have not. I am not familiar with Mr. Bean.
MATT: Okay, so Carl Bean, Mr. Bean, gay Black man, activist, disco singer. 1977, puts out a song called "I Was Born This Way."
LULU: What? No!
MATT: Uh-huh. And ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, I Was Born This Way: [singing] I'm walking tonight ...]
MATT: ... it's very good.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, I Was Born This Way: [singing] ... in nature's disguise ...]
LULU: Ooh! Come out onto the dance floor. I would dance to this!
MATT: It's amazing!
LULU: [laughs] Oh my gosh!
MATT: Listen to the words.
LULU: Okay. "You laugh at me and you criticize because I'm happy ..."
MATT: Yes.
LULU: " ... carefree ..."
MATT: Uh-huh.
LULU: " ... and gay!" [laughs] Oh my God!
MATT: "It ain't a fault, it's a fact."
[ARCHIVE CLIP, I Was Born This Way: [singing] I was born this way. Yeah!]
LULU: Wait, so Gaga ripped off Carl Bean?
MATT: Uh, well that's a loaded question, but ...
LULU: [laughs]
MATT: But I mean, she said in many interviews the song was inspired by Carl Bean, the album was inspired by Carl Bean.
JOANNA WUEST: I guess what we can say is Carl Bean is in the vanguard here.
MATT: Okay, Joanna's point is that ...
JOANNA WUEST: The ingredients are there. It just feels really early.
MATT: ... "born this way" was still not there as like a full-throated message yet. Because, like, the science wasn't really there. But then once you get into, like, the mid/late-'80's, you have somebody like Judd Marmor, who was the former president of the American Psychiatric Association, he was an advocate and collaborator with gay rights groups ...
JOANNA WUEST: He's beginning to place extra emphasis on biological factors.
MATT: These were studies that were done by the mid-'80s that were looking at sexual orientation and, like, hormones and brain development.
JOANNA WUEST: That perhaps something happened in utero. And so the idea is, like, if you are a male fetus, you are being kind of bathed with estrogen in utero, and that's going to influence your brain development which is then going to feminize you and to make you into a gay man. And as you can hear there, there's a lot of assumptions about what it means to be a gay man there. It's estrogen, which is a female hormone, allegedly, which is gonna give you feminine qualities that are baked into your brain structures.
MATT: And that's where you start to see biology really take hold. So you can see how, like, there's these mainstream cultural assumptions of what homosexuality is that are a part of this work in the '80s. But what happens, and like it's the same thing that's been happening going back through the '70s, the '60s into the '50s when this all started, is gay rights activists are going to take this work and fold it into their civil rights campaign, into their public messaging.
LULU: But how—but that's not like a monolith, right? I mean, were there—it sounds like we're hearing about some of the gay activists but, like, were there other—I mean, were there people who were just like, "Uh, don't grab onto this?"
MATT: Yeah. No, for sure. There were people like Martha Shelley.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Martha Shelley: My feeling was that why do you need some psychiatrist to tell you you're okay?]
MATT: A cofounder of the Gay Liberation Front.
JOANNA WUEST: Which has all these arguments that we want to refuse help from expertise.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Martha Shelley: Here we were trying to supposedly climb the ladder to respectability step by step, and I would feel like well hell, the right thing to do is to say "Screw it!" to the system. [laughs]]
MATT: And the Liberation Front was active in the late '60s/early '70s basically being like ...
JOANNA WUEST: Who said that clinicians get to say anything about our sexualities one way or the other?
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Martha Shelley: The word "liberation" means "change," "openness to something new." Seeing yourself as a person who can be fluid, who can do other things than whatever somebody ascribes for you.]
MATT: And by the late-'80s/early-'90s, there were also people in academia like Judith Butler arguing that the environment, culture, social interactions, fluidity, all these things were essential to understanding human sexuality and also gender identity.
LULU: So you're saying there was like—there's a cauldron of ideas here, of course. Like, there's nuance.
MATT: Yes, but those ideas are more fringe, they're more radical. And the mainstream of the movement, the most powerful part of the movement, is going to continue to hitch itself to this developing biological point of view. And then ...
[NEWS CLIP: There is some new evidence today about what causes a man to be homosexual.]
MATT: ... two years before Dean's study, December, 1991 ...
[NEWS CLIP: A new study suggests that the answer to a very large degree may be found in a person's genetic inheritance.]
MATT: Genetics, which in the '90s was like biological determinism on steroids, that shows up.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: Researchers at Northwestern examined 167 gay men and their brothers.]
MATT: So basically there's a twin study that comes out. A twin study is like a shorthand way for scientists to measure the potential genetic influence on a trait. And so these researchers look at adopted brothers all the way up to identical twins.
[NEWS CLIP: And found the more similar the brothers were genetically, the more likely both would be gay.]
MATT: Which leads one of the researchers to say ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, researcher: A substantial proportion of the causes of male sexual orientation are genetic.]
[NEWS CLIP: Some scientists criticize this latest report as simplistic. Indeed, many predict the roles of environment and heredity will continue to be debated unless scientists can actually identify genes responsible for homosexuality.]
MATT: Again, so that's '91.
LULU: Okay. And that is where Dean comes back?
MATT: Yeah, exactly. '91, he's pitching the NIH.
DEAN HAMER: Got the green light.
MATT: He starts doing his interviews.
DEAN HAMER: To get DNA, you just take a little blood.
MATT: He's combing through these X chromosomes.
DEAN HAMER: When eureka!
MATT: They find the little genetic tweak. And the tweak, they found it in pairs of gay brothers. They were looking at gay brothers because gay brothers reduces the amount of just, like, randomness and chance that could be involved here.
LULU: Hmm.
MATT: And they find this little tweak in almost all of the pairs of gay brothers. And I think it was about, like, 80 men were involved in this study.
LULU: It is—it is weird, though, just to sift through that for one sec. Like, that's less than a hundred people.
MATT: Yeah. No, it's small.
LULU: So what does that mean in terms of, you know—what does that mean?
MATT: Well, so to Dean what it means is that this little region of DNA is playing some sort of role in determining these brothers' sexual orientation.
DEAN HAMER: But how strong a role it's playing is difficult to estimate.
MATT: Like, if it were potentially completely determinative, every gay brother would have had this gene, but they don't.
DEAN HAMER: It was more like tilting the scales a bit.
MATT: It was like a little nudge.
DEAN HAMER: Yeah. That's all we said. Yeah.
LULU: A little bit, perhaps.
MATT: Right.
DEAN HAMER: But a week before the paper gets published ...
MATT: July, 1993.
DEAN HAMER: ... my phone just starts ringing off the hook.
MATT: Word got out about the study.
DEAN HAMER: And I get called by the New York Times and the Washington Post.
MATT: The LA Times, major magazines ...
DEAN HAMER: Pretty much every major TV network.
MATT: And what exactly are they asking you?
DEAN HAMER: I think the first question was just, "What did you find?"
MATT: And Dean would say ...
DEAN HAMER: A statistically significant correlation between markers on XQ28 and male sexual orientation. And then everybody sort of crossed their eyes.
MATT: [laughs]
MATT: But he says the very next question he would get from these reporters was ...
DEAN HAMER: "Well, what does this mean for gay rights?"
MATT: Because this was 1993, that was, like, the question.
[NEWS CLIP: The first presidential campaign in which gays and lesbians have begun voting in a bloc in their own self-interest.]
MATT: Earlier that year, Bill Clinton had taken office.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Clinton: I have a vision, and you're a part of it.]
MATT: He'd run a campaign that was responding to the gay rights movement.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: The first time in the history of this country our issues are being discussed.]
MATT: And so leading up to Dean's research ...
[NEWS CLIP: Tonight ...]
MATT: ... all over the news ...
[NEWS CLIP: It's gays in the military ...]
MATT: ... you've got things like ...
[NEWS CLIP: The ban on homosexuals in the military ...]
MATT: ... Don't Ask Don't Tell ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, protesters: Gay rights!]
MATT: ... the Gay and Lesbian March ...
[NEWS CLIP: One of the largest demonstrations ever in the nation's capital.]
MATT: There's also ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP: Gay rights now!]
MATT: ... the beginnings of marriage equality, debates about homosexuality in sex education.
[NEWS CLIP: Some on the religious right are running a TV ad campaign targeting ...]
MATT: And so people wanted to know, in the midst of this whole conversation, if genetics are a part of it, what does that mean ...
DEAN HAMER: For gay rights.
MATT: And Dean would be like, "Well, I don't know."
DEAN HAMER: That's not a scientific question. That's a social question. It's a political question. But it's not about the science.
[NEWS CLIP: Dean Hamer, a senior researcher ...]
MATT: But then Dean gets a call to come on a very popular show, Nightline, to talk about his work.
DEAN HAMER: And I was like, "No" because that's not—that's a discussion show, it's not really a science show. And they were like, "Well, we're gonna talk about it anyway," so I was like, "Okay."
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ted Koppel: I should point out that Dr. Hamer wants only to refer and to comment on the scientific aspects of this story.]
MATT: But then Ted Koppel leads in with this question ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ted Koppel: If the findings of the study, Dr. Hamer, are confirmed, will it then be accurate to say that homosexuality is not optional behavior?]
MATT: And Dean ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Dean Hamer: What we found is that ...]
MATT: ... basically just sticks to his science.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Dean Hamer: ... one specific region of one chromosome is linked to homosexuality, at least in some men.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ted Koppel: But ...]
MATT: Koppel pushes it a little bit further.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ted Koppel: ... will it then be possible at least to say that it is not a purely behavioral thing, that there are inherited traits?]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Dean Hamer: There are definitely inherited characteristics which are very important, that's correct.]
DEAN HAMER: But ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ted Koppel: And how important?]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Dean Hamer: Well, previous ...]
DEAN HAMER: ... I am unwilling to go to the lengths he wants me to go to.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ted Koppel: I mean, I'm just trying to get you to put it in as commonplace a language as you can so that we all understand it.]
MATT: And Dean's like, "Look ..."
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Dean Hamer: Homosexuality is not simply determined by some single gene. What's important today is that we've clearly demonstrated that genes are involved.]
MATT: And really, it's nearly at the end of this 30 minute-long episode that Koppel just finally asks the thing.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ted Koppel: Back to the science of this, Dr. Hamer, and ask you to what degree is it appropriate, based on the findings that you have reached, that gays can say, "Look, it's not a matter of choice. It is predetermined, in a sense, genetically?"]
MATT: Basically, are you born this way? It was almost as if, like, that word "choice" unlocked something in Dean.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Dean Hamer: I think all scientists that have studied sexual orientation already agree that there's very little element of choice in whether or not people choose to be gay or heterosexual.]
LULU: Wait, wait. All scientists say there's no choice?
MATT: Well, there's very little choice.
LULU: Is that even true? Did all scientists think that?
MATT: Well, okay. So ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Dean Hamer: Well, previous studies have suggested that ...]
MATT: ... Dean is referencing all of the stuff that we talked about: the child development studies, the hormone studies, the twin studies. So all that stuff, plus his work, that he believes tells him that there's very little choice involved in sexual orientation.
LULU: Have they heard of bisexuality?
MATT: [laughs]
LULU: Did bisexuality not exist in people's minds then?
MATT: Wait. Hang on. I'm sending you something. I'm sending you something. Okay.
LULU: Ooh!
MATT: The cover of Newsweek with the headline ...
LULU: "Not Gay, Not Straight: A New Sexual Identity Emerges."
MATT: Okay, thank you. Yeah, so that's 1995. That's two years after Dean's work.
LULU: Okay, but anyway well, just the only reason I'm bringing that up is I guess you could—like, it's just like there's choice in every aspect of it, which is part of what makes it so darned fun.
MATT: Right. I think what's tricky about it is there's like this question of what are we talking about when we're talking about choice? And I talked about this a lot with Dean.
MATT: So you think because there's some sort of genetic basis that means what, that we don't have any control?
DEAN HAMER: No. It's within our control to do what you do, including who you have sex with.
MATT: But Dean believed that what he found showed that when it comes to sexuality ...
DEAN HAMER: ... you can no longer make the argument that it's purely a matter of choice. It's something much deeper than that.
MATT: It's like the thing that strikes you about somebody, like the way they laugh or, like, the shape of their mouth or whatever, like, those flickers of desire that just emerge from within you.
LULU: Sure. I get that it feels bodily, it feels that it's just like intuitively—that you're not controlling it, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's genetic or, like, biological. I mean, plenty of things that feel deeply rooted come from our environment, our culture. Like, that's how it works. It gets in there.
MATT: Right. No, no, no, I think—I mean, Dean ...
DEAN HAMER: There could be environmental factors.
MATT: ... will say, "Sure."
DEAN HAMER: It could also be very specific things that happen to you during life.
MATT: There could be an environmental influence on something like sexual orientation. But to him ...
DEAN HAMER: Because the gay brothers ...
MATT: Have that little genetic tweak, that at least to some degree ...
DEAN HAMER: Genes are involved.
LULU: Okay, well maybe—this is what I'm struggling with. Like, this is taking one study that is only on gay men—no women looked at, no other genders—and then this one other pretty small twin study—again, only about gay men—and to make a claim about genetics being involved in sexuality as a whole, like, that just feels—that feels like a pretty big leap.
MATT: Right. And I do think that this is important, which is like if we set genetics aside, in some way obviously, this was something that Dean had always felt about himself.
DEAN HAMER: That for me personally, sexual orientation wasn't something I chose. It's just—it's something that developed in me.
MATT: Going back to being five and feeling feelings about the Lone Ranger. Like ...
DEAN HAMER: It was just there.
MATT: And Dean says those feelings, how would he have modeled them? How would he have learned them?
DEAN HAMER: Because, you know, who would be the teachers?
MATT: It was Montclair, New Jersey in the '50s. And if anything ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, The Homosexuals: I know that inside now I'm sick.]
MATT: ... the environment was telling him ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, The Homosexuals: I'm sick in a lot of ways.]
MATT: ... "Don't have this desire. Get rid of it."
DEAN HAMER: But I couldn't think of any way around it whatsoever.
MATT: And sure, Dean had girlfriends in high school, even in college.
DEAN HAMER: Just like an unbelievable hottie. I mean, she is really good at sex.
MATT: [laughs]
MATT: He has this three-week affair with a woman.
DEAN HAMER: And then I'm just like, "But it's just not what I want. It's just not."
MATT: There's just this persistent desire he has. And so to have that experience, to become a geneticist, to find this tweak in gay brothers, it's a confirmation of something that he felt all along and that he believes to be true, that there are probably genes in all of us that are playing a role, even if that role ...
DEAN HAMER: Like tilting the scales a bit.
MATT: ... is just like a tiny, little nudge. But it being 1993 ...
[NEWS CLIP: The Human Genome Project.]
MATT: ... and the way that the media ...
[NEWS CLIP: We'll know the complete set of instructions ...]
MATT: ... talked about genetics ...
[NEWS CLIP: ... which make people.]
MATT: ... and Dean's work in particular ...
[NEWS CLIP: He found a portion of DNA ...]
MATT: ... was basically like ...
[NEWS CLIP: ... that appears to determine sexual orientation.]
MATT: ... right here …
[ARCHIVE CLIP: This is a picture of the entire X chromosome.]
MATT: ... is the proof.
[NEWS CLIP: And this is the area believed to be associated with determining human sexuality.]
MATT: That you are, indeed ...
[NEWS CLIP: ... which points strongly to a link ...]
MATT: ... born this way.
[NEWS CLIP: ... between homosexuality and heredity.]
MATT: And in fact ...
[NEWS CLIP: Think about it for just a moment.]
MATT: ... this oversimplification ...
[NEWS CLIP: Think only about the legal implications.]
MATT: ... suddenly created this new, very powerful legal tool for the gay rights movement to use.
[NEWS CLIP: While it is constitutional, for example, to prohibit certain behavior, it is not constitutional to make status such as race illegal.]
MATT: In other words, you can make laws that target certain types of behaviors or actions that people take, but you can't make laws that simply target somebody for their identity. This is the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, that we're all treated equally under the law. But the thing about equal protection, and the thing about identity under the law, is that there's this weird catch.
JOANNA WUEST: Yes, so—and I think we're starting to get into this idea of immutability here.
MATT: Yes.
JOANNA WUEST: Yeah, so this requires getting just a little bit into the weeds to really get, but so ...
MATT: That's all right. Let's get into it and we'll just see where we go.
JOANNA WUEST: I'll do it quickly.
MATT: So Joanna explained that going back to the 1950s, the Supreme Court started making these rulings saying that certain types of identities get special protections.
JOANNA WUEST: Yes, race, sex ...
MATT: Being foreign-born is another. And the Court said one of the reasons why these identities get special protection is because they are ...
JOANNA WUEST: Immutable.
MATT: Meaning that identity is something that is deeply held through chance, luck, or quote, "an accident of birth."
LULU: Meaning, like, you didn't choose this identity, you have no control over it, and therefore ...
MATT: Therefore, legally you shouldn't be held culpable for anything pertaining to your identity.
LULU: Hmm.
JOANNA WUEST: It's seen as the gold standard of civil rights protections.
MATT: And so many in the gay rights movement, many gay rights litigators look at Dean's work ...
JOANNA WUEST: And think this is a really powerful thing that we can use. And so whenever they can, they're gonna bring biologists into court to say gays and lesbians are immutable.
MATT: And so the "born this way" idea shows up in ...
JOANNA WUEST: ... military exclusion cases.
MATT: Sodomy cases.
JOANNA WUEST: Marriage equality cases.
DEAN HAMER: And I get called up ...
MATT: Anti-discrimination cases.
*DEAN HAMER: ... and asked to testify in Denver, Colorado.
[NEWS CLIP: Stunned and angry with voters who said no to homosexual rights laws here.]
MATT: In 1992, voters in Colorado had overwhelmingly voted for an amendment to the state constitution that said that if you were fired for being gay, if you were denied health insurance for being gay, you had no legal recourse. You couldn't claim discrimination.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: I mean, hate is okay, you know? They just made it okay.]
MATT: A bunch of other cities and states put forward similar ballot initiatives. And this anti-gay front, their argument was…
DEAN HAMER: It's a choice, and ...
MATT: ... being gay ...
DEAN HAMER: ... people aren't born that way, they just become that way or they choose to be that way.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jean Dubofsky: And because it could be changed, so they thought ...]
MATT: This was the lead attorney, Jean Dubofsky.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jean Dubofsky: ... it would mean that they weren't entitled to equal protection under the law.]
MATT: So Jean started grabbing experts ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jean Dubofsky: Psychiatrists, medical doctors ...]
MATT: ... to come testify in court.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jean Dubofsky: ... that, wait a minute, sexual orientation has a biological or genetic basis.]
MATT: And Dean did come and testify about his work.
DEAN HAMER: Which tells us that there is at least a substantial genetic component. It's not purely a choice.
MATT: And all of this was kind of what Joanna was referring to.
JOANNA WUEST: Kind of the culmination of a particular project, a several decades-long process.
MATT: To use science in the courts to argue for civil rights, but also to define the nature of homosexuality.
JOANNA WUEST: That it's fixed.
MATT: That it's immutable.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: We'll hear argument next in ...]
MATT: Now whenever these cases ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP: ... Lawrence and Tyron Garner vs. Texas.]
MATT: ... ended up making it to ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP: Obergefell v. Hodges.]
MATT: ... the Supreme Court ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP: The intimate and committed relationships of same-sex couples ...]
MATT: ... the justices use legal principles like privacy and due process ...
JOANNA WUEST: To give gays and lesbians more civil rights than they previously had.
MATT: But they don't touch immutability.
JOANNA WUEST: Exactly.
MATT: They refuse to give gays and lesbians this special protection under the 14th Amendment.
DEAN HAMER: Which I think is a good thing.
MATT: But I'm a little confused because I mean, you testified in court ...
DEAN HAMER: Well, I think I felt right from the beginning that the naturalness of sexual orientation was something that was really important. And I do think it's important to have correct and true information. But for me, immutability is not a requirement for human rights. It just doesn't enter into the argument at all. But I think that the argument of immutability affects people's perceptions and affects people's beliefs in a very deep way, and ultimately what is decided legally depends on what people think about things. We think that we have these laws that are somehow abstract, but really they're based on people's opinions about things, what's good and what's bad, what's moral and what's immoral. And that information that sexuality is something innate, that affects people's opinions and that in turn has a big effect on the law.
LULU: And do you know—I mean, do we know if there was, like, a sea change just in what your average Joe believed?
MATT: Well, let me take way too long to answer that question.
LULU: [laughs]
MATT: Joanna says Dean's work definitely impacted public opinion. And actually, right after it came out ...
JOANNA WUEST: The born gay narrative, you could see it everywhere, in press releases from national gay rights organizations during the time.
MATT: Quotes in papers from gay leaders ...
JOANNA WUEST: ... saying that homosexuality is, in fact, innate.
MATT: The Human Rights Campaign starts passing out pamphlets and essays to its members and to members of Congress ...
JOANNA WUEST: ... with the born this way idea of homosexuality.
MATT: It becomes explicitly a way to change the minds of the mainstream straight public.
JOANNA WUEST: PFLAG, for instance ...
MATT: Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays.
JOANNA WUEST: ... hires a consulting group to ask, among other things, how we should use the biology of sexual orientation in our activism.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: I knew it. [laughs] I just knew it!]
JOANNA WUEST: Because it's a very powerful narrative to tell parents that they did nothing wrong.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: It's confirming of what I've always felt in my heart, and even when he was little, I would think I couldn't be doing this many things wrong.]
LULU: Ugh, that tape is—that's, like, in her relief you can hear she still so clearly thinks it's a defect.
MATT: Yeah, and actually, in fact, in the report that the consulting group wrote for PFLAG, they write, quote, "Explaining the source of homosexuality allows straight people to reassure themselves that sexuality is a given. If sexuality were a matter of choice or even contained some degree of choice and ambiguity, people would have to think about a volatile and complex dimension of human experience," unquote.
LULU: Whoa! Keep that trap door shut. [laughs]
MATT: It's just like, yeah, don't look at it at all, don't think about it.
LULU: Wow. It's like explicitly being used in that instance to, like, comfort a straight.
MATT: Yeah, a majority-straight public. And Joanna says by the time you get to 2003 ...
JOANNA WUEST: The ACLU will tell canvassers doing door-to-door knocking in support of marriage equality to emphasize biology and immutability when they talk about why queer people should be able to get married.
MATT: And it was actually in that year, '03 ...
[NEWS CLIP: Today it was gay rights, and the law of the land will never be the same.]
MATT: ... the Supreme Court rules sodomy bans to be unconstitutional.
[NEWS CLIP: Homosexual conduct is no longer a crime.]
MATT: Then 2004 ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP: Do you believe homosexuality is a choice?]
MATT: ... in a presidential debate, Democratic hopeful John Kerry ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, John Kerry: I think if you talk to anybody, it's not a choice.]
MATT: ... even says Vice President Dick Cheney's daughter, who is a lesbian ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, John Kerry: That she's being who she was. She's being who she was born as.]
MATT: A 2010 town hall ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barack Obama: I don't think it's a choice.]
MATT: ... then-President Barack Obama ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barack Obama: I think that people are born with, you know, a certain makeup.]
MATT: Also in 2010 ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Lady Gaga: It's called "Born This Way." [singing] I'm beautiful in my way because God makes no mistakes. I'm on the right track baby, I was born this way.]
LULU: That's where it really got its wings. [laughs]
MATT: Yeah. I mean, like, "born this way" around here really starts to, like, move through the culture. And Joanna points out actually that when Gaga put that song out ...
JOANNA WUEST: She's actually overtly campaigning for a repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell.
MATT: The continued ban on openly gay people in the military.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barack Obama: Thank you, thank you, thank you.]
MATT: And on the heels of that song, Obama overturns Don't Ask Don't Tell. And then 2015, you've probably got one of the most incredible moments of "born this way" which is when the Supreme Court overturns the ban on same-sex marriage. And even though the Court doesn't rule on the immutability question, in the Court's majority opinion, written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, he writes, quote, "Sexual orientation is both a normal expression of human sexuality and immutable," unquote.
LULU: So that moment you see as just like full belief has permeated minds.
MATT: Yeah. Yeah, that it's everywhere.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: That feeling where you ...]
[ARCHIVE CLIP: Well, she was born as ...]
[ARCHIVE CLIP: We all know that you were born this way.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mary Lambert: [singing] And I can't change, even if I tried, even I wanted to.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Lady Gaga: [singing] There ain't no other way, baby I was born this way.]
MATT: And now I will finally answer your question.
LULU: [laughs] Okay.
MATT: Which is, if you remember, okay, so the 2018 Gallup poll about "born this way?"
LULU: Yes, yep. Okay. The one you were part of, the sea of 50 percent of people who think that people ...
MATT: [laughs] I'm not on an island, I'm floating in a sea of half of America.
LULU: Who thinks that a person is born that way.
MATT: Who believes that born this way. So it turns out Gallup has actually been asking about this all the way back since 1977. And in 1977, that number was at 13 percent. 13 percent of Americans believed that somebody was born that way.
LULU: Wow! Okay, so that's like a really big leap in just a couple huge decades.
MATT: Yeah, it's a total transformation. And actually, if you look at it on a graph, which I'm going to do ...
LULU: Okay. Can I see?
MATT: Because I had it. Do you want to look at it?
LULU: Yeah.
MATT: Okay, here.
LULU: Okay, what am I looking at? A green line and a green line.
MATT: Okay, yeah, just look at the dark green line, which is "born this way."
LULU: And it's going zoop! And it spookity spikes in the '90s.
MATT: Yeah, exactly. You see, it's like a very slow climb through the '80s, and then boop!
LULU: [laughs]
MATT: It's like, right after Dean's work, it just starts shooting up.
LULU: Wow.
DEAN HAMER: So there's this nice correlation.
MATT: Between growing acceptance of homosexuality and the belief that a homosexual person is born that way.
DEAN HAMER: But what's really cool is, in those surveys you can then go in and ask people, what do you think about gay rights? What do you think about gay marriage?
MATT: And there's been some research that shows that the number one shared characteristic of somebody who supports something like gay marriage is that they believe a person was born that way.
LULU: Hmm.
MATT: So that trumps political affiliation, geographic location.
DEAN HAMER: It was even stronger than your religious affiliation, which is quite remarkable.
LULU: Wow! So it's like, regardless of how accurate or not it is, this belief, they think, is the thing changing minds politically?
MATT: Right.
JOANNA WUEST: Yeah, it's fascinating, but we don't have any way of saying that "born this way" is what led those folks to be supportive. And there have been some experimental public opinion research papers published in the last few years that kind of throw some cold water on that idea. And they argue that "born this way" is more of the way that a person who already supports gay civil rights expresses that support for gay civil rights.
MATT: So rather than "born this way" being the thing that causes you to change your opinion on homosexuality, it's just something that allows you to express an opinion that you already held.
JOANNA WUEST: Yeah, and I think it's a little bit of both.
MATT: And I mean, I think I've read that, like, media representation has also been a big thing in acceptance, and ...
JOANNA WUEST: Yeah, I could give you one other thing that maybe might help.
MATT: Sure.
JOANNA WUEST: So there are a lot of recent public opinion scholars who have looked—Jeremiah Garrison in particular, he has this book where he looks at the importance of the HIV-AIDS crisis in kind of making gay and lesbians visible. And visible in the media but also visible to their family members and their social networks. And one way to think about what's happening here is as people are coming out and being forced to come out, this is precisely at the moment that the gay brain and the gay gene and all these kind of studies are being published. And there's the media reaction and oh gosh, now everyone's talking about "born this way." And so we can definitely think of a lot of congruence there: people are coming out, here's the story that the national organizations are giving to people, and if you look at NBC's nightly news, you might see someone like Dean Hamer talking about the implications of the gay gene study for your son or daughter.
MATT: Okay, before we go further, I just want to take, like, a tiny break.
LULU: Okay, I can stay here. That was a lot of info.
MATT: [laughs] It was. So just like, short little break, refresh, come back.
LULU: And when we come back?
MATT: Um, yeah, we'll get into the unraveling.
LULU: Okay. Radiolab will be back in a moment.
LULU: [humming "Born This Way"] Radiolab. Lulu. Back with Matt.
MATT: Okay. So the unraveling. So that idea Joanna mentioned about AIDS, that was a part of a book. The book put forward the idea that AIDS might be the actual, like, thing that changed American attitudes regarding homosexuality.
LULU: Mm-hmm.
MATT: Which meant, maybe "born this way ..."
LULU: Wasn't as much of a driver?
MATT: Yeah. exactly.
LULU: Yeah, yeah.
MATT: And so that book—that came out in 2018, and that same year, researcher and professor Lisa Diamond ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Lisa Diamond: True or false ...]
MATT: ... out of the University of Utah ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Lisa Diamond: ... sexual orientation is something you're born with.]
MATT: In 2018, she gives this TedX Talk that has, like, over half a million views at this point.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Lisa Diamond: Chances are that if you support LGBT rights, you said, "True."]
MATT: Which is essentially about the fact that "born this way" ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Lisa Diamond: There are three problems with the "born that way" argument.]
MATT: ... shouldn't exist anymore.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Lisa Diamond: First, it's not scientifically accurate.]
MATT: So as you pointed out, a lot of the early research that became a part of "born this way" was very male-focused.
LULU: Mm-hmm.
MATT: Diamond's own work ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Lisa Diamond: Over 20 years ago, I started a study ...]
MATT: ... focuses on women.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Lisa Diamond: ... tracking over time 100 women with different sexual identities.]
MATT: And her work shows how there's a lot of fluidity and plasticity in female sexuality.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Lisa Diamond: Some individuals start out exclusively attracted to one gender, and over time they find themselves attracted to both genders. Or vice versa.]
MATT: And that it's not just women, that many people experience these changing desires or orientations over time.
LULU: So basically clearly, it's not set at birth.
MATT: Right. There can be fluidity throughout a lifetime.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Lisa Diamond: Now let's move on to the second problem with the "born that way" argument: that it's not legally necessary.]
MATT: She points out that the Supreme Court never ruled on immutability.
LULU: It never actually hitched its wagon to it?
MATT: Right.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Lisa Diamond: So although we keep shouting "We're born this way!" the courts have been saying, "We don't care." Now for the third and most important problem with the "born that way" argument: that it's unjust.]
MATT: Diamond says look, it creates a narrow definition of a lived sexual orientation which excludes all sorts of people, but also as an argument in and of itself ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Lisa Diamond: We were born this way! You can't punish us for something that is not our fault. Now do you see how that argument just goes along with the notion that being LGBT is a fault? That it's inherently sad and tragic. It's like—it's like we have this terrible disease and we need to be pitied instead of punished. Thankfully, times have changed, and if there's one thing that LGBT individuals want now it is certainly not pity. What we want, what we deserve is dignity, autonomy, self-determination. And that is our strongest argument for equality.]
MATT: So that was 2018. And then 2019 ...
[NEWS CLIP: A new study found there is no single gene that can determine a person's sexual orientation.]
MATT: Genetics all grown up. There's this huge paper, hundreds of thousands of people's genomes are sequenced—both men and women.
[NEWS CLIP: What is being considered the largest genetic study on sexual behavior.]
MATT: And the researchers claim that, unlike where Dean expected there would maybe be a dozen genes associated with sexual orientation ...
DEAN HAMER: Now we know that there are thousands of genes involved.
MATT: And we've identified a few.
ROBBEE WEDOW: Complex human behaviors all work like this.
MATT: And I talked to one of the co-authors of the big paper, Robbee Wedow, who was like ...
ROBBEE WEDOW: All human traits have a lot more to do with probability and statistics.
MATT: That if you look at complex traits like depression or risk-taking behavior, there are thousands upon thousands of genes that might have this, like, little bit of an influence on what you become.
ROBBEE WEDOW: And instead of deterministic, it really just has a lot more to do with probability.
MATT: The sort of likelihood of what your genes might lead you to become in an environment. And the way this study got reported on a lot and the way it even got messaged was that when it comes to sexual behavior, genetics plays a very, very limited role, and that a lot of this does indeed have to do with the environment. And what you start to see after all this ...
[NEWS CLIP: Now more than ever before ...]
MATT: ... is this sort of explosion ...
[NEWS CLIP: ... Americans are openly identifying as LGBTQ.]
MATT: ... of people, especially in Gen Z, identifying as gay, bi, trans, queer. And what you see as a reaction to that ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Michael Knowles: What the left used to tell you is look, you're just born this way.]
MATT: ... is the right starts making all these arguments ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Michael Knowles: The one thing we were told ...]
MATT: ... about the environment.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Michael Knowles: ... is that none of this has anything to do with culture. None of this has anything to do with nurture, none of this has anything to do with education.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP: Ron DeSantis: And so in Florida ...]
MATT: So this is where you get the Florida bill, this is where you get ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP: Groomer.]
MATT: ... the whole groomer thing.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: And all of a sudden with her group of friends, they all decided they're trans.]
MATT: Quote, "trans trenders."
[ARCHIVE CLIP: And she went on hormones.]
MATT: Social contagion theories, and this rise of anti-LGBTQ legislation.
JOANNA WUEST: That says we're gonna try to eliminate a lot of these kind of ways of being able to live one's life.
MATT: And Joanna says even though it seems like "born this way" is maybe unraveling ...
JOANNA WUEST: It's that anxiety, it's that real threat ...
MATT: ... that has kept the idea very much here in the world today. She says you see it in trans rights cases where lawyers bring in ...
JOANNA WUEST: Brain scans.
MATT: Twin studies. You see it in the way that people talk about the fact that there's this jump in LGBTQ identity.
JOANNA WUEST: ... that ...
[NEWS CLIP: ... people are much more likely to be out.]
JOANNA WUEST: Now that the world is more tolerant ...
[NEWS CLIP: ... and in an environment that accepts them, a community that accepts them, a family that accepts them, a country that accepts them ...]
MATT: People can actually just be ...
[NEWS CLIP: We didn't just wake up one day and decide to be gay, lesbian or bisexual.]
MATT: ... who they always intrinsically were.
[NEWS CLIP: It was never a choice. It was something we were born with.]
DEAN HAMER: Of course we are born that way.
MATT: And this is the thing is if you believe that there's some sort of genetic basis for something like sexual orientation, it's almost like the "born this way" idea still kind of holds true. And when Dean and I would talk about this and talk about genes ...
DEAN HAMER: I think they influence your—just what you particularly desire.
MATT: ... he would emphasize the role he believes they play.
DEAN HAMER: And that's really important. That's what you're going to pursue in your life, most likely.
MATT: And we would spend hours ...
DEAN HAMER: Genes are having ...
MATT: ... debating that role.
DEAN HAMER: ... a big influence. And that being the case ...
MATT: I guess I might—you might have a disagreement, though, on "big" influence.
MATT: And Dean would cite studies that claim that if you look at sexual orientation, like, 25 percent to 50 percent of that has to come from genetics.
DEAN HAMER: It's hard to get below.
MATT: Although some would argue—some would argue lower.
DEAN HAMER: Yes. Okay, great. Eight percent. Fine.
MATT: [laughs]
MATT: And I told Dean about this thing that Joanna had said that always stuck with me.
JOANNA WUEST: That what may be happening is something that conservatives have always feared and that liberals could never bear to admit, which is that it might not be all about biology.
MATT: That yes, we are biological beings, but we are a part of a very complex environment.
JOANNA WUEST: And organisms change their environment and environments change organisms.
DEAN HAMER: Well, there's no evidence for any environmental effect—at least in men. Zero. There's never been any study that showed any effect of the environment. It's important to recognize that. The environment meaning the shared environment: schools, language, religion, stuff like that, stuff that's shared within a household.
LULU: Does that mean that in women there have been studies?
MATT: No. I mean, none that—that I could find. I mean, like, there's studies that show that sexual behavior is malleable that, like, environmental circumstances will change how people have sex with one another, but there's nothing that shows, like, this thing here is what leads to a sense of orientation. And because of that, for Dean ...
DEAN HAMER: I think that at the time of birth ...
MATT: ... your orientation, gay, straight or bi ...
DEAN HAMER: ... that that is very, very strongly influenced by these innate factors that we have right from the very beginning. And we know what the effect is of saying, you know, we don't know how this happens. It's not good. It's not good at all. So I'm not saying at all that that should be the basis of our arguments or our moral arguments or our law, but I think it's a pity if we—if people don't know what's known.
MATT: Yeah, but I just don't know if much of anything is known. And if we do want to say that there are things that we know about sexual orientation or something, that, like, what we know to me still feels so, so small.
DEAN HAMER: I agree. We know about as much about sexual orientation as we know about depression or schizophrenia, which is not much. And I guess what I would just be wary of is confusing the idea that we don't know everything with the idea that there's nothing to know.
JOANNA WUEST: I don't know why I'm trans. I just know that I am. But I think by the time I was transitioning, I knew too much about some of these biological stories, and I knew I could start probing the past, and that I could tell a story about why I did something when I was five years old. But kids are gender nonconforming in many different ways. I've known many kids who played with dolls, cis boys who played with dolls for a period of their life, and then don't. And it's not this kind of story that you would hear, like, "If your little boy's playing with dolls, you can't give him a football because he's gonna be gay at the end of the day and you should just accept the fact." I mean, that was the narrative. I think these stories are too easy. I don't think they explain everyone's experience, but they are neat and tidy stories that tell us the way the world is is the way the world was always meant to be.
JOANNA WUEST: And also that the "born this way" thing, that narrative doesn't protect us from conservatives who talk about, you know, trans trending because the fact of the matter is there is much, much more identification with gender-diverse identities and living sexuality out in different ways. And I think we're backing ourselves up into a corner if we don't kind of correct course a little bit.
MATT: Well, so what is the correct course if it's not making these sorts of scientific arguments about biology, "born this way," immutability?
JOANNA WUEST: Well yeah, I think that I wrote the book in part because I've grown a little bit kind of weary of the kind of queer theory accounts that say, "Oh, we should just get rid of any kind of involvement with scientific or medical expertise when we're fighting for political equality."
MATT: Oh, is that a thing that people are talking about?
JOANNA WUEST: Yeah. I think it—I think it's a thing you hear in academia.
MATT: Okay.
JOANNA WUEST: And you might hear it in some kind of more left-leaning queer smaller activist groups.
MATT: Which is like, "Get rid of science. We don't need science anymore?"
JOANNA WUEST: Yeah, but I would not be so willing to say that I don't want a gender identity clinician coming to court and saying that trans kids should have access to gender-affirming health care because if you don't give it to them they might experience trauma. They could even die. And you don't need a biological story to explain why that's the case because those studies that prove that don't investigate the sources of identity. They just say that if you punch someone it's gonna hurt. And I'm okay with that kind of scientific authority. And it seems to have a lot more credibility than an assertion that we know of a gay gene or that we're so close to finding a gay gene, which is just—we're nowhere near that, and I don't think we ever will be.
LULU: Reporter Matthew Kielty. This episode was reported and produced by Matt Kielty, with original music by Matt as well. Dialogue with mixing help from Arianne Wack. Fact-checking by Diane Kelly.
LULU: And some news: Joanna's dissertation is coming out as a book in mere days. It's called Born This Way: Science, Citizenship, and Inequality in the American LGBTQ+ Movement. Born This Way by Joanna Wuest. Check it out.
LULU: Also huge special thanks: a ton of very smart people weighed in with edits to help us navigate through this thorny, complex history. Big thanks to Sean McKeithan, Jo Osmunsdon, Jennifer Brier, Maddie Sofia, Daniel Levine-Spound, Heather Radke and Elie Mystal. Additional special thanks to Angela Pattatucci, Carl Zimmer, Eric Turkheimer, Andrea Ganna, Chandler Burr, Jacques Balthazart, Mike's Breakfast Sandwiches, and a huge thank you to the Lesbian Herstory Archives for letting us use some of their oral histories of founders and members of the Daughters of Bilitis. The Herstory Archives are so cool. I highly recommend you check them out. That'll do it for today. Thank you for listening. Thank you for being. Catch you next week.
[LISTENER: Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad, and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes: Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Rachael Cusick, Ekedi Fausther-Keeys, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neason, Sarah Qari, Anna Rascouët-Paz, Alyssa Jeong Perry, Sarah Sandbach, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster, with help from Timmy Broderick. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger and Natalie Middleton.]
[LISTENER: Hi, I'm Erica in Yonkers. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.]
-30-
Copyright © 2023 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.
New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of programming is the audio record.
