"Sex Is In Our Heads, Not in Our Genes," (New York Newsday, in April 1995)

This essay by Katz against biological determinism was published in New York Newsday (Long Island, NY), April 2, 1995.

YOU'D NEVER KNOW IT from the mainstream media, but a furious fight is going on right now about the origin and character of homosexual and heterosexual desire. This is no mere academic battle. It's an ethical and political struggle about the shaping of love and lust.

Within this arena, many right-wingers argue that homosexuality is a "lifestyle," "preference" and "choice" -- a kind of desire lite. Because homosexuals, they say, can choose to suppress their desires, acts and identities, they should. A value judgment underlies the right's argument: Homosexual desire, acts and persons are inferior; heterosexuality is superior.

Because homosexuals choose not to suppress their feelings, these conservatives claim, gay men and lesbians do not constitute a legitimate "minority," discriminated against for traits they can't help. So homosexuals don't deserve civil rights and protections. Not even Newt Gingrich's own sister deserves to be treated as equal in all respects to a heterosexual. The Speaker of the House argues against federal protection from being fired because of homosexuality: "I don't think you should have a right [for the] federal government [to] protect you based upon your sexual behavior."

Among homosexuals and their supporters, the right's queer bashing provokes four basic responses.

Bio Determinist Argument

One group of pro-gay biological determinists argues that, contrary to the right-wing line, sexual desire is an unchangeable "orientation." Homosexuals are born with it, and stuck with it. These determinists counter the right's antihomosexual arguments with the assertion that gay men and lesbians "can't help" what they feel, how they act and who they are. Homosexuals, they argue, deserve constitutional protections against unreasonable prejudice because a homosexual orientation is inherent, deep and fIxed.

Determinists like neuro-anatomist Simon LeVay invoke the authority of science to suggest that a homosexual orientation is biologically fated. LeVay's study of 41 brains, published in 1991 in the influential journal Science, reported that part of the hypothalamus was smaller in homosexual men than in heterosexual men. This alleged neurological difference was offered as a clue to an alleged biological cause of an alleged sexual orientation.

Constructionist Argument

A second group of gay defenders rejects biological determinism. In their view, heterosexual and homosexual desires -- and a great variety of other hankerings -- arise in us as we interact with others within a particular society. Our desires are neither simply determined, nor simply a choice. Moving through the world as we find it, we form our desires, learning how to feel masculine, feminine and erotic -- and how we're supposed to feel. In this process we accept or reject aspects of our society's norms. Desires, this group argues, are individually and culturally "constructed. "

For example, desire is not always constructed as simply a same-sex or different-sex attraction. Sometimes desire is a yearning across classes or races or ages, or a lust to participate in a particular act. Most feminists, and many sociologists, anthropologists, historians and scholars in the humanities affirm some version of this constructionism. Biology is not the issue, they say. Power is -- the power to construct a world that welcomes erotic diversity.

"Common Sense" Argument

A third group of gay supporters stakes out a "common-sense" middle position - half biological determinism, half social conditioning. Homosexual and heterosexual desires, they assert, are determined by both biological and social factors. It's naive, they claim, to think otherwise -- the old nature versus nurture debate is an obsolete oversimplification.

This middle position appeals to many people, but it has its critics. Anthropologist Carole S. Vance calls it "the mushy middle model." To switch gears for a minute, consider its application to race, and to the recent "slip" by the president of Rutgers University. Referring to college entrance tests, Francis Lawrence called African Americans a "population that doesn't have that genetic hereditary background to have a higher average."

The mushy middle response to this biological determinist assertion is that those test results are due to social conditioning and genes. But genetics has nothing to do with it. It's social conditions that put African Americans at a disadvantage when taking college boards. The mushy middle model does not provide an adequate retort to right-wing gay bashing, either; it simply plops the old biological determinism into a new sociobiological stew. And in any guise, biological determinism is pernicious. It blames the victim, diverting our eyes from our unequal-opportunity society.

Liberal Argument

A fourth group of gay supporters formulates a liberal response to right-wing anti-homosexuality. These liberals assert the irrelevance of biological determinism and constructionism to the struggle for gay and lesbian civil rights. Whatever the origins of homosexuals' desires, acts and identities, these liberals affirm, gays and lesbians deserve the same constitutional rights and protections as heterosexuals -- or Catholics or Marxists. The U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights do not apply only to those marked socially by certain biological features. Americans defined on the basis of their religious views or political beliefs are also explicitly protected. And few imagine that religion and politics are biologically determined.

I count myself squarely in the social constructionist camp, but even the liberal reponse is a lot more robust than the pitiful plea by biological determinists that homosexuals deserve full social equality because they "can't help it." The "gay can't help it" plea may seem expedient as an immediate rejoinder to right-wing homophobia, but it concedes the bigots' nasty proposition that something's fundamentally wrong with homosexuals, something basically right with heterosexuals.

Today, the fight against biological determinism takes many forms. The critical response to Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray's "The Bell Curve" publicized the insidious way biological determinism "naturalizes" social hierarchies of class and race. Thanks to modern feminists, we're no longer so quick to assume that "anatomy is destiny."

But when it comes to "sexual orientation," biological determinism is still widely embraced, even though biology can never account for the vast historical diversity of human desires, their myriad social forms, or the changing ways they're thought about and named.

Jonathan Ned Katz, Heterosexuality (White pencil on acid-free paper.)

Heterosexuals as "abnormal"

Take heterosexuality, for example. The earliest known use of the word "heterosexual" in the United States occurred just over a hundred years ago, in May, 1892, when it was linked to one of several "abnormal manifestations of the sexual appetite" in a medical journal article on "Sexual Perversion." "Heterosexuals" were identified as persons attracted "to both sexes" and "to abnormal methods of gratification."

The words heterosexual and homosexual: and the concepts were not in use in the United States before 1892. Sexuality wasn't organized on a different-sex/same-sex basis. The norm wasn't "heterosexual." It was reproductive. So any sex that wasn't procreative was perverted. This included non-reproductive intercourse between men and women. By this procreative standard, heterosexuals and homosexuals stood together in the pantheon of sexual perverts.

It wasn't until 1923 that Merriam-Webster's dictionary for the first time included "heteorseuxal," still defined as "Morbid sexual passion for one of the opposiute sex." Only in 1934 did "heterosexuality" appear in Webster's as "normal sexuality."

The issue here is not just words. This lexicographical history points to the changing social organization of eroticism and gender. It destabilizes the biological model of heterosexuality and homosexuality as universal givens.

Those who oppose biological determinism are not against biology. And we're certainly not against the body. The value of our bodies and our pleasures is, in fact, especially important to affirm in a society still struggling to overcome its anti-sexual, body-hating past. The value of biology is important to affirm at a time when our government is threatening to cut funds for research on the HIV virus and for the treatment of those infected.

The value of same-sex love and lust, however, will never be affirmed by reference to biological fact. As much as we ever learn about the physiological grounding of desire, that knowledge will never convince hate-mongers or even some homosexuals that gay is just as good as straight. Luckily, homosexual feelings, like heterosexual emotions, need no backup from biology to justify themselves. The pleasures of the flesh must be affirmed by political action. The sexualities of the future will be shaped by all of us in struggle.