Alan Turing at 100

One of the most important people in the modern history was a gay man. He was the first person to conceptualize the “thinking machine” we now call a computer, and he was the single person most responsible for saving the world from the Nazis. Yet the story ends tragically.

In 1936, at twenty four, Alan Turing announced that, “It is possible to invent a single machine which can be used to compute any computable sequence.” Taking advantage of Turing’s brilliance, the Allies made him a key member of the secret code cracking team at Bletchley Park where he and his thinking machines cracked the Nazi Enigma code. From that point on the Allies could intercept commands sent to German U-boats in real time, turning the course of the war. Sir Harry Hinsley, a veteran of the Bletchley Park team and the official historian of British Intelligence in World War II said that Turing’s work shortened the war “by not less than two years and probably by four years.”

Sadly, saving the world was not enough to prove a gay life acceptable in his day. Turing was convicted by a court for being a homosexual in 1952, a felony. Publicly humiliated and chemically castrated, his career and life destroyed, he committed suicide in 1954 at the age of 41.

The brilliance of Alan Turing remains current through the Turing Test, a challenge he developed to determine if machines can think. While it is dauntingly difficult to define thinking, Turning’s test proposed a profoundly human interaction. An interrogator asks questions of two unseen subjects using a keyboard. One of the subjects is human and the other a computer. The test is passed if the interrogator cannot tell which is subject is the machine. No computer has yet passed the Turing Test.

Now that we can see gay people as human beings, the world is seeing Turing for the genius he truly was. In 2000, Alan Turing was named one of the 100 most important people of the 20th Century by Time Magazine. In 2009 the British Prime Minister offered an official governmental apology to Alan Turing noting, “We’re sorry, you deserved so much better.” The science journal Nature recently devoted an entire issue to Turing, and there is a petition currently circulating to put Turing on the UK ten-pound note.

Turing said that when we build intelligent machines we are not creating souls, but rather building the mansions for the souls God creates. While touring Google a few years ago, science historian George Dyson noted:

I walked around and saw what they were doing and realized they were building a very large distributed AI, much as Turing had predicted. And I thought, my God, this is not Turing’s mansion — this is Turing’s cathedral. Cathedrals were built over hundreds of years by thousands of nameless people, each one carving a little corner somewhere or adding one little stone. That’s how I feel about the whole computational universe. Everybody is putting these small stones in place, incrementally creating this cathedral that no one could even imagine doing on their own.

Turing would be 100 this year.

Alan Turing, gay

Homosexuality And Hair Swirls

One of the most publicized indications of homosexuality written on the body turned out to be false, or at least ambiguous. Luckily science updates itself when the facts change.

Widely reported, the initial study found that gay men’s hair tends to swirl around the crown of their head one way, while straight men’s tends to swirl the other direction. Straight men won’t admit to swirling, but a glance at their crowns shows they do. The technical term is actually whorl, and researchers looked at gay and straight men’s whorls and noted their clockwise and counter-clockwise manifestations.

Subsequent studies have not validated the hair whorl findings, and scientists are not sure hair whorls are a valid feature to count. As one says after analyzing the situation:

It’s hard to determine which way the hair whorls in people with long or curly hair, and the data do not fit the simple genetic model perfectly. So you should not use hair whorl direction to demonstrate basic genetics.

He doesn’t even mention those of us who no longer swirl around our crowns. :-(

They both tell us the same about our sexuality. Not much.


Source:
This article is part of a series, Written on the Body, exploring the correlations between our body structures and sexual attraction.

Homosexuality And Brain Structures

I remember reading an article a long time ago by a female brain scientist who said nothing made her crazier in our modern discourse than the common assumption that male and female brains are physically the same.

Scientists used to believe that both gender’s brains identical, but closer study in rats and humans in the 1970s and 80s revealed that some parts of the brain are have different structures for different genders. Early research then looked for brain differences between gay and straight people.

That big news came from an announcement by Dr. Simon LeVay in 1991. Examining the hypothalamus from the brains of gay men who died of AIDS, and comparing them to the brains of deceased straight men, he found that gay men’s hypothalmus’ were half the size of straight men’s, a proportion more like that of women. Although this early study was subsequently questioned, Dr. LeVay’s work opened up the study of the physiology and genetics of gay people.

One of the gendered differences is in brain symmetry. Straight women’s brains are symmetrical, with both hemispheres of equal size, while straight men are asymmetrical, with a larger right hemisphere. Swedish researchers used MRIs to compare brain hemispheres of straight and gay men and women. They found that the physical structures of gay men’s brains were more like heterosexual women’s, and lesbians brains were more like those of straight men.

Beyond brain symmetry, these researchers did positron emission tomography (PET) scans to measure blood flow to the amygdala of each hemisphere. Straight men and gay women had more nerve connections in the right side of the amygdala, while straight women gay men had more neural connections in the left amygdala. The amygdala is the center of emotional learning and memory consolidation, affecting behavior as part of our “flight, flight, or mate” response (although it is easier to remembered with three Fs, ahem). As a British scientist told the BBC:

In other words, the brain network which determines what sexual orientation actually “orients” towards is similar between gay men and straight women, and between gay women and straight men.

This Swedish study stands out for another reason. Because money for gay research is usually blocked by social conservatives, those who do gay research are often gay themselves, opening the results to charges of bias. This Swedish study was not looking for any findings on gay people. They were studying strokes, asked participants if they were gay or straight as part of the intake process, and found these results in the subsequent data.

Summary:

  • Gay Men: Tend towards symmetrical brains and increased amygdala neural connections on the left side resembling straight female brain structures, indicating basic other-gender similarities from birth.
  • Lesbians: Tend towards asymmetrical brains and increased amygdala neural connections on the right side resembling straight male brain structures, indicating basic other-gender similarities from birth.

Sources:
  • Simon LeVay, PhD, et al., A Difference in Hypothalamic Structure Between Heterosexual and Homosexual Men, Science, June, 1991
  • Ivanka Savic-Berglund, MD, PhD, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, June 16, 2008

This article is part of a series, Written on the Body, exploring the correlations between our body structures and sexual attraction.

Homosexuality And Our Response To Sweat

While the last post used a sophisticated analysis of brain scans to understand our response to pheromones, this one is simpler. Volunteers sniffed samples of the underarm sweat of gay and straight men and women.

Some of the results were what we would expect. Men and women attracted to women responded positively to women’s sweat. Men and women attracted to men where attracted to straight men’s sweat. The big finding was in the participant’s reactions to gay men’s sweat. It got the strongest response: the strongest attraction from gay men, and the least attraction from others.

The study’s authors concluded that gay men produce unique odor components that heterosexual men, heterosexual women and lesbians do not, and that gay men perceive sweat odors differently as well. Some people theorize this is the root of homophobia… that there is something about gay men that is physically repellant to others. It would be interesting to find that homophobia arises from something as biological as our chemistry.

It is hard to imagine a more primal test of attraction than pit smelling. I know I’ve smelled pits that make me hot and bothered and others that make me cringe. Smell seems the essence of the magical “chemistry” we all seek in a partner, something deep in our own chemistry and wiring determines our response.

And as the study’s author said, “It’s hard to see how a simple choice to be gay or lesbian would influence the production of body odor.”

Summary:

  • Gay Men: Attracted to male sweat indicating a biological root to attraction. May produce an odor repellant to those who are not gay men, a result of unknown origin but implicating a biological root to gay male-focused homophobia.
  • Lesbians: Attracted to female sweat indicating a biological root to attraction.

Source:
  • Charles J. Wysocki et al, Preference for Human Body Odors Is Influenced by Gender and Sexual Orientation, Psychological Science, September 2005; vol. 16, 9: pp. 694-701

This article is part of a series, Written on the Body, exploring the correlations between our body structures and sexual attraction.

Homosexuality And Our Response To Pheromones

Smells are an incredibly powerful part of attraction, and repulsion, to different people. What turns you on and what repulses you are not a choice, its a much more visceral reaction than that.

To test our response to different smells researchers scanned participant’s brains while they sniffed various odors, including the androgen-like pheromones of males (AND) and estrogen-like pheromones of females (EST). Their responses to the sex hormones were predictable: lesbians and straight men were attracted to the scents of women and irritated by male pheromones, and gay men and straight women were attracted to the scents of men and irritated by female pheromones.

AND EST
Straight men Irritation Sexual response
Gay men Sexual response Irritation
Straight women Sexual response Irritation
Lesbians Irritation Sexual response

All test subjects were similar in age and educational levels, healthy, unmedicated, right handed, HIV negative, and had a similar reaction to ordinary odors like lavender and cedar.

This study tells us that sexual attraction comes from a deeply physiological response. Watching the brain scans, researchers noted that smells that generated a sexual response were similar in both location and degree of activation in each of the attraction pairs.

We do not know why we are attracted to the pheromones we are attracted to, but we do know it is a fundamental body function determined through genes or womb environment early in fetal development.

Summary:

  • Gay Men: Attracted to male pheromones, irritated by female pheromones, indicating prenatal wiring for sexual attraction to men.
  • Lesbians: Attracted to female pheromones, irritated by male pheromones, indicating prenatal wiring for sexual attraction to women.

Sources:
  • Ivanka Savic-Berglund, MD, PhD, Brain Response To Putative Pheromones in Lesbian Women, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, May 8, 2006
  • Ivanka Savic-Berglund, MD, PhD, et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, May 2005

This article is part of a series, Written on the Body, exploring the correlations between our body structures and sexual attraction.

Homosexuality And Penis Size

A fresco from Pompeii depicts Priapus, one of the fertility gods, weighing his penis against a bag of gold.

Penis size is the source of many jokes in our culture, but it is also an indicator of prenatal hormone levels.

Much of the available evidence we have about gay male bodies demonstrates that gay men may have less exposure to testosterone in the womb than straight men, but one contrary piece of evidence comes from measuring penis size. More testosterone means a larger penis, and gay men’s penises are larger than straight men’s.

The Kinsey Institute collected data on the penises of over 5,000 men, including over 900 gay men, between 1938 and 1963. Using five different measures of length and circumference, the results showed that gay men had larger penises than straight men on all five measures.

OK, I know you want to know, so here it is: Straight men averaged 5.99 inches long, while Gay men averaged 6.32 inches. And while straight male chubbiness measured 4.80 inches, gay men’s circumference averaged 4.95 inches. So gay men are over 5% longer and 4% thicker than straight men. So much for gay men being “less man” than others. I guess homophobes will now have to mock the sissies for their longer, fatter cocks.

Summary:

  • Gay Men: Longer, thicker penises indicate increased prenatal exposure to male hormones.
  • Lesbians: Not applicable

Source:

  • Anthony Bogaert, PhD, The Relation Between Sexual Orientation and Penile Size, Archives of Sexual Behavior, June, 1999

This article is part of a series, Written on the Body, exploring the correlations between our body structures and sexual attraction.

Homosexuality And Bone Lengths In Arms, Legs, and Hands

Monkeys climb trees.

At 6’4”, I obviously have long bones, but we all vary in our body’s proportions, including how the length of our arm, leg, and hand bones relate to our overall stature.

People attracted to men (hetero women and gay men) tend to have less long bone growth in their arms, legs and hands, than people attracted to women (hetero men and lesbians).

The theory is that those with longer arm, leg, and hand bones had more exposure to androgens in the womb, and those with shorter bones had less.

Summary:

  • Gay Men: Shorter leg, arm, and hand bones in proportion to height indicates lower exposure to male hormones in the womb.
  • Lesbians: Longer leg, arm, and hand bones in proportion to height indicates higher exposure to male hormones in the womb.

Sources:
  • Martin, J. T. and D. H. Nguyen. 2004. Anthropometric analysis of homosexuals and heterosexuals: implications for early hormone exposure, Hormones and Behavior 45: 31-39

This article is part of a series, Written on the Body, exploring the correlations between our body structures and sexual attraction.

Homosexuality And Eye Blink Reactions

When startled, I blink. So does everyone else. This blink response is hard-wired in our body. We cannot consciously alter it.

Researchers into the eye blink response startle their subjects with a loud noise, then rate the response on the prepulse inhibition (PPI) scale. These hard-wired responses give us a view into the limbic system or “the emotional brain” that helps control emotion, behavior, long-term memory, and smell. The limbic system is also highly interconnected with the brain’s pleasure center meaning it plays an important part in sexual arousal and the high of some recreational drugs. The limbic system also processes memory, tagging certain experiences as having special significance.

Lesbians have a strong blink response, closer to the response of straight men. Gay men’s responses are weaker than straight men’s, but not so dramatically.

One of the study’s author explained why this is important:

The startle response is pre-conscious and cannot be learned. It is mediated by an ancient region of the brain called the limbic system which also controls sexual behavior. This is very strong evidence that female sexual orientation at least may be ‘hard-wired’ in this region.

Summary:

  • Lesbians: Strong blink response resembling straight men’s indicates prenatal hard-wiring of the limbic system.
  • Gay Men: Weaker blink response than straight men, but the differentiation is minor.

Sources:
  • Qazi Rahman, PhD, et al., Behavioral Neuroscience, Oct. 2003

This article is part of a series, Written on the Body, exploring the correlations between our body structures and sexual attraction.

Homosexuality And Inner Ear Clicks

We think of our ears picking up sounds, but don’t consider that inner ear makes sounds too. As the tiny bones of the inner ear move, they give off gives off weak clicking sounds called “otoacoustic emissions.” Listening to inner ear clicks offers scientists a non-invasive way to study of prenatal hormones on the body.

As one of the most delicate mechanisms of the body, the inner ear is highly vulnerable to womb conditions. In general, men don’t hear sounds as well as women, an effect created by prenatal exposure to male hormones that affects the cochlea. Straight women’s cochleas are three times more sensitive than men’s. Maybe that explains all those men who can sleep through the baby fussing in the night?

Lesbian and bisexual women’s inner ears emitted less frequent and weaker sounds than heterosexual women’s. Lesbian’s inner ears are one third as sensitive as straight women’s, meaning their inner ear structures are closer to men’s. The study’s author notes that for lesbians, “Their auditory centers have been masculinized, and the presumption is that so have the sites in the brain that direct sexual preference.” Knowing that lesbians tend to have masculinized inner ears, we can deduce that other parts of their bodies and brains must be affected as well.

This effect was not found in gay men, as we have the same otoacoustic emmisions as straight men.

Summary:

  • Lesbians: Weaker otoacoustic emissions indicates higher prenatal exposure to male hormones.
  • Gay Men: No differentiation observed.

Sources:
  • Dennis McFadden, PhD, et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Mar. 1998

This article is part of a series, Written on the Body, exploring the correlations between our body structures and sexual attraction.

Homosexuality And Right Or Left Handedness

Queer handedness

Like most people, I’m right handed, while gay people are somewhat more likely to be left handed than straight people.

Handedness is interesting because we can see patterns in people, but don’t know what makes me right handed and some other person left handed (and we won’t even get into the ambidextrous). Current theories on handedness include genetics, birth stress, ultrasound, and prenatal testosterone. We also know body asymmetry correlates with gendered cognition, so we surmise there may be a relationship between cognition and handedness.

The other confusing thing is that varying studies have come up with conflicting results. One study only found the effect in gay women, while another only found it in gay men. Adding further confusion, the more older brothers a boy has, the more likely he is to be gay, but this is only true for right-handed males. Left-handed males are only more likely to be gay if they have no older brothers. Right-handed males without older brothers, and left-handed males with older brothers, were homosexual at about the same rate.

Clearly something is going on here, but more study is figure out exactly what!

Summary:

  • Gay Men: Tend towards left-handedness. No older brother effect for right-handed gay men.
  • Lesbians: Tend towards left-handedness.

Sources:

  • Lalumière ML, Blanchard R, Zucker KJ., Sexual orientation and handedness in men and women: a meta-analysis. Psychol Bull. 2000 Jul;126(4):575-92. A meta-analysis of 20 previous studies showing gay people are somewhat more left handed than straight people.
  • Mustanski, B. S., Bailey, J. M., & Kaspar, S. (2002). Dermatoglyphics, handedness, sex, and sexual orientation. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 31, 113–122. Found that homosexual women to be more left handed that straight women, but did not find the same effect in heterosexual and homosexual men.
  • Lippa, R. A. (2003). Handedness, sexual orientation, and gender-related personality traits in men and women. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 32 103–114. Found homosexual men more left handed than heterosexual men, but did not find the same effect in women.
  • Blanchard, R., Cantor, J. M., Bogaert, A. F., Breedlove, S. M., & Ellis, L. (2006). Interaction of fraternal birth order and handedness in the development of male homosexuality. Hormones and Behavior, 49, 405–414. Found the older brother effect in handedness.

This article is part of a series, Written on the Body, exploring the correlations between our body structures and sexual attraction.

Homosexuality And Fingertip Swirls

You already know that every individual has a unique fingerprint, but did you know these fingertip swirls are usually asymmetrical? Most of us have more fingertip ridges on our right hands than our left.

Gay people are different. We tend to have higher left hand ridge counts. 30% of us have more fingertip ridges on our left, whereas only 14% of straight people have more on their left hands.

Fingertip swirles seem an odd thing to count, but they tell us something important. Fingertip patterns are highly inheritable, with genetics accounting for 90%–95% of the variation. Our fingerprint swirls are also fully developed by the 4th month of pregnancy, meaning this trait is not affected by other factors in birth, childhood, or later in life.

Body asymmetry is important because it correlates with the ability to perform certain cognitive tasks. Those with higher right hand counts excelled at tasks where men typically excel, and those with higher left hand counts excelled at tasks where women typically excel. Knowing the link between asymmetry and cognitive functioning we learn that fingertip swirl counts tells us there are gender or sexual-orientation related cognitive patterns based in our DNA, factors determined at the moment of conception.

Summary:

  • Gay Men: Tend towards higher fingerprint ridge counts on the left hand indicating pre-natal differentiation.
  • Lesbians: Same effect as gay men.

Source:

  • J.A.Y. Hall and D. Kimura, Dermatoglyphic asymmetry: Relation to sex, handedness and cognitive pattern, (1994) Behavioral Neuroscience, 108, 1203-1206

This article is part of a series, Written on the Body, exploring the correlations between our body structures and sexual attraction.

Homosexuality And Finger Length

Preston left, Kamran right.

If I hold out my hand, I can see that my ring finger and my index finger are about the same length. That may be a sign of my body’s homosexuality. In general, men tend to have longer ring fingers than index fingers, while women’s index fingers tend to be the same size or slightly shorter than their ring fingers.

While finger length sounds like a random data point, it isn’t. The length of our fingers is determined by the amount of testosterone we receive in the womb. Apparently I had less, resulting in feminized finger lengths, while Kamran had the more typical male amount. This jibes with the concept these are statistical probabilities or tendencies, not absolutes.

Lesbians tend towards men’s finger lengths, a sign of a masculinized body.

Strangely, none of this applies to gay men with more than one older brother. As the oldest of five kids, this doesn’t apply to me.

I really enjoy how we learned all this. With serious funding of gay people blocked, researchers went out into public street fairs, asked participants to complete a questionnaire about their sexuality, and then photocopied their hands for measurement later. The triumph of the copying machine as scientific research tool.

Summary:

  • Gay men: Finger length tends towards female patterns, indicating lower testosterone exposure in the womb. The pattern is not seen in gay men with more than one older brother.
  • Lesbians: Finger lengths tend towards male patterns, indicating higher testosterone exposure in the womb.

Source:

  • S. Marc Breedlove et al, Finger-length ratios and sexual orientation, (2000) Nature, 404, 455 – 456

This article is part of a series, Written on the Body, exploring the correlations between our body structures and sexual attraction.

Written On The Body

Looking puzzled at about 12 years old

I hated my body growing up. I was pear shaped, depressed, didn’t enjoy sports, and was lost in the experience of an alternative sexuality blooming in my awkward teenage body. (That story here.) As an adult things got better in my zesty 20s, but then cancers, a burst appendix, and a list of systemic health issues developed, many linked to the trauma of my upbringing. Life has forced me to learn more about the mind-body connection than I wanted to know.

I bring all that up because I am gay through some amalgam of body and soul. How much of my sexuality is from a “gay spirit” and how much was a biological destiny written on my bones, I don’t know, or really care. I am what I am, regardless of how I got here.

That said, it is still pretty fascinating to see the correlations between gay bodies and sexual attraction. Keeping it simple, we can look at what is physically different about gay bodies, and consider why these differences occur. The current list of variations we’ve discovered includes:

For a list of all articles on gay bodies click here.

Homosexuality And The Older Brother Effect

Some of my ancestors floating in the Great Salt Lake around 1926. The guy in the back was a family friend. People use to take the train out to the Great Salt Lake for a day at the Saltair resort, therefore the matching swimsuits. No implication of anyones sexuality implied, I just enjoyed the photo of brothers.

As the oldest child this doesn’t apply to me, but the more older brothers a boy has, the higher the chance a boy will be gay. Younger brothers and sisters of any age have no correlation.

We don’t know why, but there’s an interesting theory. When a mother has a series of boys, and becomes pregnant with another male, her body may have an immune system response that affects fetal development, including sexual differentiation of the brain. This could be a reaction of her female body reacting to a series of male embryos or it could be an evolutionary adaptation to ensure there is a feminized boy in the family if girls fail to appear.

A later study validated the results, and added the calculation that each older brother increases the chances the next son is homosexual by 33%. At an average rate of homosexual orientation of 4%, it would take 9-10 older brothers to reach a 50-50 chance of being gay.

Summary:

  • Gay Men: The more older brothers, the more likely a son is gay.
  • Lesbians: No sibling effect observed.

Sources:
  • R. Blanchard and A.F. Bogaert, Proportion of homosexual men who owe their sexual orientation to fraternal birth order: an estimate based on two national probability samples, Am. J. Hum. Biol. 16 (2004), pp. 151–157.
  • R. Blanchard, Quantitative and theoretical analyses of the relation between older brothers and homosexuality in men, J. Theor. Biol. 230 (2004), pp. 173–187.

The Tao Of The 1%

From the Tao Te Ching 2,500 years ago, a reminder of the follies of materialism.

53. Insight

If the mind’s modest
I walk the great way.
Arrogance
is all I fear.

The great way is low and plain,
but people like shortcuts over the mountains.

The palace is full of splendor
and the fields are full of weeds
and the granaries are full of nothing.

People wearing ornaments and fancy clothes,
carrying weapons,
drinking and eating a lot,
having a lot of things, a lot of money;
shameless thieves.
Surely their way
isn’t the way.

From The Book of the Way and the Power of the Way, by Lao Tzu, from Ursula Le Guin’s beautiful translation.

Puts it all into perspective, doesn’t it.

11 Horrifying Cures For Homosexuality

From the Huffington Post, a list of crazy ways people have tried to get the homo out of the homosexuals.

Their list includes:

  • Cocaine
  • Organ transplants
  • Cold showers
  • Bicycling
  • Nausea drugs
  • Fetal intervention
  • Hypnosis
  • Prostitution
  • Electrocution

As a graduate of the “strap him in a chair and show him pornography while electro-shocking him” cure favored by the Mormons, this is a topic close to home for me. A foul business, that.

The Gay Origins of the High Five

The High Five is oh-so gay, and not in the disparaging teenage sense of the word. The high five is rightly associated with sports, and with one of the earliest out gay athletes, baseball player Glenn Burke.

On October 2, 1977, Burke was a charismatic and popular player for the Los Angeles Dodgers, where a crowded stadium watched… As ESPN tells it:

It was the last day of the regular season, and Dodgers leftfielder Dusty Baker had just gone deep off the Astros’ J.R. Richard. It was Baker’s 30th home run, making the Dodgers the first team in history to have four sluggers — Baker, Ron Cey, Steve Garvey and Reggie Smith — with at least 30 homers each. It was a wild, triumphant moment and a good omen as the Dodgers headed to the playoffs. Burke, waiting on deck, thrust his hand enthusiastically over his head to greet his friend at the plate. Baker, not knowing what to do, smacked it. “His hand was up in the air, and he was arching way back,” says Baker, now 62 and managing the Reds. “So I reached up and hit his hand. It seemed like the thing to do.”

Burke then stepped up and launched his first major league home run. And as he returned to the dugout, Baker high-fived him. From there, the story goes, the high five went ricocheting around the world. (According to Dodgers team historian Mark Langill, the game was not televised, and no footage survives.)

Burke was the hero of the Dodgers, and their charismatic soul, but he also had a relationship of unspecified intimacy with Tommy Lasorda’s embarrassment of an effeminate son. The Dodger’s traded Burke to the Oakland A’s in a weak trade designed mostly to get rid of him.

Burke retired in 1980, after some frustrating years. He then became a fixture in the Castro, known for sitting on whatever car was in front of the Pendulum bar giving high fives…a great image.

The full story from ESPN and another article in the Los Angeles Times.

Science Adjusts While Faith Denies

The Wall Street Journal‘s opinion page gives us the latest example of why the Science versus Religion debate is so dumb. In an editorial on climate change, author Robert Bryce laments:

Last month, scientists at CERN, the prestigious high-energy physics lab in Switzerland, reported that neutrinos might—repeat, might—travel faster than the speed of light. If serious scientists can question Einstein’s theory of relativity, then there must be room for debate about the workings and complexities of the Earth’s atmosphere.

If science can discover new truths that supersede old ones, how can we have faith in science?

Um, because science it isn’t a belief system. Science is the process of finding facts, which necessarily includes openness to new information. Its about trusting the process over dogma. (Sadly, some of the New Atheists get confused on this too, declaring science to be some kind of new Truth. It’s not.)

Tim Minchin nailed the problem between the two approaches:

Science adjusts its beliefs based on what’s observed.

Faith is the denial of observation so that Belief can be preserved.

The WSJ believes, as an article of faith, that climate change cannot be real, so all contradictory observations must be denied. This kind of thinking represents a radical failure of our education system; a failure to teach what science is, and what it isn’t.

On climate change I agree with the formulations of former Presidential candidate John Huntsman:

All I know is 90 percent of the scientists say climate change is occurring. If 90 percent of the oncological community said something was causing cancer we’d listen to them.

That’s trusting the process of discovery over dogma.

The LGBTQQIAAP (or LGBTTIQQ2SA) Community, and Why

When I was first out, in the early 1980s, we called ourselves the Gay community, but over time it became increasingly obvious that when people heard the word gay they only thought of gay men, so to give women their due Lesbians were separated out, and the Bi people in the middle included, so we the Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual community. Then it became clear that GLB did not really include the interrelated issues of gender, and so a T was added for Transexual, and we became the LGBT community.

Of course four letters are not enough to account for all of the variations in human sexuality and gender, so in the spirit of acknowledging everyone, we kept adding letters, to the point it got a bit ridiculous. I think I laughed out loud the first time I saw LGBTQQIAAP:

  • L: Lesbian. Women attracted to women.
  • G: Gay. Men attracted to men.
  • B: Bisexual. People attracted to both sexes.
  • T: Transgender. People whose interior sense of gender is different than their exterior physical sexuality, whether male to female (MTF) or female to male (FTM).
  • Q: Queer. People who don’t want to label themselves by their sex acts but do want to claim being different, eccentric, and fabulous. Reclaimed from an old hate term, Queer can also be highly offensive, depending on usage.
  • Q: Questioning. People still working out who they are attracted to, often applicable to the young.
  • I: Intersex. People born into bodies that are not definitiviely male or female, including those born with ambiguous genitalia, bits of both male and female plumbing, or genetics beyond the standard XX and XY.
  • A: Asexual. People who are affectional but aren’t that into sex.
  • A: Allies. Straight people who support the LGBTQ+ community.
  • P: Pansexual. People attracted to others more by individual personality, differing from bisexuality in that they ignore the gender binary altogether.

And of course that is not all. Another of my personal favorites comes from Canada where they add North American respect for an indigenous non-European category, making it LGBTQQIAAP2S, or some variant thereof:

  • 2S: Two Spirit. The traditional gender variation in First People communities who often served as the community’s visionaries and healers.

And for those who think this all sounds trivial, India’s Supreme Court recently recognized the legal status of traditional Hijras, people born male or intersex but live as women or in-between genders. So voters registering in the world’s largest democracy now have gender checkboxes that include M, F, and O, for Male, Female, and Other.

At some point all these letters add up to acronyms so long no one can say them, and they become too long to even fit on a tshirt! But more importantly, using labels right can be tough. On the one hand, they are incredibly useful – think American, athletic, Muslim, grandmother, plumber, and shy – all useful signposts for navigating the social sphere and showing respect, or disrespect, for other people. Yet they can also be limiting or misdirect people from the truth. Grandmother may sound like a sweet label, but not all grandmothers are sweet. Meanwhile Muslim may mean terrorist in some people’s ears, but there are more than a billion and a half people on the planet who strongly disagree. I was raised Mormon and I am gay, but the words gay and ex-Mormon are only a hint of my larger story, because like everyone else I am so much more than my labels.

Most people fit in the middle of the demographic bell curves, by definition. It must be a wonderful thing to feel like you are “normal,” although I have met few people, straight or gay, who admit to feeling completely normal on the inside. I think we all feel a little special, sometimes for better, and sometimes for worse. But if this magical state of normal does exist, I am all for it. My existence outside the norms is not an attack on anyone else’s typicality.

The truth is am both “normal” and atypical. In many ways I am a pretty typical white American male, for example, and yet I am a good bit taller than average, and of course I am gay. None of these qualities should disqualify me from equal respect as a human being, they are just variations in the size, shape, and nature of my humanity.

The gay/LGBT/LGBTQQIAAP+2S community, then, is a group of people whose sexuality and sense of gender lie outside the center of the bell curve. We are a club inclusive of outsiders, where anyone who feels they belong is welcome. At the same time we often divide up into smaller sub-groups, as it can be empowering to be with others like ourselves. That’s why people have church picnics after all, as it can be great to hang out with your own community, even if you have friends, family, co-workers, and others in your community outside of the church. Lesbians, drag queens, and queer androgynous kids all feel the same way, as it can be joyful to experience communion and solidarity with fellow travelers, even as they maintain their place in the larger social world.

The gay community is now at the paradoxical crossroads of the problem of labels. We are increasingly hyper-specializing into finely grained sub-groups, while at the same time we are letting go of those groupings and identities and integrating into the mainstream. A young gay person can now choose an intricately defined self-identity and live within a tightly proscribed tribe of like-minded friends, or they can choose a traditional path of marriage and family little different from their straight peers. For me all of this represents success, as I want people to be who they are and puzzle out their path through life with the support of healthy community, something I wish for everyone – straight, gay, or none of the above.

Let us enjoy our labels and groupings: Texan, Presbyterian, voluptuous, ripped, Eagle Scout, volleyball player, stubborn, brown, pedestrian, Chinese, fundamentalist, Hare Krishna, and female. And at the same time let us see beyond the labels and respect each individual for who they are, far beyond the limitations of language.

And as for sexuality, at our core maybe we are all just humansexuals, doing the things that humans do in all the different ways that humans do it, and maybe that too is something worth celebrating.

Be The Change

I hear friends complain about the world, yet often they are people who perpetuate the very thing they lament.

Sometimes we see what we believe. I am an optimist and a philanthrope. I genuinely like most of the people I meet. Because of that, I live in a breathtakingly benign world. I am treated exceptionally well wherever I go, and the exceptions stand out strongly, as they are so rare and unexpected. (Of course being tall, white, and male is all part of the privilege I live with too. I do hope some of the world I generate around me is because of my heart, as well.)

We often forget our power to shift the world. Part of this is putting on different, rosier, goggles, and part of this is being the change we want to see in the world, as Ghandi put it. Or as the Greek philosopher Plutarch said:

What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.

Most recently, we’ve watched the gay rights movement fight for equality on the national stage. Yet it isn’t only national laws that create change, but also in the smaller increments of our individual lives.

I grew up with Mormons who idolized family values, yet excommunicated their gay children. This form of “morality” is replicated across the Christian world, with communities rejecting the very members who bridge and crossover community divisions, while they lament that things fall apart.

Contrast that with the wisdom of Eleanor Roosevelt, who said:

Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home – so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm, or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.

The Middle Way in a Divided World

William Butler Yeats wrote in The Second Coming:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand

The center is not holding. The spining vortex of life, politics, morality, and social connections are ripping us apart. We need a construct to get us through these divisive times. We need a middle path.

The Buddha was most powerful teacher of a Middle Way. As explained by Adyashanti, one of my favorite teachers, the Middle Way is not a muddled bland beige that doesn’t take a stand. The Middle Way is even simpler than that. The Middle Way is neither grasping nor rejecting what life offers.

As Adyashanti put it in his book Emptiness Dancing:

The Middle Way has nothing to do with the notion of being halfway between two opposites. The Middle Way is when spirit and matter are in harmony–when the inherent oneness is realized. Spirit and matter are not two different things, they are two aspects of the One.

That’s it. Deal with life as it comes, as it actually is, all of it.

Like Christ’s “love thy neighbor,” the Middle way is one of those profound teachings we can spend our lives studying without full comprehension, but as the economy crumbles and our political systems grind into disfunction, we need a way to understand the world that sees it as it really is.

The Buddha may have been inspired by an ancient song quoted in a recent PBS documentary:

Fair goes the dancing when the Sitar is tuned.
Tune us the Sitar neither high nor low,

And we will dance away the hearts of men.

But the string too tight breaks, and the music dies.
The string too slack has no sound, and the music dies.

There is a middle way.

Tune us the Sitar neither low nor high.

And we will dance away the hearts of men.

Walking the widening gyre at Point Reyes. Tule Elk bottom right. (photo by Kamran Akhavan)

Steve Jobs on Life

From his Commencement Address at Stanford University in 2005:

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

The whole speech is well worth your time:

My own feelings for Steve Jobs were best captured by a Facebook friend in Australia, Preston de Guise, who wrote this morning:

I remember reading once (I can’t find the exact quote), during the height of the Microsoft/Apple ‘wars’, Jobs was always the more dangerous compared to Gates. The person didn’t mean it as a negative towards Jobs, but as a statement towards business-as-usual/status quo beliefs. Paraphrasing, it was said:

Gates is easier to understand. He just wants to own the world.

Jobs wants to change it.

And as a reminder of how powerful that difference was, while the Mormons where fighting against our right to be treated as equal with other humans, Apple made an announcement:

Apple is publicly opposing Proposition 8 and making a donation of $100,000 to the No on 8 campaign. Apple was among the first California companies to offer equal rights and benefits to our employees’ same-sex partners, and we strongly believe that a person’s fundamental rights — including the right to marry — should not be affected by their sexual orientation. Apple views this as a civil rights issue, rather than just a political issue, and is therefore speaking out publicly against Proposition 8.

Rest in peace, Steve.

And thank you. You really did think differently.

How Bisexual Calamari Reproduce

One of the weird things about studying the bi- and homo-sexuality of animals is realizing how much I don’t know about their hetero-sexual practices. Take squid for example. How do squid have sex?

It turns out male squid who live in the deep dark only occasionally swim past each other, and when they detect another hot little squiddy number cruising past…

…the male ejaculates a packet of sperm at the mating partner, and the packet turns inside out, essentially shooting the sperm contained in a membrane into the flesh of the partner, where they stay embedded until the female (if the shooter has been lucky) is ready to fertilize its eggs. (NYT)

Scientists in the Monterrey Bay Aquarium reviewed years of undersea videos of squid behavior and found 39 images where they could tell the sex of squid, 19 females and 20 males. Of these, 9 males and 10 females had embedded sperm. So what we learn is: squids shoot their sperm at all passing squid, male or female.

The scientific paper announcing these results, “A shot in the dark: same-sex sexual behavior in a deep-sea squid,” hints at a controversy within. Why does this happen? Scientists split on the motivation of same-sex sexuality in animals. Often, scientists assume that animals that have sex with the same-sex are just dumb, that squid, among others, cannot determine the sex of other squid. This explanation strains credulity and tears at the rationale for a procreative drive. Increasingly we understand that same-sex sexuality also serves a purpose, otherwise evolution would weed it out as wasteful misfires.

Why do male squid fire their sperm packets at other male squid? The question remains unanswered.

(FYI, calimari is just Italian for squid, but sounding more delicious, it is the more common name on restaurant menus, where you and I are most likely to run into it.)

When Your Befuddled Mom Thinks You Are Gay, And You Are Not

From a commenter on Gawker comes a cute story:

My mother was in a nursing home in Utah towards the end of her life and I was in Florida. I’m not gay, but my best friend since kindergarten is gay and we have lived together several different times over the years and we were doing so at the time of this story.

My sister called me out of the blue to tell me mom was telling everyone I was gay. My sister told her, “No, Mark and Doug aren’t boyfriends. Doug has a boyfriend.”

My mom teared-up and said, “Oh, no! Does Mark know?”

I’ve always loved my mom, but loved her just a bit more when I learned that she wasn’t really concerned about me being gay, but she was terribly upset that my supposed boyfriend was cheating on me.

Aw.

Channeling Freddie Mercury

Freddie Mercury in 1984 (photo by Thomas Steffan)

I remember the day I first heard Bohemian Rhapsody. I imagine it was 1975 when the album came out, and my friend Jeff had just bought the LP. A couple of us sat on his bed and listened as the ballad rock opera unfolded in our ears and my head exploded. I’ve loved Queen ever since.

I also have a hard time forgiving Freddie Mercury for coming out so late. He was famously gay in underground London, yet he only came out as gay 24 hours before his death. When he died on November 24, 1991, the announcement read: “Freddie Mercury died peacefully this evening at his home at 1 Logan Place, Kensington, London. His death was the result of pneumonia brought on by AIDS.” He could have helped change a lot of people’s understanding of AIDS and homosexuality if he had owned it a little earlier.

Then compassion reminds me that Mercury was born born Farrokh Bulsara to a Parsi (Zoroastrian-Indian) family in Zanzibar, growing in Tanzania and India. To go from that background to become one of the world’s biggest rockstars must have been a trip. And then to front the band Queen. Oh my.

This cascade of reminiscences was triggered by this charming cover of Somebody to Love by singer Marc Martel. Love the dirty ‘stache.

RIP, Freddie. We still love you.

[Update: August 2012]

Freddie Mercury rose again to rock the closing ceremonies of the London Olympics. It is stunning to see a gay man, long dead from AIDS, rousting a stadium full of people into singing out loud in joy. Powerful stuff.

Gay Marriage and Straight Divorces

  • State with gay marriage the longest: Massachusetts, at 10 years.
  • State with the lowest divorce rate: Massachusetts.
  • Bonus Round: States with the highest divorce rate: The Bible Belt.

So much for gay marriage destroying straight marriage.

Of course correlation is not causality, as it is education that correlates with longer marriages, while religiosity correlates with increased divorce. For a fuller discussion of why, click here.

A Suicide Poem

It may be that dandies have always suffered, as in this poem Richard Cory by Edwin Arlington Robinson first published in 1897:

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.

 

And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
”Good-morning,”
and he glittered when he walked.

 

And he was rich – yes, richer than a king –
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

 

So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.

Fortunately for us modern dandies, It Gets Better.
 

The Trouble With Heteronormativity

It’s an awkward word, heteronormativity, but I kind of like it. It describes something important. As Meg Barker of The Open University describes it, heteronormativity is:

…the idea that attraction and relationships between one man and one woman are the normal form of sexuality, that sex itself should involve a penis penetrating a vagina, and that any other forms of sexuality, or gender, are not normal, or at least not as normal as this.

I’ve only recently become aware of the fragility of this notion. I’ve always assumed, along with most people, that heterosexuality was the norm and everything else a variation. This presumption is increasingly challenged by realizations that everyone varies, and more than they think. It now appears that variation itself may be the norm.

While we know the harm of heteronormativity to non-heterosexuals, Barker goes a step farther in outlining the harms of this reductive thinking even to those who supposedly fit inside it.

These have been particularly brought home to me in my work as a sexual and relationship therapist. Almost every seemingly heteronormative client who I’ve seen in this capacity has expressed an overwhelming desire to be ‘normal’ and often a desperate fear that they might not be, which has frequently made their life a misery. Normality is often privileged over everything else including having pleasurable sex, positive relationships, and open communication.

The whole article is well worth a read.