Born This Way?

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Hi Matt Kielty, Hi Lula Miller, let me tell you what I've been thinking about.

Hey, I'm Lula Miller. This is Radiolab, and a little while ago, our reporter Matthew Kielty came to me with the story of an idea.

Yeah, the idea that you were born into a sexual orientation.

This is like the born this way idea, yeah.

Yeah, the born this way idea, okay, 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. And in these like, pretty public ways and ways that were happening on both the right and the left.

Seven, the Parents Rights and Education Bill.

The Don't say gay bill.

The bill prohibits classroom instruction.

Where you can't teach kids third grade and below anything about sexual orientation or gender identity, because the logic there is.

And so in Florida.

That by talking about sexuality and gender, or reading a book about it or whatever.

We will make sure that parents can send their kids to school.

That those things will, like, change a kid's identity.

To get an education, not an indoctrination, yeah.

And the foundation of the thing is just this idea that, like tiny little things in a kid's school environment, is going to change them radically. So that's going on on the right and on the left.

So there are many different theories of gender, and mine is just one.

In the past several years, you've had these ideas that 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.

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, someone who identifies as bi.

And I think for me, as a cis, straight man.

You had a sense you'd been told like, this is how it works in the science.

Yeah, like, the science is at the root of this. And I think I should underline that this is just like the born this way idea was the thing that millions and millions of people believed.

How do you know that?

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 half of all Americans believe that somebody is born that way, huh? And so I felt like I was witnessing all the ways in which this born.

Like, Okay, so why do I believe? where did this belief come from? why do I believe it? so certainly, and why do so many other people believe it?

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?

Yeah, no, I wonder that, like, I feel that I worry about that and I don't know.

Yeah, I think, you know, talking to a lot of different people, the point is like, 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.

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?

Well, okay. So I started trying to figure out where this idea actually came from, like the birth of it. Almost everything I came across, the research team's leader, everything I read.

Dean Hamer.

Dean Hamer.

Everybody I was talking to.

Dean's motivations are what Dean's motivations are.

That, rightly or wrongly, are you talking about the Dean Hamer Paper from 93? That's it. Yep, that's him.

I think that Dean Hamer is.

To the idea that you were born this way.

Kind of the culmination of a particular project, a several decades long process.

The origins of homosexuality.

Is that on? that's on? Hello?

Yeah.

Oh, shoot, can you hear me?

I can hear you very well. How is my mic?

Your mic sounds pretty good, good. So last summer 2022, I began interviewing Dean.

Things are wonderful here, as always.

He's 72, lives in Hawaii.

It's, you know, 85 degrees and blue skies, and the trade winds are blowing.

Well, that's lovely.

So, not too bad.

And actually, the first thing I ever came across of Dean was an oral history that he did and the thing that grabbed me about it.

Like?

Well, so I think like one of the things is kind of like one of his earliest memories.

So I was in.

Preschool this is in Montclair, New Jersey, just outside New York.

And every day they would make us take a nap and they would give us little mats, and we'd lay down. And I would lie on my stomach and then I would start sort of rubbing around.

The Lone ranger, The lone ranger.

That mythical lawman from TV with the black mask.

Which I thought was very sexy.

Crisp white cowboy hat.

And had a nice pouch in his Levi's.

And in this little fantasy, Dean would hop up on the ranger's horse, wrap his arms around him.

And ride around the range with him.

The way he said it, he was like, I just knew I wanted to be his friend and so there he'd be face down.

And I would gyrate into the mat and get a little tiny boner.

And he's like three, he's like three or four.

Five years old.

Five, five, five, but.

Eventually, one of the preschool teachers would come over and be like, Dean.

You are definitely not supposed to do that.

But he says, over the next few years, when he'd be on something like a school field trip.

I would fantasize about guys that I was rooming with or that we were on the bus with.

And still, it wasn't sexual.

It's more about friendship.

It was just like those first little inklings of desire.

You know what we might call puppy love?

That thing that just sort of bubbles up attraction and during any of this are you.

No, I never questioned the direction of my attraction.

But this is the Suburbs 1950s.

Middle class, heteronormative type of environment.

So Dean, in middle school, would like make out with girls.

Because that's what everybody was doing.

Had girlfriends in high school?

Including the Queen of the Prom. 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.

But then one night, Dean's at home, he's 15..

And I saw a TV program.

Called.

The homosexuals.

The homosexuals.

With CBS News correspondent Mike Wallace.

It's this hour long TV news report from 1967.

Most Americans are repelled by the mere notion of homosexuality.

And in it, there are gay men.

Lit indirectly so that you couldn't see their face.

This man is 27, college educated.

Talking about how horrible it was to be a homosexual.

I had one friend who was beaten savagely by his father.

About violence they endured.

And he beat him, in fact, with bricks.

About how they couldn't maintain relationships, about how they felt like they had to hide.

That it was a sickness.

I know that inside now I'm sick and sick in a lot of ways.

I looked at that and thought, Oh gosh, that's who I am that they're talking about.

Did it make you feel some sort of shame, or like I would think I'm ill or something?

I didn't feel that I felt really angry because it it wasn't right and it was who I was.

But then, 1969, Dean graduates from high school.

I'm smoking a lot of pot.

Once he finishes undergrad, he applies to Harvard Medical School.

To my surprise, get in there, so I head off to Boston.

And it's in Boston that Dean encounters these two very, very important things the first.

Gay Liberation.

This very new part of the gay rights movement, that is about being out, that is about gay pride.

My sort of first taste of activism.

And it's not as though Dean would become an activist.

I went to my first gay Pride parade, literally scary people throwing beer cans and the like.

In Boston, he sort of swept up in a sea of a movement where you can.

And I was like.

Whoa go to gay bars?

This is pretty good.

You can have a boyfriend.

At one point, I fell in love.

And how was it?

It was amazing and fantastic.

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.

Genetics.

He basically stumbled into it at Harvard, fell in love with it 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 was the promise of it, and that promise would end up entwining Dean and the gay rights movement.

So I decided to go work.

So mid 70s, Dean gets his P.h.D. from Harvard, he goes down to D.C.

The National Institutes of Health.

To do genetics work there.

It was all very basic science.

Figuring out how genes turn on and off.

How your blood carries oxygen.

Really technical stuff.

How Copper islands induce the metallothionein gene and saccharomyces cerevisiae. Why are you laughing?

It sounds very boring, very boring. And he was actually like, it was kind of big and important work, but the details of it were horrendous.

And uninteresting.

But he does the boring stuff.

For a good 10 years.

And so cut to.

I'm 40 years old.

It's now 1991.

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.

I mean, it's the whole reason he got into this, to uncover something fundamental about nature.

At the same time.

So far tonight, we've been bringing you news of the world around us.

There's this revolution.

Happening now, we have news of the incredible world inside us.

The very beginnings of.

What is called the human genome project?

The Human Genome Project.

A vast effort to map man's entire genetic system.

Scientists begin mapping out and identifying every single gene.

The very building blocks of life.

In our chromosomes.

It's essentially like having an encyclopedia of man. The principal will know the complete set of instructions which make people.

And for people like Dean.

It was new and exciting.

The belief was this is the thing that is actually going to unlock all of that mystery.

Hidden in that piece of DNA.

And not just the basic stuff.

From hair color to height.

But personality traits?

Shyness, aggression, empathy, thrill, seeking shame.

Alcoholism.

Intelligence.

Mental illness.

Depression?

Everything about life, and so I started thinking about, you know?

Desire sex?

It's so important.

To dean, it has to be encoded in us because.

The driving force of evolution is to make organisms that can have more organisms.

In other words, sex.

Drives.

Everything.

What could I learn about that?

And so is he immediately like, Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, is there a?

Well, actually, he says, like, no, Dean says.

You know, because I'm gay, I know where I can get subjects.

Other gay people.

Because whenever you're interested in a trait, the only powerful way to study it.

How it works? So the hope is, by studying gay people like, that's actually the path.

So the really.

He says it wasn't at all about, like, homosexuality, what makes him the way he is.

No, I mean everything I read of or from Dean, everything I've seen him say publicly.

Okay, so dudes, just dudes first.

Right, so basically, he pitches this to his bosses at the NIH.

I got the green light.

And he began.

So we started placing advertisements, advertisements.

In gay papers.

Went to the HIV clinic right at the NIH.

Went to a group called Pflag.

Parents and friends of lesbians and gays.

And Dean said when he would interview these gay men.

Right off the bat.

Almost all of them would say.

It was just there.

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.

Are families?

And so he's like, Okay, do you have any brothers? Do you have any sisters? Are they gay? What about mom?

And I started traveling.

All over the country.

California, Pennsylvania.

To the deep south.

To the Great Heartland.

And he would sit down with these family members and ask them all these questions.

Basic information about their age and their birth. Then I would ask about their own sexuality.

You know, when was your first sexual fantasy? What did you fantasize about?

For example, if you masturbate.

Who do you think about?

Is it another guy or is it a woman or both? How many different people have you had sex with?

How many men, how many women?

How frequently?

How do you have sex?

Do you do oral? do you do anal? do you do masturbation? do you do rubbing? yeah.

But so Dean does all these interviews, he collects blood from everybody, eventually goes back to D..C.

Mid 1992 or so.

This takes him, like, a whole year.

By that time, I have about 100 or so families a little bit over that.

He starts drawing out by hand these family trees.

With squares for men and circles for women.

Fill in the circle or the square if definitely gay.

Blank if definitely heterosexual, or thought to be heterosexual, and a big question mark if we're not sure.

When he's looking at him, he notices this thing, which is that the gay men in a family.

There's virtually none on the father's side of the family.

They're on the mom's side of the family.

And it was like a light bulb 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.

So, oftentimes, not always, but oftentimes, a man has an X and Y chromosome. the Y comes from the dad, the X comes from the mom.

So anything on the X chromosome tends to come down the mother's side. To get DNA, you just take a little blood.

They do a bunch of fancy science.

Add a couple of reagents, shake it, pass it through a filter.

And he starts combing through many of these gay men's X chromosome.

The entire chromosome.

When he finds this tiny little.

Tomorrow's issue of Science Magazine contains the results of a national Institutes of Health study.

He finds this little genetic tweak.

Which shows that male homosexuality may be genetically determined.

And it was this.

New evidence today about what causes a man to be homosexual.

A little bit of DNA.

The origins of homosexuality.

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.

Is it something that happens at birth?

Or is it a lifestyle?

Gays in the military 58 are against legalizing gay marriages. You deserve no rights. It is a cultural war. We're mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore.

It is an abomination for a man to lie with a man. We are going to fight back. This is not a moral issue, this is a human rights issue.

We will be free.

All that in just a moment.

The Democrats have spent the week partying, the Republicans are fighting to get back in the headlines. And let's be honest, the main thing a whole lot of people really want to know right now is who's winning. That comes down to how voters in a handful of states feel about these presidential tickets. I'm Kai Wright and this week, a swing state pollster joins me for On the Call Our Notes from America pop-up series on the election.

Radiolab Lulu Matt.

Uh-huh.

Okay, that feels like a bit of a short shrift.

Matt Kilty.

Thank you.

Straight Reporter.

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 are the results actually show? And I spent a long time looking into this, into the science of this dean's science, other science.

And that the born this way idea is kind of the culmination of a particular project, a several decades long process.

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.

Oh, sure, so it's pronounced Joanna Wiest.

Wiest.

Wiest Great, and I am an assistant professor of politics at Mount Holyoke.

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.

Exactly, yeah.

Okay, so where would you want to start?

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 Madison Society.

One of the first nationwide gay rights organizations.

Also, the daughters of Bolitis, a lesbian organization, both of which were predominantly white middle class.

They had dress codes on the books, men had to wear ties, women couldn't wear jeans.

It's hard, in terms of today to think, to really understand what was going on in the 50s.

This is from an oral history of Del Martin, who was one of the co-founders of the daughters of Bolitis.

I mean, the fear and the paranoia was just something fierce.

Thousands of suspected gay people were being kicked out of the government.

There was fear of losing your job. He's been in jail three times for committing homosexual acts.

Of being arrested, thrown into jail.

Or thrown into a mental institution.

Because at the time.

Homosexuality is, in fact, a mental illness.

The argument was that homosexuality was a psychological defect.

Which has reached epidemiological proportions.

That was literally the American Psychiatric Association's definition homosexuality was a mental illness.

It's all the parent's fault.

The idea was.

Relationships to the father and the mother.

That it was caused by the environment at home and having a profound effect on the final pattern of the individual's sexual behavior.

And so at that point, we needed validation.

Del says that she and most of the gay people she knew were like, We know we aren't mentally ill.

But we still have to deal with the rest of society.

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.

And start collaborating with.

I feel from the many years of work.

Psychologists and psychiatrists.

That a homosexual is, first of all, a human being. We were guinea pigs. For a lot of researchers, research being a way to get rid of the sickness label.

And so they start going to psychiatric conferences.

Sitting on panels.

Making inroads with more researchers.

To say that these people aren't sick.

And I do not look upon homosexuality as a neurotic problem.

That being gay is not a mental illness.

That being gay?

Lies deep in the individual's nature.

That it has nothing to do with your parents, that it's essentially natural.

Well, I was going to add that.

From somebody like Hal Call, who was the president of the Madison Society.

That this whole business of homosexualism is just one of the things that exists in nature.

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.

It's huge, it's so pivotal.

The American Psychiatric Association drops the definition of homosexuality as a mental illness.

And those prominent gay rights activists who had made these relationships with folks in psychology and psychiatry.

They would lean on those allies to start trying to make bigger changes.

Exactly.

And so Joanna says, all throughout the 70s.

Gay rights litigators are bringing all of these scientific experts into court to serve as expert witnesses.

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. He was relieved of his classroom duties.

Because he is a homosexual.

So, like a teacher would be fired for being gay.

We are modeling behavior all the time by what we do, as well as by what we say or teach in the classroom.

Because they're homosexuality.

Is kind of seen as a contagion.

Like, that's the rhetoric, which feels very much like one word groomer, they're grooming seven year olds. What you see from conservatives today?

This is propaganda for grooming.

It's groomers, pre-groomers.

Yeah, exactly this idea that.

There are definite overtones that children will catch yes, particularly children of today.

Sexual orientation is modeled, it is learned, and in response to that.

Pioneering scholars and clinicians.

Will come into the court as expert witnesses.

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.

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.

That you're saying in the context of these court battles that like.

Yeah, but it's not just like court cases like these. Scientists are coming to annual conferences held by gay rights organizations.

To teach them about the science of sexual orientation.

And that the origin of sexual orientation might not be rooted in psychology, but rather biology.

That's interesting, so you're saying, there's almost like this gradient? Yeah, it's like a gradient.

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.

Which is the beginning of what we eventually will see as a born this way rhetoric.

Also Did you come across Carl Bean during your research?

The disco song Yeah, yeah.

Okay, Carl Bean, Have you heard of Carl Bean?

No, I have not, I'm not familiar with Mr. Bean.

Okay, so Carl Bean, Mr. Bean, Gay Black man activist.

I'm walking through life.

It's very good. Nature's sky.

Ooh.

Come out onto the dance floor, I would dance to this.

It's amazing. Oh my God, listen to the words, okay?

You laugh at me and you criticize.

Because I'm happy.

Yes.

Carefree?

Uh, huh, and gay? Oh my God, it ain't a fault.

It ain't no fault.

It's a fact.

I was born this way.

Yeah.

Wait, so Gaga, ripped off Carl Bean.

Uh, well, that's a loaded question.

I guess what we can say is Carl Bean is in the vanguard here.

Okay, Joanna's point is that.

The ingredients are there, it just feels really early.

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 80s, you have somebody like Judd Marmore, who was the former president of the American Psychiatric Association.

He's beginning to place extra emphasis on biological factors.

These were studies that were done by the mid 80s. We're looking at sexual orientation and, like hormones and brain development.

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 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 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 are just like, don't grab on to this?

Yeah, no, for sure. There were people like Martha Shelley.

My feeling was, why do you need some psychiatrist to tell you you're okay?

A co-founder of the Gay Liberation Front.

Which has all these arguments that we want to refuse help from expertise.

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.

And the Liberation Front was active in the late 60s, early 70s, basically being like.

Who said that clinicians get to say anything about our sexualities, one way or the other?

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 prescribes for you.

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.

So you're saying there was like, there's a cauldron of ideas here, of course, like there's nuance.

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.

There is some new evidence today about what causes a man to be homosexual.

Two years before Dean's study, December 1991..

A new study suggests that the answer, to a very large degree, may be found in a person's genetic inheritance.

Genetics, which in the 90s was like biological determinism on steroids, that shows up.

Researchers at Northwestern examined 167 gay men and their brothers.

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. So these researchers look at adopted brothers all the way up to identical twins.

And found the more similar the brothers were genetically, the more likely both would be gay.

Which leads one of the researchers to say.

A substantial proportion of the causes of male sexual orientation are genetic. 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.

Again, so that's 91.

Okay, and that is where Dean comes back.

Yeah, exactly 91. He's pitching the NIH.

That's a green light.

Starts doing his interviews.

To get DNA, you just take a little blood.

Combing through these X chromosomes.

When Eureka?

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, and they find this little tweak in almost all of the pairs of gay brothers. And I think it was.

It is weird, though, just to sit with that for one sec. Like that's less than 100 people.

Yeah, no, it's small.

So what does that mean in terms of, you know, what does that mean?

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.

But how strong a role it's playing is difficult to estimate, right?

Like, if it were potentially completely determinative, every gay brother would have had this gene, but they don't.

It was more like tilting the scales a bit.

It was like a little nudge, yeah.

That's all we said, yeah.

A little bit.

Perhaps right?

But a week before the paper gets published.

July 1993.

My phone just starts ringing off the hook.

Word got out about the study.

And I get called by the New York Times and the Washington Post.

The L.A. Times major magazines.

Pretty much every major TV network.

And what exactly are they asking you?

I think the first question was, just What did you find?

And Dean would say.

A statistically significant correlation between markers on XQ28 and male sexual orientation. And then everybody sort of crossed their eyes.

But, he says, the very next question you get from these reporters was.

Well, what does this mean for gay rights?

Because this was 1993.

The first presidential campaign in which gays and lesbians have begun voting in a block in their own self-interest.

Earlier that year, Bill Clinton had taken office.

I have a vision and you're a part of it.

He'd run a campaign that was responding to the gay rights movement.

The first time in the history of this country, our issues are being discussed.

And so, leading up to Dean's research tonight, all over the news.

It's gays in the military.

You've got things like.

The ban on homosexuals in the military.

Don't ask, don't tell the Gay and Lesbian March.

One of the largest demonstrations ever in the nation's capital.