Coming soon: test to see if you have the "gay gene"

There’s a new “gay gene” study making the rounds this week and while some members of the press are celebrating the study as objective and necessary evidence that homosexuality is not a “choice,” most gay, lesbian, and bisexual people I know could not care less.

This time around, we’re rolling our eyes at a study led by behavioral geneticist Dr. Alan Sanders at the NorthShore Research Institute in Evanston, Illinois, which examined the genes of 409 pairs of gay brothers, finding that gay men may share certain genetic markers on the Xq28 and 8q12 regions of the X chromosome and chromosome 8. Only some of the findings from NorthShore’s study are statistically significant, but that hasn’t stopped a flurry of misleadingly conclusive headlines like “Male sexual orientation influenced by genes, study shows” or “Broader study confirms genetic link to male homosexuality.”

If you don’t see gay people celebrating this news in the streets, understand that we’ve been hearing news about a potential biological basis for homosexuality for a long time now. In 1991, neuroscientist Simon LeVay suggested that small differences in the size of certain cell clusters in the hypothalamus could influence sexual orientation in men. In 1993, geneticist Dean Hamer published a paper in Science that claimed that genetic markers on the X chromosome could influence the development of a same-sex orientation in men. This was the start of a long love affair between Hamer and the media in the mid-1990s, with new stories swirling around each of his successive publications in anticipation of the discovery of the mythical “gay gene.”