The Ninth Street Center Infrequently Asked Questions

Are gay brains different from straight brains?

According to a researcher named Dr. LeVay they are. To me this looks like just another attempt to spare human beings from taking responsibility for their lives by giving them yet another medical excuse for being "sick". I thought people would have gotten over this once Thomas Szasz had published The Myth of Mental Illness. For, as R. D. Laing once told me, "DSM III is, after all, just a retread of Malleus Malificarum".

But rather than reviewing LeVay's findings, I'd prefer to analyze this on a different basis. I was taught many years ago by my friend Paul Rosenfels that, when confronted by an argumentative adversary, I should avoid getting entangled in the premises of his thought. So let's not argue LeVay's results on a line-by-line basis but pull back for a moment and take a cold look at the very premises of the work.

Scientists who work for industry are very technology-driven and often have very poor training in the history and philosophy of science, let alone undergraduate logic. Although this matters little to the day to day running of the kind of lab whose primary purpose is, say, to torture little animals and sign off on a new cosmetic, it matters a great deal when one sits down to publish ideas about the mind and its relationship to the brain.

There are many models of the mind/brain connection: 1) the mind is only an emanation of the brain (realism), 2) the brain is only a construct of the mind (idealism), 3) the mind and brain need to be thought of as distinct realms each of which can cause events in the other (interactionism). Since I don't think we have made much progress yet in conclusively modelling this connection I prefer the most open, fluid and commonsensical model, the third. How can the realists, for example, explain the fact that our bodies never go to the store for milk when we are asleep? How can idealists deny the power of sedatives to put us asleep? Dogmatists from each camp often assume their model and then show how it could fit these examples. But when you look closely you find that the realists literally believe the mind doesn't exist, while the idealists believe that the only thing that exists IS the mind. Science shouldn't fly in the face of common sense like that.

When we talk about psychology, we need to be careful to classify events, actions, faculties and capabilities as primarily brain-centered or mind-centered, and we need to do this intellectually not experimentally. (It's the intellect that designs the experiments, after all.) For example, homosexuality is not very much an attribute of what our bodies do when asleep. It is first and foremost a mental proclivity. Seen in this light, what any student of brain anatomy has to say about homosexuality becomes quite literally irrelevant!

Since I don't rule out mind events causing brain effects, and vice versa, it may be true that becoming homosexual causes permenent changes in the brain. But to assume that any brain changes that parallel homosexuality have CAUSED the homosexuality is getting it literally backwards.

Simiarly, I don't want to rule out the remote possibility that certain kinds of brain anomalies may some day be shown to have an effect on sexual feeling, but THIS IS NOT WHAT WE MEAN BY HOMOSEXUALITY. It would be merely a distortion of sexual feeling caused by a brain anomaly.

Be very wary of brain anatomists who need to drape themselves in a cloak of unearned psychological authority. If a brain scientist gave you a CAT scan and said you should get rid of your lover, would you do it? If the NIMH prepared a report proving that the brain of homo sapiens is more compatible with a government that had no Bill of Rights, would you vote to repeal it?

Your mind is your own. It is more important than property or even liberty. DEFEND IT.