To the Editors:

“Is Homosexuality Inherited?” asks Richard Horton’s review (NYR, July 13), thereby colluding, however inadvertently, with a one-hundred-year-old anti-homosexual tradition. That politics keeps positing homosexuality as “the problem.” Heterosexuality, it seems, is problem-free.

Why doesn’t an NYRB headline ever ask: “Is Heterosexuality Inherited?” Or: “Has Heterosexuality Always Existed?” Why not ask: “Are There Such Timeless, Unitary, Biological Things as Heterosexuality. Homosexuality, or Sexuality That Can Possibly be Inherited?” Why not an essay asking: “What The Hell Are Those ‘Male Typical’ and ‘Female Typical’ Behaviors and Feelings That LeVay talks About?” When will the NYR head a piece: “Is Desire to Read the NYR Inherited?” The phrasing of our questions implies loaded first assumptions about the shape of the world.

The reviewer praises my history of the heterosexual norm, The Invention of Heterosexuality, then charges that my stand against biological determinism is “uninformed,” a case of “extreme intellectual reductionism.” I’m accused of accepting “the naive dualism of nature vs. nurture” when those two “forces” are “not in opposition.”

Horton, a medical doctor, favors a complex determinism in which fickle forces, “nature” and “nurture,” “biology” and “environment,” together seal our fates. “Many different genes, together with many different environmental factors, will interact in unpredictable ways to guide behavioral preferences.” Sounds reasonable, don’t it? That’s because it’s today’s dominant, “common sense” understanding of sexuality.

But that dualistic, bio-enviro fatalism reinstates biological determinism as half of Horton’s paradigm. And that mushy middle model (so named by anthropologist Carole S. Vance) is just as politically loaded as any other way of viewing the world. Try telling feminists that biology and environment destine women for house-work and men-tending. Try telling African Americans that nature and nurture determine their difficulty getting into college.

Horton’s nature and nurture determinism, LeVay’s biological determinism, and my social-historical understanding are conflicting ways of imagining the basic phenomena at issue. Horton charges that my anti-biological determinist view is political and ideological, implying that his bio-enviro model is free of such bias. Excuse me, I don’t think so!

Dr. Horton is critical of the loony-toons analogizing of “homosexuality” in fruit flies and human beings. I agree. Such biological comparisons completely erase the historically specific social systems in which humans interact with others, learning to feel masculine, feminine, and erotic—and to call themselves “gay,” “straight,” or whatever. (Straight-faced, straight-thinking researchers who compare fruit flies and men long derided as “fruits” should also be criticized for insensitivity to the comic ironies of language.) But the ludicrous analogizing of insects and humans is based on the same biological fatalism that Horton defends as half of his biological-environmental determinism.

I honestly don’t understand how biology can play any role in determining all the different, discontinuous forms of human relationship revealed by historians: “heterosexual,” “homosexual,” and “bisexual,” “lipstick lesbian” and “old butch,” “ancient Greek pederasty,” “Victorian true love,” “romantic friendship,” “early-colonial sodomy,” and the Native American “berdache” (so-called by the French colonizers).

I don’t see how biology can determine the social, historical, and political use of sexual preference to create two dominant and subordinate classes, “heterosexuals” and “homosexuals.”

With many others, I question the medical model that defines heterosexuality, homosexuality, and sexuality as essential biological things to be explained by scientists. With others, I’m asking basic questions about those objects we’ve all taken for granted under the rule of the medical model: “heterosexuality,” “homosexuality,” and “sexuality”; “sexual orientation”; “the body,” “biology,” and “nature”; the idea of a natural “determinism” of desire.

Dr. Horton pits my “ignorance” of nature and biology against his (and LeVay’s and Hamer’s) scientific “evidence.” Such criticism delegitimizes the view of us non-scientist gay people. Horton’s bio-enviro model makes us ignoramuses, with no authority to comment on and reject a paradigm that (supposedly) defines the origin of our feelings. His, and LeVay’s and Hamer’s, rebiologizing of homosexuality and sexual preference puts the “experts” in charge again. Their biologizing makes homosexuality and sexual desire a “scientific” problem, not essentially a social, historical, and political phenomenon, joined at the hip with power.

But it’s political power that privileges the words of medical doctors and scientists, and makes the rest of us incompetents, too “uninformed,” “naive,” and “ignorant” to speak with authority.

The way to deal with the power issues implicit in all formulations of sexual research problems is to make that politics explicit, not assume its absence in the work of doctors and scientists.

In The Invention of Heterosexuality I suggest that the recent popular boom in biological theories of homosexuality shores up slippage in the 100-year-old distinction between heterosexual and homosexual. Defenders of hetero privilege are perceiving that heteros are just like homos, except for the sex of their sex partners—and they’re scared. The hetero/homo distinction upholds heterosexual supremacy. In any case, belief in the heterosexual dictatorship and biological determinism are the problems that need explaining, not homosexuality.

Jonathan Ned Katz

New York City