Out & About

Gay Day is tomorrow at House cinema on Royal City Avenue, with gay- and lesbian-theme films showing all day. 

To those who fantasise about the ultimate threesome, the gay identical twins known in the music industry as Nemesis may be walking soft porn. But to a rational mind like yours truly, Joseph and Joshua Miller represent hard scientific facts.

Long before the genome project, twin studies have been the mainstay of genetics, where the occurrence of a trait is observed in identical twins who share all of their genes as opposed to fraternal twins who share roughly half. As the same non-genetic factors are eliminated from the equation, a trait can be concluded to have genetic components when the concordance (i.e. it happens in both twins) is higher in the former group than in the latter.

Several twin studies consistently showed it to be the case for homosexuality. If one twin is gay, his identical brother is about 50 per cent likely to bat on the same team (compare this to about 20 per cent in fraternal twins).

So what about the other 50 per cent of pairs with mixed orientations? Well, genetics isn't everything and "identical" twins aren't exact images of each other after all. Each, like the rest of us, is a unique product of the interplay between genes and the environment that plays out in the womb and the first few years of life when virtually all of the brain's neural synapses are wired. Even in the same womb, twins aren't symmetrically exposed to the same conditions - hormones and whatnot.

(It's now understood that sexual orientation is set in the first few years of life, while later factors have no relevance. Theories on domineering mother, absent father, many sisters, etc. have yet to be supported by hard evidence.)

Many bigots, however, would still argue that homosexuality must be a personal choice - a vice to be eradicated or an aberration to be cured.  Toting high school science textbooks, they insist that such non-reproductive traits cannot exist or persist, because they will be weeded out by natural selection.

Strangely enough, despite the constancy of homosexuality occurring across cultures and millennia, Homo sapiens seem to be doing well. (With overpopulation threatening our own survival, we perhaps could do with more homosexuality, not less.) So how do scientists reconcile homosexuality with natural selection?

In birds such as flamingos, it's been observed that a homosexual couple holds larger territory than a heterosexual one, so their chicks (sired with the help of a female who is chased away after laying the eggs) have better chance of survival and spreading the "gay gene". But this explanation fails when gay individuals make no attempt to breed.

In those cases - in primates, for example - it's been suggested that homosexual "uncles" assist with raising the nieces and nephews so much that they pass more of their genes this way than by having their own children. But the best yet explanation came in 2004 from University of Padova in Italy.

The research team led by Dr Francesca Corna found that mothers and maternal aunts of gay men tend to have significantly more children than those of straight men (while there's no difference for paternal aunts.)

Apparently, the genes that make gay boys also make extra-fertile girls to compensate. (Not too far-fetched, as both are male-oriented.) This means that even if all the gay males don't continue the family line, the 'gay gene' can still pass on in the female side of the family, namely their aunts, sisters, nieces, and so on.

No doubt future studies will give us a clearer understanding of homosexuality's role in human evolution. But what's already clear is that those who dogmatically cling to their prejudice might as well be arguing that aeroplanes can't fly because they are heavier than air.

The programme is:

"Bear Club" (noon); "Blue" (1pm); "Mysterious Skin"  (2pm); "A Soap"  (3.15pm);

"You, I Love" (4pm); "Spider Lilies" (5.30pm); "Formula 17" (5.45pm); "Clean" (7.15pm); "Eternal Summer" (7.45pm); "My Summer of Love" (9.45pm); "Party Monster" (10pm).

AYOR  

Share ideas on gay issues via ayor@nationgroup.com.