On August 31, the day following the publication of LeVay (1991), Science News scooped the other large popular periodicals and reported: “A comparison of 41 autopsied brains has revealed a distinct difference between homosexual and heterosexual men in the brain region that controls sexual behavior” (Ezzell, 1991, p. 134). Even though the article went on to include the makeup of the participant pool, and also included LeVay’s own caution about making assumptions regarding the origins of the difference, the opening sentence quoted above easily upstaged LeVay’s suggestion for caution.
The high profile accorded to LeVay’s work continued into September 1991, with at least five articles appearing in major magazines. On September 4, The Chronicle of Higher Education published a short piece (Wheeler, 1991) that would prove to be one of the rare objections to the study, as voiced by Anne Fausto-Sterling (1985), but the popular press ignored the objections. On September 5, John Maddox published an article in Nature, in which he suggested that although inconclusive LeVay’s results needed to be taken seriously.
On September 9, Newsweek, Time, and U. S. News and World Report all ran articles on LeVay’s findings. Newsweek posed the question: “What Causes People to Be Homosexual?” and implied an answer to the question with, “A study pinpoints a difference in the brain” (Begley & Gelman, 1991, p. 52). lime ran an article (Gorman, 1991) with a photo depicting two presumably gay men in a happy embrace. The photograph was accompanied by bold text, with the suggestion that a structural difference had been found in the brains of homosexual and heterosexual men. L/.S. News and World Report in a short article (Crabb, 1991) ran the photographs comparing slices of brain tissue but failed to offer any explanation of the
complexity involved in interpreting the photos, only noting that the slices came from the hypothalamus, and that the hypothalamus “controls sexual behavior” (p. 58).
Later, in January of 1992, Discover reprinted the above-mentioned photographs (Grady, 1992), and Time referred to LeVay’s study in a cover story that discussed the biological basis for men and women being fundamentally different (Gorman, 1992). In February of 1992 the cover of Newsweek bore a sensational, larger-than-life photo of a newborn, and a headline “Is This Child Gay?” The article was anchored by references to the LeVay study, with repeated citations of his findings, and frequent comments on LeVay’s own homosexuality. Throughout 1992, LeVay’s work received further media attention in Newsweek (Gelman & Foote, 1992), Science (Marshall, 1992), and New Statesman and Society (Kohn, 1992). The following year, LeVay’s (1993) new book was reviewed in Science, with further reference to the original study (Livingston, 1993). In 1994, Discover ran an extensive five-page account of LeVay’s rise to fame, his research, and the aftermath of his notoriety (Nimmons, 1994). All this coverage is in contrast to the 2 1/2 pages allocated to the original article.
The power of the media in this example is astounding, considering that LeVay acknowledged the problems with his sample in the original study. He would later (LeVay, 1993) seem to further de-emphasize the results of his 1991 study in terms of cause and effect, albeit far after the fact, and long after the flurry of, in his words, “media attention and public interest” (p. xiii). “Time and again I have been described as someone who ‘proved that homosexuality is genetic’ or some such thing. I did not. My observations were made only on adults who had been sexually active for a considerable period of time. It is not possible, purely on the basis of my observations, to say whether the structural differences were present at birth and later influenced the men to become gay or straight, or whether they arose in adult life, perhaps as a result of the men’s sexual behavior” (p. 122). However, LeVay did not dispute the inference of a biological basis for sexual orientation. His views are all too apparent elsewhere in the same volume, when he suggested that “gay men simply don’t have the brain cells to be attracted to women” (p. 121).
A subsequent publication has further bolstered the popular appeal of LeVay’s 1991 findings and maintained interest in the topic. In the May 1994 issue of Scientific American, LeVay and Hamer (1994) entered into what was billed as a debate about homosexuality with William Byne (1994). LeVay and Hamer recounted LeVay’s original study, and cited the addition of one more specimen (this included tissue reported to have been retrieved from a gay man who had died of non-AIDS related causes). The same results were reported for this additional case, and it was offered as support for the original assumption, that AIDS pathology was not responsible for observed differences. In tandem with Hamer’s research on the heritability of homosexuality, the article purported to offer “Evidence for a Biological Influence in Male Homosexuality” (p. 44).
Seeming to fall victim to the repetition of his own work, LeVay became more emphatic in his statements. He surmised that the difference in hypothalamic structure between gay and straight men, as compared with the difference between men and women overall, “suggests a difference related to male sexual orientation about as great as that related to sex” (p. 46). Byne (1994) argued that genetic studies such as Hamer’s have serious limitations, that there are some important flaws in sexuality research in general, and that LeVay’s study was an example of those flaws. He also noted that genetic studies are inherently confounded with nature and nurture effects; that is, it is impossible to interpret the genetic family tree without considering the soil in which it was grown.
Although many of the articles that appeared in the popular media noted the limitations and the methodological problems of LeVay’s study, the popular formats gave the study credence. Such pervasive media attention to questionable findings does little for the public understanding of sexuality, and overemphasizes biologically based conclusions.