Word: levay
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Simon Levay, chair of California's Institute of Gay and Lesbian Studies said establishing a biological basis for homosexuality poses both positive and negative threats...
Among the speakers are Richard Pillard, professor of psychiatry at Boston University Medical School; Simon Levay, from the Institute of Gay and Lesbian Studies in California; and Evan S. Balaban, assistant professor of biology at Harvard...
Many researchers suspect that, in humans too, sexual preferences are controlled by the hypothalamus. Based on a study of 41 autopsied brains, Simon LeVay of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies announced last summer that he had found a region in the hypothalamus that was on average twice as large in heterosexual men as in either women or homosexual men. LeVay's findings support the idea that varying hormone levels before birth may immutably stamp the developing brain in one erotic direction or another...
...freshman biology students know enough to sink this study," declares Anne Fausto-Sterling, professor of medical science at Brown University. Others are more receptive to LeVay's work. "It makes sense," says Laura Allen, a neuroanatomist at the University of California, Los Angeles. Finding a difference in the INAH, which influences male sexual behavior, "is what one would expect." The finding also has social implications. "People who believe that sexual orientation is a choice help legitimize discrimination against homosexuals," says Melissa Hines, a UCLA psychologist. "But if it is immutable, or partly so, then that argues for legal protections...
Over the years much research on homosexuality has been motivated by a desire to eradicate the behavior rather than understand, let alone celebrate, diversity. (A notorious German biologist, for instance, claims that prenatal hormone injections could act as a "vaccine" against homosexuality.) LeVay and others hope their work will enable humans to view homosexuality the way other species seem to see it: as a normal variation of sexual behavior...