To the Editor:

It strikes me as excessively pessimistic of Damien Guay, ISU’s Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Student Services coordinator, to state that establishing a genetic link to sexual orientation will not benefit gays.

I also find his claim that, “the social aspect of sexuality is much more important than the genetic aspect” to be highly speculative.

Clearly, without the underlying biological urges, there would be no social issue at all.

True, there are those who are so viscerally anti-gay that no argument would ever win them over. (Already the anti-gay factions are split between claiming that the genetic research is bogus and declaring that homosexuality is genetic, then a “cure” must be found.)

But proof that people really have no choice in the matter of their orientation is a potent argument to convince the majority who are not emotionally involved in the society’s homophobia.

This is because it undermines one of the most potent myths used against gays: that they “recruit” impressionable youths. Once this is understood to be untrue, someone’s simply being gay ceases to be a threat to anyone.

As far as the validity of the research is involved, it should be noted that very strong evidence of the maternally-linked genetic nature of homosexuality has been known for years, even before discoveries in biology made the recent controversial research possible.

Studies have been done on the patterns of homosexuality within families. These show that a gay male individual has about a twenty percent chance of having a gay brother.

The same twenty-or-so percent of his maternal uncles and the male children of his sisters and those of his maternal aunts will be gay.

Among his paternal uncles and cousins and the sons of his brothers and other male members of his family, the chance drops to less than ten percent, the same as the population at large. A half-brother by a different mother is also less likely to be gay, but not by a different father.

Twin studies also show significant statistical results. If an individual who is gay has a fraternal twin brother, the likelihood of his twin also being gay is about twenty percent. When they are identical, the number goes up to 50 percent.

This last statistic carries a double message: First, sexual orientation is surely linked to genetic factors, and second, the way those factors translate into real people is unpredictable.

This means that the ability to say whether a particular fetus whose genes read “possibly gay” might actually BE gay will never be better than 50-50.

The DNA studies are interesting, and they may even shed more light on the subject, but the proof that sexual orientation is genetically determined has been there right along.

David Paquette

Woonsocket, RI