Gay Science

Gay Science is the first comprehensive examination of the ethical questions surrounding sexual orientation research. Bioethicist Timothy Murphy presents the views of many gay men and women who detect ominous motives behind this research. If a genetic marker were discovered for homosexual tendencies, would genetic screening be used to further discriminate against gay people? If a method for changing sexual orientation were developed, would it be forced upon gay adults or children whose parents suspected they might grow up to be gay? Given the potential for its misuse, is sexual orientation research fundamentally unethical? Murphy acknowledges that much of sexual orientation research to date has been bad science, questionable in its motives and methodologically unsound. He examines the social and historical conditions, from the 1880s to the present, that spawned this research and reviews the findings that have often perpetuated confusion about homosexuality. He assesses five major studies on sexual orientation undertaken in the 1990s, from neuroanatomist Simon LeVay's study of certain brain structures in gay men to the work of psychologist Joseph Nicolosi. He questions the flawed and simplistic assumptions about sexuality made by much of this research. Murphy argues that a true science of sexual orientation would not be focused exclusively upon homosexuality nor presuppose its pathology.

Timothy F. Murphy is associate professor in the Medical Humanities Program at the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Chicago. He is the author of Ethics in Epidemic: AIDS, Morality, and Culture; editor of Gay Ethics: Controversies in Outing, Civil Rights, and Sexual Science; and coeditor of Writing AIDS: Gay Literature, Language, and Analysis; and Justice and the Human Genome Project.