And although I mentioned it in the previous post, this is a nice reminder of how much President Obama has got better, as they say.
Apparently Legalize Love is part of an new effort to rally queer folks in support of the obvious better choice, officially independent of the Obama campaign. Which is … interesting. But effective. I just bought a tee-shirt.◼
You could pretty much replace the entirety of Mitt Gets Worse, a punnily-named campaign to get out the word about the Republican presidential nominee’s attitudes and record on queer rights, with a webpage reading “Christ, what an asshole.” Because what other response is there to this sort of thing:
Oh, that’s right. The other response is to go give a few bucks toward reelecting President Barack “DADT repeal” Obama.
(Hat tip to Queerty.)◼
Parliament, viewed across the Rideau Canal. Photo by jby.I’m now back from Evolution 2012 and in the process of getting back up to speed with non-conference life—i.e., a daily routine that isn’t eight hours (less a lunch break) of listening to people talking about science in fifteen-minute chunks, then going out to drink and talk about the science until midnight. Returning to a schedule in which I can think about the same scientific topic for hours on end is a bit disorienting.
For in-the-moment (more or less) writing about the meetings and everything discussed there, I suggest, of course, contributions by myself and the rest of the crew at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense, plus notes from Jeremy Fox at the Oikos blog (with posts for days one, two, and three). And, of course, there’s the formidable feed of updates via the conference’s Twitter hashtag, about which more below.
All in all, I had a great time, and saw a lot of really cool science. This was the first Evolution meeting I’ve been to where I was never at a loose end—every moment I was in the Convention Centre, I had someone to go see, or a talk to go hear. And, honestly, I finished the meeting without having checked in with everyone I’d have liked to.
My talk went pretty well, if I do say so myself. I finished well before the buzzer, and the questions afterward generally suggested that the audience understood what I was presenting. Plus, Pleuni Pennings, one of the authors of a cool series of papers I’d read and thought about a lot in preparing the analysis, came to the talk, and she had both good things to say, and some interesting suggestions.
I’ve posted my slideshow (which, I should warn you, presents preliminary results, and has relatively little explanatory text) online as a PDF document, in case you’re curious.
The Canadian Museum of Civilization, site of the end-of-meeting banquet. Photo by jby.The Ottawa Convention Centre was a great venue for a huge meeting, and the critical support—coffee, snacks, lunch—was good, if somewhat parsimoniously distributed. The final banquet at the Canadian Museum of Civilization was nice, but marred by badly distributed (and, ultimately, insufficient) food. The timer chimes—or, as Luke Harmon called them, the call of the Canadian Electro-Frog—weren’t as annoying as I’d thought they’d be, though I do think they made things a bit too regimented until folks got used to them.
This was also far and away the most-tweeted Evolution meeting I’ve been to; it was actually possible to sample what was going on in the other sessions thanks to other Twitterers at the meeting. We’ve come a long way since I first suggested people live-blog and tweet the 2009 meetings, and hardly anyone showed up to do it. It’s a pity, then, that the Convention Centre wi-fi was unprepared for the volume of traffic that inevitably resulted—and which was probably exacerbated by the fact that most of the U.S. residents in attendance were using wi-fi with their smartphones rather than rack up huge bills for using “foreign” cellular data services.
I was also happy to be involved in re-starting “Outgroup,” a meet-up of queer folks at the conference that hasn’t convened since the 90s, apparently. I’d heard about it from Chris Smith, who was at one of the last Outgroup gatherings, and we both agreed it’d be nice to do again. So we put up a handwritten notice on the conference bulletin board, and I put the word out on Twitter that LGBT folks should meet up for lunch Sunday—and people showed up! (Although, as Sarcozona noted, the group was an overwhelmingly male. C’mon, ladies!)
But so I made some nice new connections via Outgroup, and the lunch added an extra level of networking to the meeting: hearing a bit about being out in a professional context back when Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell counted as a compromise and marriage equality was a pipe dream; or what it’s like to negotiate a faculty contract in a state where state schools are forbidden by law to provide benefits for non-married partners. I think we’ll definitely be gathering Outgroup again next year, when Evolution meets in Snowbird, Utah.◼
Photo by nezume_you.The new Pride edition of the Diversity in Science blog carnival is online over at Balanced Instability, where Gerty-Z does an excellent job tying together a huge list of contributions from queer folks and allies in the sciences (including a couple from yours truly). It’s a great turnout for the Carnival—more contributors than last year, if I’m not mistaken, and including a lot of new voices. Go read the whole thing.◼
Are you sure you want to be getting all uncritically book-endorse-y with Jesse Bering? I mean, yes, Bering’s a snappy writer with a nose for edgy topics, and the bit you excerpted—concerning the good ol’ “plunger penis” hypothesis [$]—is intriguing.
But.
This is Jesse Bering we’re talking about. Jesse “gay-bashing is adaptive” Bering. Jesse “natural selection is the only misogynist here” Bering. Jesse “Deep-Thinking Hebephile” Bering.
I mean, I don’t want to be making an ad-hominem argument here, but I tend to think that the point of popular science writing is for the audience to benefit from a writer’s perspective and expert judgement. And Jesse Bering’s judgement is in pretty serious question. (Don’t just take my word for it!) He might very well be a great psychologist—that field is beyond my expertise to assess—but it’s pretty clear that Bering’s knowledge of evolution begins and ends with an exceptionally superficial understanding of natural selection, and, more often than not, he rallies that superficial understanding (but not much actual scientific evidence) for the defense of some pretty damn’ regressive ideas.
Plus which, “plunger penis” isn’t exactly news: the paper Bering seems to be citing is from 2003, and Jared Diamond discussed the ways in which the human penis stands out (heh) in comparison to those of other apes in The Third Chimpanzee, which was first published in 1992. Wasn’t this covered in Sex at Dawn?
All I’m saying is, read that new book with a saltshaker handy.◼
Reference
Gallup, G. G., R. L. Burch, M. L. Zappieri, R. A. Parvez, M. L. Stockwell, & J. A. Davis (2003). The human penis as a semen displacement device. Evolution and Human Behavior, 24, 277-89 DOI: 10.1016/S1090-5138(03)00016-3
Performers on a float at the 2011 Twin Cities Pride parade. Photo by jby.Hi! Have you signed our pledge to vote “no” on the amendment?
The actual Pride festival is, in my opinion, the least appealing part of any Pride weekend.
Imagine a small county fair stripped of its rides and livestock shows, the agricultural implements replaced with booths full of rainbow-flag keychains and questionably tasteful erotic art, and with lip-synching drag queens instead of country musicians in the all-day stage shows, all dropped into a city park without enough drinking fountains. The people-watching is, admittedly, pretty great, but I don’t think I’ve ever spent more time in a Pride festival than it takes to walk the circuit of the booths.
This Pride Saturday, however, I spent seven hours among the tents and food trucks in Loring Park—mostly standing within reach of one of the Minnesotans United for All Families canvassing booths, handing clipboarded sign-up sheets to passers-by, reminding them to vote “no” on a proposed amendment to the state constitution that would define marriage as “only a union between one man and one woman.”
I’ve been putting in an evening a week with MN United for nearly six months, now—first making calls to Minnesota voters, but now mostly helping to train and assist other volunteer phone-callers. Since I started back in January, prospects for voting down the anti-marriage amendment are looking better: a new statewide poll shows “no” votes outnumbering “yes”, MNUnited has raised quite a bit more funding than the pro-amendment campaign in the first half of 2012, and President Obama finally stated his support for marriage equality.
And then this weekend, hundreds of thousands of potential MN United supporters converged on downtown Minneapolis. With Pride as an official kickoff, the campaign against the amendment is off to a strong (and fabulous) start.
But.
Public polling has burned us before—in California, prior to the vote on Proposition 8, and in Maine, on Question 1, it looked like things were reasonably secure, until they weren’t. Pro-equality campaigns have outspent anti-equality campaigns in other states—most recently in North Carolina—without success.
All things considered, I’d say I’m optimistic that Minnesota could be the first state to turn down an attempt to restrict the rights of queer people via popular vote—but I still wouldn’t say the odds are in our favor.
So what am I doing spending my Pride Saturday in Loring Park, thrusting clipboards at strangers? Or working the phone bank every Tuesday till November?
* * *
Gerty-Z’s announcement that this year’s Pride edition of the Diversity in Science carnival would focus on advocacy was a good prompt for me to sit back and think about my involvement with the campaign against the amendment, and, yes, advocacy in general.
Whenever MN United comes up in conversation, queer friends have taken to calling me a “good gay”—in a tone that’s simultaneously needling and (usually) admitting they feel a bit guilty about not doing similarly. At the same time, I’ve been pretty firm about keeping my volunteering commitment limited—it’s not exactly cramping my day-to-day schedule. Regardless of how the vote comes out in November, I wouldn’t feel quite right if I hadn’t put in some actual effort to help defeat the amendment, but I don’t particularly want the campaign to dominate my life.
And, really, I’d say that the volunteering doesn’t, of itself, make me a “good gay.” Advocacy of the sort that happens in organized political campaigns, even the rather different kind of advocacy that happens in MN United’s campaign, is important—but I strongly believe that, as with revenge, the best kind of advocacy is a life well lived.
I say that in large part because of the way I came out of the closet. I took a (relatively) long time figuring out my orienation, and by the time I came out I was well aware of, and in agreement with, the political arguments in favor of gay rights. All of that kind of advocacy didn’t, frankly, do me a lot of good.
What did end up making a big difference was when I met my first openly gay friend, a collaborator on my dissertation research, who provided a daily example in matter-of-factness about his orientation. I knew him as a smart scientist and a fun drinking buddy, and the occasional presence of his boyfriend at social events was, really, no more remarkable than the occasional presence of anyone else’s significant other. And he turned out to be entirely the right person to phone up, one night, for one of the most important conversations of my life.
* * *
And but so now, years after that conversation, my sexuality is a mostly unremarkable feature of my life. Day to day, I commute to campus and do the quotidian work of science—check ongoing analyses, start new ones, write up results, read papers, think about the next project. I go to the gym or for a run. Sometimes I go on a date or out for a night with friends; sometimes I stay at home and work in front of the T.V. I cook. I write about deeply metafictional Star Trek parodies.
And yet of course my orientation flavors almost everything I do, just as it would if I were straight. When I go on a date, it’s with another guy, of course; but it also influences which bars I go to when I’m out with friends, what kind of books I read (A Single Man, anyone?) and T.V. I watch (poor Renly), and, yes, even how I think about science (well, how prone I am to take issue with evolutionary psychology, anyway). I don’t immediately identify myself as gay to everyone I meet, but I don’t make any effort to hide it; when I’ve taught, I wore my rainbow wristband and “Legalize Gay” t-shirt to class (ignorant as I was of the biases I was courting—but I have every intention of continuing to do so). I’d like to think my experience of life in the closet and out makes me a little more naturally skeptical about recieved wisdom and existing power structures, and I tend to think that kind of suspicion is a good thing.
If I had to pick a professional model for integrating my sexual identity into my professional identity, I’d lean more towards Douglas Futuyma than Joan Roughgarden; not so much a crusader for equality via science, but someone identifiable as a gay man who does good scientific work. My favorite example of this, I think, is a snippet from a perspective article Futuyma wrote for The American Naturalist back in 1999, lamenting the loss of old-fashioned natural historical specilization in evolutionary ecology:
… I could not begin to estimate the number of students I have met who, in explaining their work on some aspects of the biology of birds, plants, insects, frogs, have hastened to say that they are not interested in birds or insects as such but, instead, as models for studying principles—as if “ornithologist” or “botanist” were a scarlet letter, a badge of shame. I cannot cast the first stone, for I have often done the same. But in parallel with my other experiences of life, I have come to feel that as a closet entomologist, I should come out and stand proud.
I love that final line because Futuyma’s drawing on his sexuality to make a point in pretty much the same way Stephen Jay Gould would quote Gilbert and Sullivan. (But, you know, much less pompously.) It’s simultaneously an identfiable facet of his personality and no big fracking deal.
(See also that previous link on Futuyma for his own statement about a career as a gay biologist, much of it in an era when it wasn’t as easy as it is today.)
* * *
In the end, I think that the point of advocacy is to try and leave the world a little bit better place for the next generation of queer kids, the ones who are just realizing they have to figure out how their orientation fits into the lives they’ve only just begun to build. In the spirit of It Gets Better, if good examples of how to be gay are what helped me come out, how can I not do my best to be a good example of how to be gay now that I’m out?
But, you know, I want to get married someday, too. So come tomorrow night, I’ll be back at the phone bank.◼
Photo source unknown, presumed public domain.
There’s some more new evidence for one of the theories as to how gene variants that make men more likely to be gay could persist in human populations in the face of their obvious selective disadvantages: the same genes could, when carried by women, lead to greater fertility.
I recently posted about a study of Samoan fa’afafine, that documented this effect; now an Italian team is reporting, in a forthcoming article in The Journal of Sexual Medecine, that they’ve found the same thing in a sample of 200-some French and Italian women [$a].
The authors interviewed women who were the biological mothers or aunts of gay men, and compared them to women who were mothers or aunts of straight men. They gave each participant a questionaire covering the key question—how many children they’d had. It also covered a sort of focused medical history, covering a slew of conditions that might have affected their fertility—anything from chlamydia infections to ovarian cysts to complicated pregnancies—and asked about their sexual behavior and history. Finally, the team gave the women in their sample a standardized personality test.
Even this relatively small sample showed the previously documented effect of shared genetics with gay men—women who had gay sons or nephews had more children than those who didn’t. Mothers and aunts of gay men also reported lower rates of medical conditions that could reduce their ability to have children. They said they’d had more partners than mothers and aunts of straight men (but this difference wasn’t statistically significant) and were also less concerned about family issues, and more likely to have been divorced. Finally, the personality test revealed that mothers and aunts of gay men were more extraverted.
That’s a big pile of factors tested, which makes me wonder about multiple testing issues with a small sample size. The study’s authors build a somewhat complicated narrative out of it all: They speculate that the same genes that make men gay make women less likely to have fertility-reducing conditions, but also more extraverted and more “relaxed” about building a family—which apparently also helps them have more children. So, okay, I guess that’s plausible given the results.
Here’s what the study doesn’t do, however: it doesn’t identify any specific genes involved in making gay men gay. It can’t actually test the hypothesis that there’s a genetic basis to same-sex attraction at all, much less the hypothesis that genes promoting same-sex attraction in men are located on the maternally-inherited X-chromosome. For those questions, you really need full pedigree data—or, better yet, lots and lots of genetic data; interviewing only female relatives isn’t remotely enough.
The text of the article doesn’t necessarily make that point as clearly as it could. The authors spend a great deal of time talking about the X-chromosome hypothesis, and though they make the requisite disclaimer in the Conclusions section—
With this type of limited data, we cannot directly derive a causal connection between the hypothetical sexually antagonistic autosomal or X-chromosome-linked genetic factors and health, behavior, and personality.
—that disclaimer elides the point that their data set can’t really test anything to do with genetics indirectly either.
The authors repeatedly describe their sample as a “pilot study,” however, so maybe something bigger, and more rigorous, is in the works.◼
Reference
Camperio Ciani, A., Fontanesi, L., Iemmola, F., Giannella, E., Ferron, C., & Lombardi, L. (2012). Factors associated with higher fecundity in female maternal relatives of homosexual men. The Journal of Sexual Medicine DOI: 10.1111/j.1743-6109.2012.02785.x
Via Bora Zivkovic: Today over a thousand people gathered in Newton, North Carolina, to protest reprehensible anti-gay remarks made by a local pastor. Which, good for them! But when you stage a protest against proposing to basically put gay people in concentration camps (or, let’s be fair: dude actually proposed just one big concentration camp), you’ve got to expect that there will be some counter-protesters. And you never know who you’ll meet counter-protesting a protest against a proposed homocaust:
Earlier in the day, one counter protester was caught off guard when a peacekeeper working with protest organizers to keep participants separated from counter protesters saw someone he recognized. The peacekeeper told [this reporter] that one of the counter protesters, a man in his mid-20s or early-30s, once hit on him at a local adult bookstore. The counter protester denied the accusation while holding a sign that condemned gays. The counter protester left the protest early. [Emphasis added.]
Way to break free of the stereotypes, counter protester dude! How does that line go? … Then they came for the lesbians and the queers, and I enthusiastically endorsed that idea, because no way am I into that sort of thing regardless of what you heard and anyway even if I was, speaking hypothetically, it was just some sinful experimentation in college and then many, many times again after college.◼
One of the most interesting ideas in Joan Roughgarden’s book Evolution’s Rainbow is that across the animal kingdom, many behaviors that we associate with gender—aggressiveness in males, nurturing of young by females—do not line up with biological sex as cleanly as we might think. One good example I’ve discussed before is white-throated sparrows, a species in which either the male or the female in a mated pair can take the aggressive role of defending the pair’s nesting territory.
That principle is echoed in a paper recently published in the journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociology. This time the subject is not birds, but electric fish. Electric fish generate, and can sense, weak electric fields, which they use to navigate their environment—and for social signalling.
Here’s video of a male and female of the species Brachyhypopomus pinnacaudatus interacting, via the website of Philip Stoddard, the senior author on the new study. The fishes’ electric fields are made audible in the soundtrack, as sort of scratchy noises.
Male and female electric fish typically generate detectably different electric signals. However, Stoddard’s team have found some evidence that “masculine” electrical signals may be more generally associated with aggressive social interaction for eletric fish of both sexes—in more crowded conditions, female electric fish start to signal more like males.
The team recorded electric signals from the electric fish Brachyhypopomus gauderio in both a natural population in Guatemala, where population density varied over several sampling periods, and in the lab, under experimentally varied population densities. In both the field and the lab, female fish generated signals with greater amplitude—a “masculine” signal trait—when the population density was higher. Females also generated signals of longer duration—another “masculine” trait—when the ratio of females to males in the population was greater.
Blood tests on female fish in the field study found increased levels of testosterone—which has previously been connected to more “masculine” electrical signals—associated with a higher female-to-male ratio. However, this wasn’t replicated in the lab study.
So it looks like the female fish in this study use the same kind of signalling for aggressive social interaction that males do. That suggests the general differences between male and female signals are more due to differences in how often each sex interacts aggressively than because of physiological differences between the sexes per se.◼
Reference
Gavasa, S., Silva, A., Gonzalez, E., Molina, J., & Stoddard, P. (2012). Social competition masculinizes the communication signals of female electric fish. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology DOI: 10.1007/s00265-012-1356-x
Woke up to this on NPR this morning: Writer and activist Armistead Maupin, discussing President Obama’s big statement on marriage equality with “Weekend Edition Saturday” host Scott Simon.
Well, we talk about bullying a lot in this country as if it’s something that’s generated in schoolyards, but in fact it’s generated in churches, and by politicians—by parents, even, who don’t even consider the fact that their own children might be gay. So when something like this comes from the top, from the very top, it’s gonna filter down. It can’t help but filter down.
We can certainly hope it will. Maupin also touches on his relationship with a conservative, Republican-voting brother in North Carolina.◼