Gay Biology # 1

Two fruit flies in a mating chamber. A Male (Male 1) and A Female. The male, with much discourtesy, begins to zip around the female in a weird manner (The Courtship Dance) – wings in rapid motion and body cirumambulating the Female, proboscis feeling…Ahem. Enter Male 2. The mating chamber gets crowded, after all it’s just a tiny 3” by 3” glass cuboid with a large depression in the centre for the flies…Male 2 begins a mating dance but seems to shower all attention on Male 1 whoz in it for Female – circling the male, touching, attempting copulation…I turn around excited, and call my classmates to watch. They feign disinterest. They feign anger. They feign preoccupation with measuring fruit fly pupation heights. My prof. gives a big lecture on “the un-natural and evolutionarily fatal act of homosexuality”. I fume with perfumed thoughts of him in Yama’s Purgatory. My gayness is fly gayness. The male fly wants to mate with another male fly. I want to mate with another human male. Period. The prof. knows that of course, but indefatigably tries to ‘counsel’ me - dropping hints about psychiatrists and the like. He doesn’t like it that I am gay and that I can do better than all his favoured straight chelas. Them, straight? I can give a million reasons why one shouldn’t use “straight” for a bunch of bigots, liars and basically crappy people who may incidentally like to sleep with women in their phantasy world. AND He wants ME as a STRAIGHT chela. Doesn’t help me that The Prof. was dad’s classmate thirty years back. I am told that the raison d’état that I should turn straight is that my dad has a PhD in reproductive biology and my mother has a PhD in socio-economic history! What more can I say!

I introduce another male (Male 3) into the mating chamber. Male 3 unfortunately seems to be confused. Dances in turns around Male 1, Male 2 or Female. Enter the Bisexual. Exit rationality. Well, we know that there are gay people and straight people, gay flies and straight flies. But bisexual flies and bisexual people? I suddenly notice that the chamber was really crowded and there was very little room for free movement. I transfer the flies into a slightly bigger chamber. Now we have gay flies, straight flies and no bisexual fly! This was what got me thinking. Are bisexual flies Pretenders? Or are they just confused in the heady pheromone cocktail in the miasmal mating chamber? Ditto for bisexual people. You’re either straight or gay. No in-betweens. Doesn’t make sense to me, neither does the gradation “index” of gayness or straightness. Male 3 now was happily carousing around Males 1 and 2. Wondered why there were so many gay flies in here together. Ran up to the department’s Drosophila stock centre where you have all the different varieties, or “mutants” as they are called, of fruit flies. Each mutant is supposed to be genetically different from an arbitrary standard model fly called the “Oregon-K” strain (Oregon for where they were first collected from, ‘K’ is the designated ID alphabet for the strain). Which means that somewhere in the “mutant”, the DNA configuration is ever so slightly different from the “standard” and this disparity is sufficient to make up for differences in appearance (different parts of the fly can show variation, for instance, eye colour), or behaviour (the Dance). So my flies it seems came from a mutant stock, say “X”. Simple questions as to where the stock was procured from etc got me on the net flybase (the fly gene database) searching for flies which were known to be gay. And Voilà! “X” strain is known to carry a gene that supposedly made the flies “gay”. The gay gene, as it is called, when mutated causes “mating preference alterations” leading to “attempts of same-sex copulation”…he he he…it was rather funny reading all that crap written in formal scientific language, in a rather prestigious science journal. But it is probably true that there is a genetic basis for homosexuality. This does not mean, of course, that there is one gay gene that controls a switch on whether flies or people are made gay or straight. It is not like the well-known genetic switch that controls sex/gender during foetal development. The ‘switch’, if there is one, is likely to be a combination switch for genetic (yet incompletely unravelled), hormonal (during puberty or before, the womb), developmental (as a foetus, interacting with maternal supplies that may include influential hormones and drugs) and/or environmental (too many to list…) keys. We probably have a long way to go before we have a decent understanding of the works. I’m not sure whether we are born gay or straight or we become gay or straight after attaining puberty but most certainly, it is then that we realise that we are gay or otherwise, isn’t it?

One point I grant my prof. That homosexuality is an evolutionary dead end. Evolution, as I understand, works on the principle of begetting. And in natural populations of wild organisms, if you are gay, you don’t beget (big assumption, I know, but read on…). If you don’t beget, then you as an individual don’t contribute to variation, which makes you unconcerned with the screen of natural selection - no natural selection, no evolutionary future. Evolutionarily or otherwise speaking, you can’t have gay species. It doesn’t make sense. But how do you explain gay flies then? Well, gay flies form a tiny percentage of the flies born in every generation. They are born in every generation due to mutations in a gene that ‘normally’ suppresses any ‘untoward’ behaviour. This tiny percentage is due to the statistical chances of that gene having undergone a random change or ‘mutation’ in its DNA configuration. This is also why we have gay lions and gay chimps. Of course, there is no study that shows that gay flies don’t procreate. It’s a straight assumption of straight researchers which has not been backed up by proof. But in humans on the other hand, homosexuality has been known for eons (won’ go into that now!). Most gay people are married and have kids. It would be interesting to know the statistics of how many (if many) gay people beget gay children and other permutations and corollaries of that question. That could also explain why the estimated percentage of homosexuals in any given human population is so much percentage I have not come across reliable studies on this, but it would be really interesting in the context of homosexuality having a genetic basis or something more than that alone. I would really pity the researcher who attempts such a study, considering the difficulties he/she would have to face! It would be something like Sisyphus rolling up his rock!

Post-script: the incident of the gay fly took place when I was doing my M.Sc. in Zoology.