Gay Biology #2 - Scent of a Man

"The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose." – J. B. S. Haldane

One gay man sniffs out another…well, at least another man. Truly, Madly, Deeply. *sniffs eagerly* No scents, though *sniff of despair*…but it is so, insist a few researchers from the prestigious Karolinska institute in Sweden. In a very interesting study published in May 2005, they have attempted to show what we always knew – smells do matter; they are as important as turn-ons as turn-offs (the lab is suffused with a miasma – malodorous armpits of a particularly pesky project assistant, who has just walked in after a game of football…bah! What can’t be cured has to be endured!). Simply put, the brains of gay men, particularly an important area called the hypothalamus, respond to testosterone-derived chemicals in a manner similar to the brains of heterosexual women. Straight men responded to estrogen-derived chemicals, but the study strangely precluded any mention of lesbians and chemical effects on their brains thereof. These “putative pheromones” are, in fact, products of the body’s metabolism generated by gender-specific processes. This study purportedly supports a decade-old study that highlighted the differences in the hypothalamus of gay and straight men (unfortunately, not available free online).

So it has been my experience too. I used to love (and am still haunted by) the odours of S. I remember how he smelt where (sheesh! Its rather embarrassing writing all this!)…I was powerfully attracted by the smells of K. & V. But the attraction that way was not overtly manifest *grin* - one doesn’t go sniffing on streets! It’s subtle. Very subtle. Only when one reads such articles do things get magnified. I have a very good memory for smells. Until two years ago, I used to identify books by the publisher as each (I felt then) had a characteristic smell – I’m not so sure nowadays. But I am digressing. I‘d really like to know how our olfactory system recognizes these odours, ‘coz it is believed that we have lost critical genes responsible for “odour receptors” as we evolved to become humans today. It is supposed that vision took precedence over smell. It is also true that our brains might respond stereo-dimensionally to smell as we do to vision, but we may be impaired by a certain degree of loss of the olfactory sense (as opposed to other mammals like, for instance, dogs) – how do I locate the scent of an attractive man in a party of a hundred people? I most probably don’t. I look for him. I may smell him (unconsciously…hmm, or rather, subconsciously!) but that would be likely once I get close to him. He might smell me. If he’s gay, he’ll respond (visually and ‘olfactorily’) positively if he finds me attractive and then…but if he were straight, he’d respond (only visually) to shoo me away, if it becomes painfully obvious that I’m hitting at him! But what else do we do? We generously douse ourselves with parfum and sprays of all description. These artifices should be affecting our olfactory perception of natural chemical attractants. They mask our true selves (No, I’m no “natural-smells-always” person, I’m as guilty as the rest when it comes to this…but it isn’t too trying to be the devil quoting scripture, is it ;-) )…and perhaps our problems with finding the right partners may involve some smelly reason! But we are a very visual species and…hmm…what else is left to say than to repeat the great biologist Haldane’s words, this time in the literal sense in what he probably meant – without gay connotations.