Simon Levay

In Gay, Straight, and the Reason Why: The Science of Sexual Orientation, author and neuroscientist Simon LeVay examines a plethora of research done by scientists across the globe who’re trying to unlock the puzzle of sexual orientation. Although most people are attracted to the opposite sex, a minority of people are attracted to the same (or both) sexes. Why? For over a century, psychologists, biologists, and sociologists have been examining this phenomenon. After pouring over all the data currently available, and conducting intensive research of his own, LeVay’s conclusion on the origin of sexual orientation closely matches my own; non-heterosexual orientations are caused mainly by biological factors.
Simon LeVay attracted national attention
By 1991, he’d graduated from Cambridge, Göttingen, and Harvard Medical School and served as an instructor in the department of neurobiology, the assistant and associate professor of neurobiology, and affiliate and member of the working committee for the neurobiology program at Harvard Medical School (LeVay, “Curriculum Vitae”). He became interested in studying the brains of people who were attracted to the same sex when he read a study published by Laura Allen and her colleagues that reported that the “nerve cells in the hypothalamus of rats was ‘sexually dimorphic’, that is, different in size between the sexes” (LeVay, “My Life”). Intrigued, LeVay decided to do a blind study (“meaning that the individual brain specimens are coded so that you don’t know which specimen comes
For example, I’ll definitely use his summary of the differences between the physical makeup of the brains of hetero- and non-heterosexual people. LeVay writes that gay adults are often have “gender-shifted” brains; gay males are likely to have brains that look and act similarly to a straight female’s and and gay females are likely to have brains that look and act similarly to a straight male’s in a variety of (but not all) areas. He goes on to say that this doesn’t mean that gay men are doomed to behave effeminately (or the converse with gay women) but that there is an observable, measurable difference in the way that the brains of non-heterosexual people look and behave when compared to those of their heterosexual counterparts (LeVay, Gay, Straight, and The Reason Why 107-114). I also intend to use evidence that LeVay has gathered on the how, when, and why non-heterosexuality is heritable. He writes, “Estimates of the heritability of homosexuality have been quite variable but range around 30%-50% for both sexes, which is similar to heritability estimates for many other psychological traits” (Gay, Straight, and The Reason Why 279). That means that a sibling of a non-heterosexual person has a