This, he explained, “is a pattern consistent with a special type of inheritance called sex linkage” (20). This search revealed a disproportionate number of gays on the mother’s side of the family rather than the fathers. Initially, Hamer traced the lineages of gay men, looking for signs of homosexuality among relatives.
Hamer does not assume that the process by which a male becomes gay and how a female becomes lesbian is necessarily the same, and his search for a gay gene in this study is limited to males. In the author’s own words, his goal in writing this book is “to describe what we found using the tools of modern genetics, how biological findings can broaden rather than narrow our understanding of the diversity of human sexual expression” (15). In a surprisingly entertaining way, researcher Dean Hamer, with the help of writer Peter Copeland, describes with great detail, personality, and reader-friendly scientific explanations about the discovery of a linkage between male homosexuality and DNA markers on the X chromosome.
Why Am I Gay? (a book review on The Science of Desire)
