Coming out to the Future: The Gay Gene Debate and the Heteronormative Discourse

The ”gay gene” debate sparked by Simon LeVay's and Dean Hamer's biogenetic researches in the early 1990s has opened up a new discursive space for gay/queer identity politics within the contemporary ”heteronormative” culture. This paper examines this debate, probing the positions taken by both sides, in part to explore the degree to which gay/lesbian resistance to heteronormative domination has been shifting and/or lapsing in the last decade, and in part to investigate those contradictions and paradoxes within gay/queer identity politics, which the gay gene debate itself has helped to uncover. The emphasis will be on how biogenetic science can provide a new conceptual framework to generate gay/lesbian self-reflections on the current strategies of homonormative identity politics. It is argued finally that an inevitably expanding future role for biotechnology will serve to clarify the inherent instabilities and unpredictabilities of both homonormative and hetero-normative discourses and values.