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were “assumed to have been mostly or all heterosexual on the basis of the numerical preponderance of heterosexual men in the population.” Ibid. LeVay anticipated challenges based on the confounding influence of HIV, since all of his “homosexual” subjects had died of AIDS. See LeVay, The Sexual Brain, p. 121; LeVay, Queer Science, p. 320 n. 43. His response, however, is only to concede that “there is always the possibility that gay men who die of AIDS are not representative of the entire population of gay men.” The Sexual Brain, p. 144.

69 has sent up the twins study Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal, pp. 9–10.

70 Does this mean, Warner asks Ibid.

71 Yet as literary critic Eve Sedgwick “[J]ust as it comes to seem questionable to assume that cultural constructs are peculiarly malleable ones, it is also becoming increasingly problematical to assume that grounding an identity in biology or ‘essential nature’ is a stable way of insulating it from societal interference. If anything, the gestalt of assumptions that undergird nature/nurture debates may be in the process of direct reversal. Increasingly, it is the conjecture that a particular trait is genetically or biologically based, not that it is ‘only cultural,’ that seems to trigger an estrus of manipulative fantasy in the technological institutions of the culture.” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 43.

72 As envisioned in Jonathan Tolins’s play Jonathan Tolins, The Twilight of the Golds (New York: Samuel French, 1992). The play takes its name from the last opera in Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle, Die Götterdämmerung, “The Twilight of the Gods,” in which the world is brought to an end by the pursuit of godly power in exchange for love. Suzanne, the daughter of the Gold family, learns that the child she is carrying will be homosexual, like her brother David. In deciding whether or not to abort, the family members struggle with the implications of Suzanne’s decision for each of them, but particularly for David.

73 Others have made subtler claims See, for example, Samuel Marcosson, “Constructive Immutability,” University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law 3 (May 2001): 646–721.

74 Such a defense “Even an immutable bisexual is perceived to have a choice—he can choose to fit into the heterosexual matrix by selecting a partner of the opposite sex.” Kenji Yoshino, “The Epistemic Contract of Bisexual Erasure,” Stanford Law Review 52 (January 2000): 406. Janet Halley notes that immutability operates as an exoneration strategy because it eliminates choice. She then points out that the immutability theory “does not explain why bisexuals—by hypothesis capable of satisfactory sexual encounters with members of the so-called ‘opposite’ sex—should not be encouraged or forced to do so.” Janet E. Halley, “Sexual Orientation and the Politics of Biology: A Critique of the Argument from Immutability,” Stanford Law Review 46 (February 1994): 518–19, 528.

75 As literature professor Leo Bersani Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 57.

GAY PASSING

1 He instinctively knows Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, in The Oxford Book of English Verse, 2nd ed., ed. Arthur Quiller-Couch (New York: Oxford University Press, 1939), p. 562.

2 The answer for when the movement See John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–70, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 1–2. D’Emilio’s work argues against that conventional wisdom. See ibid.

3 The preceding decades are often described Ibid.

4 Others came out Clendinen and Nagourney describe people coming out in bars in Dudley Clendinen and Adam Nagourney, Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), p. 17. D’Emilio describes people coming out in Communist-type cells in Sexual Politics, p. 64. Duberman describes people coming out during conversion therapy in Cures, pp. 93–115.