One Small Step for Gay Science, One Giant Step Back for Gay Rights?

Scientists recently determined how to make gay fruit flies straight, and vice versa. The findings published in Nature
Neuroscience this week conjure up disturbing images of big pharma manufacturing drugs that erase homosexual desire while the religious right markets them.

This discovery makes Gary Greenberg’s “Gay By Choice?” published in Mother Jones in September/October 2007 all the more relevant. The gay rights movement
has been hoping science would vindicate it for far too long. But what if science proves that gayness is not an immutable trait, or worse, finds a way to “cure” it? Isn’t it time, as Greenberg
argues, “to find reasons other than medical science to insist that people ought to be able
to love whom they love”?

—Celia Perry