Or that child abuse can lead to lesbianism when the special needs of a little girl are denied, ignored, or exploited and the future womanhood of the child is in jeopardy. Some believed homosexuality was caused by a difference in brain structure. Simon LeVay published research stating that sexual orientation may be the result of differing brain structures (Stombler Rd. 9). The hypothalamus, a region in the brain that governs sexual behavior, was the structure that LeVay was pinpointing as the structure at fault. In his studies of the hypothalamus, he found that in homosexual men, the hypothalamus was smaller than that of heterosexual men. Instead, it was the size of the female hypothalamus, thus explaining their sexual tendencies.
More recently, however, scientists have begun to view sexual preferences as hereditary. It is no longer a question of nature vs. nurture. Most homosexual men and women have always had the same sexual orientation. Some individuals go through a gay phase as a result of emotional or mental rejection. This helps explain why some individuals carry the gay gene, but don't express it. And adversely, why other individuals don't possess the gay gene, but do express gay tendencies. There was one man in particular that took great interest in this debatable topic. A graduate from Harvard University with his Ph.D. in Genetics, Dr. Dean Hamer now works in a division of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) as chief of Gene Structure and Regulation Section of the Laboratory of Biochemistry. The NCI became especially interested in Kaposi's sarcoma (KS), a cancer of the skin cells that appears most frequently in Greeks, Italians and in gay men with AIDS (Corvino 112-122). Hamer began thinking about the role of genes in "complex traits" and began to question the possible role of genes in sexual orientation. He began his research by drawing out family pedigrees of gay men to prove its heredity.