HOMOSEXUALITY in young people -

FOR PARENTS, TEACHERS and YOUTH WORKERS

by W. Dorr Legg

With pictures of Mars and moon walks on TV these days it seems hard to believe biologists who tell us that even more startling advances are happening in biological science than in technology. The important things, so they tell us, are to know more about man, and to better understand ourselves, if we hope to live fuller and happier lives.

Recent biological discoveries are opening new doors and revealing hitherto unsuspected facts about how man is put together and how he functions. With cool and scientific exactness biology is providing us with new ways of seeing ourselves, some of them startling in their novelty. As a result, foundations of many a cherished belief about human nature are being eroded away.

In few directions is this more true than concerning the nature of human sexuality. Despite all the discussion which has been given this topic lately, and the countless pages which have been published, the need for clearer guidelines to lead us through the welter of conflicting views and opinions seems

as acute as ever.

My hope will be to dispel in these pages if possible, certain misconceptions concerning human sexuality which have been responsible for causing painful discords between many parents and their adolescent children, discords which in some instances have inflicted psychological and other damage upon them both. The intention of these pages is to serve as a vigorously wholesome exercise in individual and group therapy.

The plan of presentation will be briefly to summarize some current biological research which has particular bearing upon. the topic of human sexual behavior. This will be followed with illustrations taken from history to show how differently, and with what results, various types of sexual expression have been dealt with in different periods. In conclusion, suggestions will be given for ways of looking at conditions as they exist in the United States today, and for our coming to terms with these conditions.

A FIXED POINT OF DEPARTURE Famed Harvard Professor George Gaylord Simpson writes, "It is the biological nature of man, both in his evolutionary

history and in his present condition, that presents us with our only fixed point of departure." Few biologists would dispute this statement, so we may as well start here with a single cell, that cell from which each of us began life. So small as to be barely visible without a microscope, this cell is the unfertilized egg as it is contained within the female ovary.

Like all human cells the egg cell is composed largely of liquid within which floats a nucleus. This nucleus contains twenty three pairs of tiny rodlike chromosomes. One of these pairs is quite unlike all the others and called the sex determining pair. In 1962 Watson and Crick were awarded Nobel Prizes for their discovery that around each of these chromosomes there intertwined a double helix made up of innumerable smaller particles called genes. Prior to then it already. had been fairly well demonstrated that these genes acted something like a computer to program cell growth, development and diversification in such ways as to determine how tall or how short, how dull or how bright each of us could become.

In the egg cell contained within the female parent the two sex determining chromosomes are alike. Biologists speak of them as X X. The much smaller cell, coming from the male to join the egg, also contains its twenty three pairs of chromosomes, but in this instance the odd pairs are not constructed symmetrically. Their arrangement of parts has been given the designation X Y.

If in sexual union these two cells join in such a way as to eliminate the Y factor the result will be a fertilized egg which contains only the XX chromosome combination. When born the child will therefore have the same sex chromosome "inventory" as the mother and be female. However, if the Y factor persists and "mates" with the X factor, the new chromosome combination will then be X Y, like that of the father, and the infant will be male.

In either case each succeeding cell in the infant's body will possess the X X or X Y make-up just described. As the fetus grows and takes on a large part of its final form and structure it is without any clearly defined male or female sex differentiation for much of the time. To use the biologists' term, it is during most of the period of gestation sexually indifferent.

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