It didn’t have a name it was just a group,” said Mitch Draizin, president of the Midtown-based investment firm Longview Capital Advisors. That’s because it wasn’t until years later that it actually named itself - as the Gay Real Estate Group, or GREG - outing itself in the process. But you could say the group was in the closet.
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In the early 1990s, gay and lesbian professionals in commercial real estate formed a professional networking group to help each other find jobs.
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For a full report, see bit.ly/1jlECUg.Elizabeth Ann Stribling-Kivlan (Photo by Sasha Maslov) The study, presented at the American Society of Human Genetics annual meeting last week, has been criticised on several fronts. Ngun’s team found five gene regions in which methylation patterns differed between gay and straight brothers and used the results to develop a model that predicted sexuality with 67 per cent accuracy. Of the pairs, 10 were both gay while 37 pairs differed. He and his colleagues looked for epigenetic modifications made to the genes of 47 sets of male twins. This might be down to epigenetic changes – which switch genes on and off by adding or subtracting a methyl group. “I don’t believe in the censoring of knowledge, but given the potential for misuse of the information, it just didn’t sit well with me.” Ngun’s work was based on the idea that a male pregnancy might leave a marker that affects subsequent pregnancies. “I just left the lab last week,” he says. Tuck Ngun of the University of California, Los Angeles, is concerned his work could be misinterpreted by those who seek to punish people for being gay.
The scientist behind the latest study looking at how genetics might influence sexuality has abandoned research in the field. Read more: Click here to read a longer version of this article (Image: George Panagakis/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty) That would be a pity, because sexual orientation is one of the most fundamental and fascinating variations in humanity that we can study. My fear is that the furore stirred up will inhibit it. I hope Ngun’s findings will stimulate more research. People who understand the role of biology in sexuality are more likely to be accepting and inclusive. That means epigenetics may only make a difference when combined with a certain genetic background.įinally, such work won’t worsen homophobia. There is room for genes and imprinting, and in fact they may synergise. What’s more, the study doesn’t discount the idea of genes directly influencing sexuality. Even if it can be replicated in more twins with highly correlated methylation patterns, it is unlikely to work in unrelated members of the public. Firstly, Ngun’s work does not amount to a sexual orientation test. Some of the coverage created misconceptions that need correcting. The society issued its own press release about the work to major media, and not surprisingly there were soon headlines about the new “gay gene test” and concerns about abuses, such as elimination of homosexuality via abortion. Ngun sent an abstract based on preliminary data to the American Society of Human Genetics, hoping for feedback at its conference last week. Five were identified which, together, could classify the sexual orientation of 37 gay/straight twin pairs with 67 per cent accuracy. The latest study by Tuck Ngun, also at UCLA, scans 4 million potential methylation points (see “ ‘I quit’: concern over gay genetics“). He looked at 30,000 methylation sites in all, but though several correlations turned up, this could not be repeated.
It could not be tested at the time, but some evidence came from X chromosome methylation patterns in mothers of gay men.īocklandt later headed to the University of California, Los Angeles, and tested imprinting directly by comparing the entire genome’s epigenetic marks in male identical twins of whom one was gay and one straight. We illustrated this by suggesting how atypical imprinting of the X chromosome could lead to failure to inactivate feminising genes or activate masculinising ones, resulting in same-sex attraction in males. That led me and graduate student Sven Bocklandt to hypothesise in 2003 that epigenetics may play a role. Despite such work, it was clear that inherited differences in DNA could not account for all of the observed variation in sexual orientation.