Returning 10 years later to one of the most-read Boston Globe stories, we find new evidence that the answers lie in the womb.
By Neil Swidey
I was apprehensive as I sat in the coffee shop, waiting for them to arrive. After all, 10 years is a long time, especially in the lives of children. Would I find that the identical twin boys, whom I had met when they were just 7 years old, had turned out the way the studies suggested they would? Would they even remember me?
Back in 2005, they had arrived as if stepping out of the pages of a Pottery Barn Kids catalog, twins with identical blue eyes, wavy hair, and freshly scrubbed handsome little faces. Yet even then it had been immediately clear their personalities were profoundly different. To protect their privacy, I had referred to them in print as Thomas and Patrick, so I will do the same now. At the time, Thomas was all boy, with such an instinct for roughhousing that, within minutes of meeting me, he had punched me in the arm. Patrick was more social, attuned, and sensitive, addressing me by name and exhibiting genuine interest in what I had to say. He also exhibited something else, as his mother had explained to me: behavior called childhood gender nonconformity. That meant he rejected boy-typical activities like the rough-and-tumble play favored by his brother and instead showed a strong and persistent preference for girl-typical pursuits, such as playing with Barbie dolls and dressing up in princess costumes.
The intriguing case of Patrick and Thomas figured prominently in my 2005 Globe Magazine article “What Makes People Gay?” I had chosen their story to anchor a deep dive into the research on the origins of sexual orientation because strong gender nonconformity in young boys is one of the most reliable predictors of same-sex attraction in adult males. While you might assume that boys who behave like this would grow up to be transgender, most studies have found that what tends to be different about them in adulthood is not their gender identity but rather their sexual orientation. The bulk of these boys grow up to be gay or bisexual men.
Patrick and Thomas began as genetic clones when one of their mother’s eggs was fertilized by one of their father’s sperm, and then that zygote split into two identical embryos. Upon birth, they were raised by the same nurturing parents in the same stable household. So if one of them turned out to be gay and the other straight — which their childhood behavior suggested would statistically be the mostly likely outcome — that would expose the inadequacy of the long dueling nature-vs.-nurture theories about the roots of homosexuality. How could it be either all in the genes or all in the upbringing if both of those realms were so similar for Patrick and Thomas?
A decade ago, I learned that the most promising frontier in sexual orientation research didn’t focus on genes or the environment in the traditional sense, but rather the environment of the womb. For Patrick and Thomas, that meant lots of important and potentially decisive action had likely taken place during their nine-month prenatal launchpad.
“What Makes People Gay?” became one of the best-read stories online in the history of the Globe, improbable for an article dense with science and absent any hint of a political scandal or sports championship run. Moreover, it has shown uncommon endurance. For instance, in 2012, a full seven years after publication, it ranked as the fourth most-read story of the year on the newspaper’s website.
Over the last decade, barely a month has gone by when I haven’t received an e-mail from at least one reader finding the article for the first time. These notes tend to be poignant, often coming from adolescents or their parents grappling with questions about sexual orientation, urgently Googling in search of answers. And with remarkable frequency, these e-mailers have closed by asking me variations of the same two questions: What’s changed in the research on sexual orientation since the story was first published? And how did things turn out for Patrick and Thomas?
For years, I had no new answers for them. It finally seemed like time to change that.
