20 | Outin the Mountains | January 2000

   

health & wellheing

Lily Tomlin Makes World AIDS Day appearance inBuriington

gathering.‘

World AIDS Day was December 1. Among the commemorations held
around the state was a candlelight vigil on the steps of the
Congregational Church in Burlington. A crowd of about 50 people braved
the cold to share light and hope with one another. Comedienne Lily
Tomlin, writer Peter Kurth, and Vermont CARES
executive director Tim Palmer were among the
{speakers who addressed the crowd during the

The vigil was preceded by a short reception with «:2
Tomlin, who was in town to perform her Search
for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe.

Orientation continued from p 19

not know this, but the men in
my age range are pathetic. So I
assume that my next lover will
be a woman.”

Now does she sound like
fun or what? Like so many

women who transition in and.

out of’ sexual identities,
Margaret’s flexibility. is
admirable (along with her salty.

humor). But maybe, even~for‘:

women as a group, it’s also
unusual. Most women (and

men) start out and stay hetero.-..

sexual. It seems the rest of us
do it differently depending on
our gender.’ ' I  ' ‘

Mara Vaijupgs}  

Bananas;-a¢s,,,Mn, 

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Caring for patients of all ages .

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Still no recipes

If learning to be open to the
world is the first step toward
lesbianism, then the religious
fundamentalists may be on to
something. ., Parenting that
encourages girls to be indepen-
dent may opens more of them
up to a range of options a sex-
ual and otherwise. If, in a gen’-
eral fashion, teaching girls to
resist-conformity leads‘more of
them to a lesbian identity, then
I shudder to think about how it
might be prevented.

For boys, and for reasons
that do not fit very well into

any theoretical scheme, we can
say with some confidence that
‘it’s genetic.’ But although
some interesting preliminary

work has provided some
details, they are a long way
from implying any sort of
intervention, the —. dreaded type
of prenatal testing A that "might
predict a boy’s adult sexuality.
Although some small stud-
ies have found the right sort" of
preliminary evidence, the
results» ‘are T "not quite Conclu-
sive: many of the gay menlack
the ‘critical? gene, suggesting
more than one is operating on
sexual, .or_ie,ntation'. Moreover,
howiany number of genes
operates in tF. regard leads to

  
     

 

further questions. What exactly

do‘they ~do?—7Does it- involve;
hormonal ‘regulation ’ or some, it

other: -3asp_ec't
ism/'?.i ' _i a »  ~ 
And because genes interact
with the environment, and sex-
ual orientation itself ‘is so‘co_m—
plex, chances are good that
we’re not looking at a one-to-
one,-gene—to-behaviorirelation-
ship. Howeverfas is the. case
with other complex clusters of
behavior, that does not then
mean that genes are unimpor-
tant, only that the mechanisms
may be impossible to fully
explain. ' g  
What’s more, ;as »l men-
tioned before, the sort of

of V brain chem-

? 0 H1769...

tterntont’

    
 
 
  

research that might answer

‘such “que$fi°“.$...:.iTS;ip.r9bab.lS*.._'_.a '17‘
“long way “from beingiconduet .L 

-ed: iitis too.“‘expensive, and the
‘pay-off, compared with.the»"{

 

pressing questions of detecting
bona fide genetic disease, is
questionable... . i. A i .

That’s not to say that the
ethical questions posed by
genetic research are resolved.
But given what we know so
far, I do not see a day when,
like in The Twilight of the
Golds, prenatal testing will
reveal a child’s sexual orienta-
tion any more than it would
predict her occupation. It’sjust'
not that simple.V

a e a condo, ,