Notes on the Straight Pill panel

[drewan]

This morning I received an email from a local convention regarding a panel I'd suggested. At Gaylaxicon 2009 we did a panel called "The Straight Pill." Here's my response to the email.

I absolutely want to be on this panel. I believe that this panel was one of our best at Gaylaxicon 2009.

This panel originated out of my time last summer when I was in ASL classes for two months. I started to see so many parallels between the Gay community and Deaf culture. Individuals in either can grow up alone and completely unattached to anyone who is also gay or deaf. Parents have a huge amount of control over a juvenile's access to gay or deaf communities and resources, and to how we form healthy self identities as a gay or deaf individuals. There are HUGE and very painful debates in the deaf culture around the subject of cochlear implants.Similar debates already happen around reparative treatment for homosexuality (which most believe doesn't even work). What if it was more direct like a device or drug?

Suggested viewing for the panel:

Sound and Fury: (http://soundandfuryfilm.com/) This is a documentary about a familie's struggle with the choice of whether to give their children coclear implants or not. Very powerful and even a bit painful to watch at times. This movie is available on Netflix Instant View and DVD.

Twilight of the Golds: While this movie isn't about a straight pill, it does resolve around a pregnant woman knowing her child will be gay. She and her family struggle around her debate whether to keep her pregnancy or not. She has a gay brother, played by Brendan Fraser, who really takes it personally that she would even consider an abortion just because her child is gay. Sadly this movie is not available on Netflix. I'll see if I can find it somewhere else. Joe thinks we have this on VHS.

Century City: Episode 5 "Sweet Child of Mine". The episodes revolves around a fertility doctor who refuses to tell his clients that their child will be gay. He has already noticed a steep decline in the births of gay children, and fears the complete decimation of the gay community. This is viewable on HULU (http://www.hulu.com/watch/78155/century-city-sweet-child-of-mine#s-p1-so-i0)

Some other angles that were raised in the Gaylaxicon panel were:

1. If there is a way to make gay people straight, is the reverse true? A good SF literary example is in David Gerrold's "Jumping Off The Planet" where for population control the government offers college scholarships for anyone willing to turn gay.
2. Could the pill become a party drug? "I feel like being gay tonight. Or straight tonight." What would happen if you overdosed?
3. Would this be a one time treatment, or on going? When a Deaf person takes off his or her cochlear implant, he or she is still deaf. If a gay person takes off his or her straight device, or stops taking the straight pill, will he or she be gay again? What are the implications of not completing/continuing treatment.
4. How would this treatment be used in conservative cultures? What if the treatment was a hat, or some other kind of noticeable device like a cochlear implant? Would conservative parents choose to make their gay child straight even though the device would be noticeable to everyone? A real scarlet letter situation.

Regarding the description:

I would leave off the "cure" word from the description. I fear that might bias the conversation in an uncomfortable direction. How about changing it to "What are the implications of a drug or device that could alter one's sexual preference?"

I'd suggest modifying the Deaf culture analogy a bit too. I'd change it to "Can parallels be drawn from cochlear implants and the Deaf community? Is it a cure or the destruction of a culture?"

Here is my complete suggested description:

Some scientists have claimed to find a 'gay gene'. What are the individual and societal implications of a drug or device that could alter one's sexual preference, either temporarily or permanently? Can parallels be drawn from cochlear implants and the Deaf community? Is it a cure or the destruction of a culture?

Comments

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

the original description, the one that went out live for people to look at and sign up for on march ninth, was as follows:

SF000938 The Straight Pill Writing a "cure" for homosexuality. What utopian and dystopain futures could lead from such an idea?


no shit.

i talked to tim wick about it, he agreed to drop the "utopian", and then later in the email conversation, matt savelkoul got involved, realized the description was totally wrong, and put up the description that is up now.

i don't think that the current programming model at convergence can be trusted to handle programming topics that are any deeper than "let's yell about how much we love/hate X".

[drewan.livejournal.com]

That hasn't been my experience when I've been on CONvergence panels in the past.

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

it's been mine.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Are there interesting connections to the science-fictional treatment of relatively easy sex changes? (Which mostly aren't related to transgender people; people who have sex changes in John Varley's universe for example don't seem to be doing it for reasons anything like why people use our own rather primitive technology today; same for the one visible case in Bujold's books, Donna/Dono Vorutyer.) In both of those examples, I remember it as changing their sexual preferences as well as their physical configuration.

[huladavid.livejournal.com]

In one of my ASL classes the teacher (about sixty years old at the time and born deaf) talked about the first time he was at Galladet University. It sounded just like a coming out experience to me.

(I chose to use "deaf" to describe the teacher because he was born into and raised to the "Hearing". After the experience above he started becoming culturally Deaf. I gotta add that I'm a hearing guy, so take it with a grain of salt.)

[ludomancer.livejournal.com]

This is really interesting. It actually sounds a lot like circumcision debates.

The general flow is:
a) is condition X harmful?
b) if yes, then early parental intervention is justified
c) if no, then it's cosmetic and should be made available to adults but never imposed on children

Unfortunately, every debate hits a terminal snag on the (a) part.

[davidschroth.livejournal.com]

Sounds like a really cool panel/idea for a panel.

[zentinal.livejournal.com]

Hey, don't forget "Hard Pill", which addresses the subject directly - http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0443530/

It even comes with its own controversial web site - http://www.hardpill.com/

[drewan.livejournal.com]

Hah... of course there is an movie on this. I swear I've never heard of this movie before now. Just added it to our Net Flix queue.

[zentinal.livejournal.com]

Heh! It just shows how exhausted you were at the time from running a kick ass convention.

[dangerdhotrod.livejournal.com]

The basic premise of all this is that it is something that is genetic and can be changed, right? As if it's a binary operation on a single gene. Seems to me the panel is kind of leaving out whether this is true or not. What about bisexuals? What about people who are pretty much straight but have experimented with homosexuality? I think of sexual development as a combination of nature/nurture personally (oh also plus I believe there's a third thing going on there too that relates to something like spirituality).

To me the question sounds more like: What if there was a pill that could make shoe fetishists not be shoe fetishists anymore? Is there a genetic marker for shoe fetishism? Sounds silly from that perspective that you could ever see that coming before someone is born and all grown up. But maybe as a developed individual you could somehow hunt down that shoe fetishism part of the brain and alter it or block it with a drug or procedure...

But let's say it could happen that a straight pill existed...I like to think that it would totally fuck everything up, it would turn out that homosexuals serve a vital role in species survival especially in large populations. And also that these different kinds of unions have other kinds of hard to define values, that man/man man/woman woman/woman pairings have unique spiritual value that deeply influence reality, if they were to be gone it would set humanity back in a big way, somehow related to karma. But nobody wants to hear about all that probably, it's not very sci-fi.

I think these traits are more complex than we define them to be and they mean different things for different people as well and to try to eliminate those traits you're going to end up eliminating a whole bunch of other things without realizing it. I also think that in order to engineer a person guaranteed of lacking the possibility of homosexual desire you're going to end up with some really messed up individuals. The idea is first that you're locking in male/female gender definitions, and then you're making sure that people of the same gender can't empathize with each other too. You'd have to be clear that men were men and women were women. To allow any sort of leeway in those rules would give for the possibility of homosexuality, wouldn't it? Would there be such a thing as a feminine man or a masculine woman in this new world? I don't see how there could be, because that seems like it would lead to homosexual desire. The only solution leads thought control really. What would the world look like if you made it so there was no color yellow? It's confusing.

How does that relate to deaf people and cochlear implants? Good question! I would want to hear what some deaf people say about that.

[zentinal.livejournal.com]

Sure it's Sci-Fi. Last I checked, biology, anthropology, sociology, etc. are all sciences.

And then there's also fantasy, equally as valid a medium for exploring these issues.