Kate Zambreno

"I used to be a woman and now I'm a man." The young man holding the microphone pauses for dramatic effect as everyone grows quiet. "Kidding."

At Ryan Auditorium, the largest classroom in the mammoth Tech Hall at Northwestern University, hundreds of coeds outfitted in North Face jackets and sloppy sweats giggle nervously. Seven men in their late twenties and thirties, immaculately dressed with polished black shoes and jeans or chinos slung just right, sit on stage and sip bottled water. "Jesus, I spent twenty-one years becoming an urban homosexual. Really, it's a full-time job," jokes one, a University of Chicago grad student, when introducing himself to the Human Sexuality class. The undergraduate psychology course taught by Michael Bailey has been one of Northwestern's most popular courses over the past decade, in large part because of these after-class panels where students are encouraged to ask whatever's on their mind to a game group of sexual minorities.

"You can't ask us something we haven't been asked. There's really nothing that's off limits," encourages the moderator, a downstate philosophy of science professor who has been participating in the panel for years. "But you must actually ask some questions about sex, or Dr. Bailey will be mad." A tall, unassuming man also dressed in black, leaning against the side wall, nods at his teasing friend but doesn't say anything. He's done with lecturing for the day.

More giggles and defensive adjusting of baseball caps, then curiosity gets the best of the students. "Try to guess which of us have slept together," someone challenges from the panel, which is composed of two couples and three single men. One set of partners, a photographer and a securities trader, reveal that they share a third boyfriend. "So there's three of you in one relationship? Isn't that kind of weird?" a male student awkwardly asks as his grinning friends elbow him. "At first, he was just a trick we picked up," one of them begins.

"Top or bottom?" another student asks. "I can't top that," one of the gay men retorts after his friend to the left answers "bitchy bottom." "I can't top you," he fires back, to applause. Questions range from adventurous, like a group of girls begging for blowjob tips ("try to have fun and, remember, no teeth") to silliness ("Doesn't anal sex hurt?" answer: "You don't know what you're missing, honey.") to probing coming-out stories.

Then the show-stopper that never fails to elicit shock and awe from the mostly straight collegiate audience. Someone asks the panelists their magic number, that is, how many other men they've slept with. The first man rounds off at 500, eliciting gasps. The next doubles the number to a thousand. Pandemonium breaks out. Everyone's squirming. Then two more numbers in the same range. A guesstimate of 100 to 150 draws applause for the comparative prude of the group. "These people are whores," he camps. Then roughly 700. The students are now covering their face. "Do the math! I'm 40," he jokes. The expression on the faces of two frat boys is more jealousy than disgust. "You've seen one dick, you've seen them all," one panelist complains.

Dr. Bailey smiles from his viewpoint from the side. The day with the "gay guys," as he calls them, is always his favorite. What better way to illustrate his theories on sexual nature? If pressed, he could explain these large numbers and apparent lack of sexual--although not emotional--monogamy among the gay panel by way of evolution, that all men would engage in as much casual sex as possible if women didn't also play a part. But the real fun of today's panel is the looks on his student's faces, half who'd admitted in an earlier survey to being virgins. After studying the science of sex for more than a decade, it's almost impossible to shock Bailey.

While many would nudge and whisper--Is she or isn't she? Is he or isn't he?--Bailey has the habit of strolling up to a striking woman with just a hint of Adam's apple at a nightclub, or a flaming gay boy with delicate features working at a department store makeup counter, and just coming out with it. He introduces himself as a psychologist currently studying the relationship between femininity and homosexuality and if the subject of his endless curiosity is receptive, if not flattered, he will strike up a blunt conversation.

As the sex scientist and associate professor of psychology writes in his first book "The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Psychology of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism," published this March by Joseph Henry Press, usually within a few minutes of chatting he can hypothesize the necessary bio. Of the overtly feminine young man at the makeup counter, his destiny according to Bailey is already manifest:

"I do not ask Edwin about his childhood because I do not need to. I already know that Edwin played with dolls and loathed football, that his best friends were girls.

I know that he was often teased by other boys, who called him 'sissy.' I am fairly certain that his parents did not encourage his feminine behavior, and if I had to bet, I'd say his father was unhappy about it...Although I didn't ask him, I know that Edwin likes to have sex with men. Not all gay men are like Edwin, but almost all men like Edwin are gay."

What makes Bailey so brazenly confident in his outing ability? Because the mild-mannered sex researcher who specializes in the kinky and controversial has devoted the past decade to nailing certainties about gay versus straight. To Bailey, sexual orientation should be studied as a science, and gayness is all in the genes.

While having coffee at the Caribou Coffee on Broadway, such a popular pickup place for gay men that it's referred to as the "Gay Caribou" in personal ads, Bailey scopes out the tailored and bicepped and tanned room of caffeinated male energy with a trained eye. His recent research links homosexuality with gender nonconformity, recruiting straight and gay subjects to study sexual orientation by posture, speech patterns, career choice (like the omnipresence of the gay dancer) and activity preferences.

Although now he could spot a gay guy from a mile away, Bailey admits that his "gaydar" was not always this fine-tuned. His first encounter with someone out of the closet was a boy in his high-school French class who was way too fabulous for the Dallas suburb where Bailey grew up. "Thinking back, he was flaming, you know, we had French names, and he was Olivier," Bailey laughs. "That in and of itself. But he was really into Hollywood stars and gossip and he had the mannerisms and the voice. I thought he was tremendous fun."

The 45-year-old Wrigleyville resident regularly frequents the Boys Town epicenter for inspiration, to further immerse himself in the dating rituals and behavior of gay men. While writing his book, he says that the testosterone-fueled hotspot also served as less distraction from the opposite sex. For this psychologist, who has devoted his life to studying gay men, is actually straight.

In a field where the large majority of scientists are same-sex oriented, Bailey comes at gay research through a more objective perspective. "There are both advantages and disadvantages to being a straight guy studying gay people," he says. "The disadvantage is, I think that often it's easier to be aware of something if you have experienced it." For example, through interviewing countless gay male subjects and a detailed analysis of personal ads, Bailey developed the notion of "femiphobia," the idea that femme men are not viewed as sexually attractive in the gay community ("Seeking GWM, well-built, no drugs, no smoking, no femmes" etc.).

In "The Man Who Would Be Queen," Bailey theorizes that this societal emphasis on masculine men, regardless of sexuality, is the reason why some "unattractive" femmes decide to make the switch to becoming outrageously attractive females, a kind of transsexual that he distinguishes from those who undergo sexual reassignment because they sexually fetishize becoming women. "I had made these, to me, discoveries, and talked to gay people about it, and they said, 'Oh, duh, of course.' And then, on a less scientific basis, sometimes my motives are suspected. This happens less now than it used to in the early nineties. Like, why are you studying this? Do you want to find the cause so you can cure us? Like, really, the only legitimate reason for being curious about homosexuality is being gay. Which I think is really false and a bad way to think about it. I don't think you should have to be black to study black people or anything to study anything."

In his endless pursuit of understanding every aspect of gay culture, Bailey does not shy away from posing uncomfortable questions or theories. Like his belief that many gay men's repression is the result of being ostracized during childhood for acting more feminine. "I felt that there were these obvious, interesting connections between being gay and being femme and nobody wanted to talk about it. And it just struck me as very odd and a waste of a potentially fascinating scientific subject," he says.

"There used to be this strong feeling that it was kind of a taboo topic. I think it's linked to the childhood experiences of gay men, being kind of femme or sissies, they really were persecuted by parents and kids and so forth, so they want to forget it, and I'm bringing it up. See, I don't feel there's anything wrong with being a femme guy, but I think a lot of them kind of started to accept that it was kind of wrong." On the "gay guy" panel, a few of the otherwise open participants were a little defensive when asked about their childhood. They were familiar with Bailey's theories, even if they didn't agree with them. "I don't wear makeup. I'm not hugely into shopping. I'm into cars," one responded.

Even straight men are not immune to this societal emphasis on gender roles, Bailey insists. Although a football-loving "normal" kid when growing up, Bailey remembers his father once calling him a sissy to make him stop crying. "I think lots of guys have moments in their past where they met the gender police." This butchy Texan built like a middle-aged linebacker and a divorced father of two teenagers, a boy and a girl, says that his kids are "tickled" by his research. His son even suggested that instead of dedicating the book to each of them separately, Drew and Kate, that he should make the epigraph Drew/Kate for mystery.

So how did this stereotypical breeder grow sensitive to the plight of grown-up sissies and she-males? While in graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin in the early eighties, Bailey played around with various dissertation topics like schizophrenia and IQ levels, but couldn't direct his studies towards a significant contribution in the field of psychology. "Plus, even though I was training to be a clinical psychologist, I didn't really like it," he says. "I didn't feel that I was especially good working with disturbed people." His interest became piqued during a human-sexuality class, in the research that was appearing linking homosexuality with genetics. His dissertation examined literature at the time that linked male homosexuality to prenatal stress on rats, repeating a previous study that posited that mothers of gay men experienced trauma during their pregnancy.

While the data did not support this thesis, interviews with a range of gay men yielded another type of "aha!" moment. Bailey asked the gay men in the study how many of their brothers were also gay, and found a much higher rate of fraternal homosexuality in gay than in straight men. Identical twins had an even higher rate of both being gay, higher than fraternal or regular biological brothers, a strong nod towards genetics playing a part in sexual orientation. In the early nineties, Bailey started earning notoriety with his identical-twins research. "It was a lot of fun working with gay people, " he says. "But at that time I did also have to get over my own homophobia because a lot of people were like, 'Oh, you're studying homosexuality, huh?'" He's still devoted to discovering the genes that affect sexual orientation, and is poised to get funding for a collaboration with the University of Chicago to study the DNA of homosexual men. However, most of the genetics research has become eclipsed by his gender nonconformity and "gaydar" studies and his recent inquiries into sexual arousal.

At Bailey's sex lab, really a tiny office on the second floor of a tiny addition to Northwestern's Swift Hall, Elizabeth Latty, one of his graduate students, shows clips of explicit seventies-era porn, intercut with more neutral stimuli like landscapes. Latty shows the vaginal probe used to measure lubrication during the female arousal study, then the penile gauge for the male portion. "It's kind of like a fancy rubber band," she says. Over the course of two years, Bailey and his team of Ph.D.s have run subjects, solicited first from ads in the paper, then drawn from Northwestern students, to test how much genital arousal plays in sexual orientation. The female portion of the study was funded through a controversial $147,000 grant from the federal National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development, paying women up to $75 to watch porn. What they found is that women have bisexual arousal responses. But just because they're turned on by two women going at it doesn't mean that they're gay, or even bi. Men, by contrast, were much easier to understand. Gay guys responded physically to men, straight guys to women. "I think women are extremely different and partly for that reason harder to understand. And with respect to sexual arousal, men make a lot of sense. You're attracted to men, you get aroused to men, you're attracted to women, you get aroused to women," explains Bailey. "Women don't work that way, evidently." The mysterious opposite sex, it seems, still frustrates the scientist so assured in his understanding of his own gender.

Not only did the federally funded sexual arousal study draw ire from the right (such as an angry op-ed in the conservative Washington Times), but some academics on the left view his work as detrimental to gay politics. "The people most into writing about gay and lesbian stuff have been the postmodernists. They have as their blanket assumption that everything's the product of culture, and that's simply wrong," he says. The matter-of-fact scientist obviously doesn't worry about being politically correct. "What they write is often incomprehensible, and I think that reflects their thought processes. I don't really care whether the postmodernists like me. People who share the common scientific values with me, I'm much more concerned that they understand what I'm saying and think that I'm doing good work."

Much of the findings of Bailey's research enforce controversial stereotypes. "Gay men, even femme gay men, are every bit as sexual as the butchest straight men. I think women are less driven by sexual motivation and more by emotional motivation." Gay men are feminine. Women are more emotional than men. If a guy had a choice, he'd sleep with as many people as possible. "On average," Bailey stresses, as if this bores him.

He then takes a deep breath and launches into what appears to be an oft-rehearsed speech. "Stereotypes are often true. They're not always true, but they're often true. What we have to remember, and I never forget, is that not everyone of a certain category fits a stereotype. There are exceptions. But, that said, it's a matter of whether there's something interesting in those stereotypes to be learned. To me, the fact that you can tell what kind of sex partners someone wants to have by listening to them speak, that's a fascinating find and I want to know why that's true. I think people who have this automatic, 'Oh, that's just a stereotype' response, I think they're actually preventing positive attitude change, because they're implying that there's something bad about these stereotypes."

(2003-04-02)

Also by Kate Zambreno

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Sew fine
Last year Cat Chow asked one thousand people to each donate one dollar, out of which she constructed an expensive-looking evening gown. Although she has been designing what she terms sculptural garments out of everyday objects like baby-bottle nipples, buttons and bobbins since 1997, the resulting work, "Not for Sale," made the artist and her witty, provocative dresses all the fashion.
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24 Hour Party People
Anyone who has ever attended Collaboraction's one-act Sketchbook festival, approaching its fourth season this fall, knows that the company has a firm command of spectacle
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Tip of the Week
It's true what they say about those ex-Catholic schoolgirls
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The Mourning After
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Freezing mad
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The wait is over
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Looking for a Buddy
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Veteran's luck
(2003-02-05)

Everything 101
(2003-01-22)

Doggie smile
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Afterlife, unlisted
(2003-01-15)

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