Blindness and Homosexuality: What Can We Learn From This Fascinating Combination?

Today, my cognitive psychology teacher showed us a video about the phenomenon known as blindsight, or the ability of people who cannot consciously process visual information due to lesions in their primary visual cortex to respond to this stimulus, in spite of the fact that they cannot actually see it. Studies demonstrating the accuracy with which blind people can detect movement and discriminate amongst visual stimuli have yielded the insight that our behavior is guided by sensory information that is acquired without our explicit awareness.

How is it possible to perceive the world around us in spite of cortical blindness?

Human beings have two separate visual systems concerned with different aspects of vision. The first one allows us to "see." Its pathway involves more sophisticated and higher brain structures, such as the visual cortex. Within the context of an evolutionary timeline, this system has emerged relatively recently. The other system is phylogenetically ancient, and resides in the parts of the brain that we share with reptiles, rodents, birds, and other mammals. It relays information from the brain stem, a primitive structure native to all vertebrate. Reflexive behavior and directing eye movements are some functions of this older visual pathway.

Immediately, this video directed my thoughts to an internet article I encountered a year earlier that is authored by a blind man who also happens to be gay. I had conducted a Google search for "blind and gay" because I reasoned that the presence of gays in the blind community would largely refute the arguments that homosexuality is learned. After all, many of the models concerning observational learning, such as the one proposed by Albert Bandura, are primarily sight-oriented, and do not take into account how the visually impaired pick up on social cues and grow acclimated to gender roles.

I was fascinated, and still am, by the accounts of people who have been blind since birth and were aware of their same-sex attraction at an early age. Even with no conception of visual attraction, they report a romantic and sexual affinity for the voice and touch of members of the same sex. They develop an attraction towards one sex, but not the other.

One gay and blind man asserts that when he was as young as eight, he experienced strong feelings when hugging other boys that he did not experience when hugging other girls. By the time he attended college, he knew with certainty that he was gay, but was terrified of inquiring about the gay community due to the fear that the social difficulties he faced as a result of being blind would be compounded by an additional deviance from the "norm." (Those who maintain that being gay is a choice should seriously question why anyone who self-reports a significant amount of psychological distress due to an unfair social stigma would deliberately subject themselves to inheriting more animosity.)

As is the case with transgender individuals, we have another valuable, yet untapped, population, the empirical study of which contains the potential to fully understand the astonishingly rich enigma that is sexuality (and, in the case of the former, gender identity).

To what extent is the sexual and romantic experience of the visually impaired influenced by tactile sensation, sound, and the release of chemicals such as pheromones?

Is there a biological hardwiring or genetic predisposition to developing strong feelings of attraction for the same sex, and if this drive is innate, then does it require sensory cues, or is it merely amplified by them?

Are there differences in the incidence of homosexuality amongst people who are blind due to lesions in their primary visual cortex as opposed to people who have sustained damage in other parts of their brain, more specifically, the older visual system? Does this primitive visual system still detect distinctions between the motions and mannerisms of men and women?

The answers are right in front of us! The search for biological etiologies of homosexuality should include studies of people who are both blind and gay. There is so much insight to be generated! Why does this topic have such a scant presence in scientific literature?