When Joe Normandin begins to question his sexuality as a teenager, he turns to neuroscience for help.
Joe Normandin earned a B.A. in Biology with a Specialization in Neuroscience from Boston University, where he worked as an undergraduate research assistant in labs studying the behavioral genetics of sexual orientation in people and female sexual behavior in a rat model. He earned a Ph.D. in Biological Sciences - Neurobiology and Behavior from Georgia State University, where he explored how the brain regulates sexual reflexes. He found evidence of a brain circuit that provides an anatomical/functional basis for the oft-reported side effects of delayed orgasm in those taking antidepressants. He is now a Lecturer and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Neuroscience Institute at Georgia State University. Dr. Normandin values the wonderful public education and support he received as a young gay man growing up in Massachusetts. Even with that education and support, he struggled with his identity as a gay person. In high school, a psychology class introduced him to neuroscience, which led to a search for research that he thought would validate his sexual orientation. This search set him on a path towards becoming a neuroscientist, and ultimately led to questions he explores in the classroom: Are people born gay? Does it matter? Dr. Normandin is also an avid gamer and has saved the universe many times.
This story originally aired on Jan. 12th, 2018, in an episode titled “Origin Stories”.
Story Transcript
I grew up in a town in Massachusetts called Methuen and on my first day of high school I put on my red Converse shoes and my red sweatshirt and I walked one block to the bus stop. There at the bus stop was another guy in a red sweatshirt. It was a tragedy of high school proportions.
But this tragedy turned into a boon because I became friends with this guy. His name was Nathan. In a lot of ways he was very unlike me. He was tall, blond, muscular, very handsome guy. I learned that he was the son of a Methodist minister, that he loved soccer, he loved to play baseball as well and was really, really into sports.
I, on the other hand, as I appear here now, am a short, skinnier – back then – and love video games and comic books and science. So Nathan and I, to some degree, were opposites in this way. But there was one thing that we both had in common which was that we were both interested in people and in ourselves and the way people tick and what’s going on in that internal world. That was the bond that we had in fact through the beginning of high school.
I admired Nathan a lot because, at that time in my life, I really didn’t like that skinny nerd. He was everything that I kind of wanted to be, that I wished I could be. That admiration sort of led me to feel inferior to him in a lot of ways, so led to a bit of shame, I would say. Then as time went on and our friendship grew deeper, I realized it wasn’t admiration that I was feeling. As I matured both emotionally and sexually, I realized that I was in love with Nathan. That brought even more shame to me because, in the environment that I grew up in, even living in liberal Massachusetts, that meant to me being a gay person would be someone who was sick or someone who would never live a happy life. It was all just a sense of shame that I had to bury.
I buried that and time went on and Nathan and I remained good friends, although with a lot of pain on my part. Later on in high school, I took a class, AP Psychology. In this class there was a wonderful book that talked about ego and id and all those wonderful psychology terms, but I wasn’t satisfied with that. Then there was this one chapter in the book about the brain and it talked about different parts of the brain and what they do.
It talked about the amygdala and how the amygdala is all about fear and the expression of fear, the occipital lobe which is important for vision, the hypothalamus which regulates feeding behavior. And all of this absolutely positively captivated me. It said to me that everything that we are is right there in our brain. It was absolutely amazing to me. All those talks that Nathan and I had had about what makes us tick and other people do this stupid shit that they do, it was right there in that book, and I was completely captivated.
But it also said something else to me. That maybe I was gay because of my brain. Maybe, like my brain makes me right-handed, my brain could be making me gay.
So the search was on. I was not going to ask my teacher why I was in love with Nathan. I was not going to ask the teacher why I was gay. But I knew I could perhaps find out a little bit about this. So like any good nerd would do, I scienced the fuck out of that shit.
So I decided to go to the library. It’s a building and they have books about stuff. No Google back then, no Wikipedia back then. So I went to Andover, Massachusetts, two towns away, and there were two advantages to going to Andover. The first advantage was that rich people lived there and they had more books than in my town. Also, it was two towns away and I wouldn’t know anybody there.
So I went to the Andover Library and I found the deepest, darkest corner where there was still a card catalog computer. I searched for different terms and found a section in the library about human sexuality. My plan was that if I walked over there and I saw someone at all I would just ease on over, grab a feminist theory book, read that and be all set.
So I headed over to that section. No one was there. Didn’t need my backup feminist theory book. And on the bottom shelf, I bent down and sifted through all of these books. This sad kid, this kid filled with shame in those stacks, alone, looking through all those books.
I found a book called The Sexual Brain by Dr. Simon LeVay who’s a neuroscientist, a neuroanatomist to be specific. And in this book I saw some amazing things. I learned that sexual orientation was heritable, meaning it ran in families. Gayness ran in families. I learned that there were perhaps even genetic links to sexual orientation in people.
I also saw something even more amazing, which was that there was a part of the brain in gay and straight men that was different. Not only that, but it was part of the hypothalamus. I mentioned earlier that the hypothalamus is involved in feeding behavior, but it’s also involved in all of our instinctual drives including sex. And Simon LeVay’s own work showed that the third interstitial nucleus in the anterior hypothalamus was sexually dimorphic, which essentially means it’s different between the sexes. And it was also dimorphic or different between sexual orientations. So gay men and straight men had different INAH3s as they're known.
Looking at that, it said to me that maybe I was in fact normal. Maybe I was gay because my brain was different. That was an important change for me. This science had given me this gift, to some degree, of just feeling okay.
After that, I went home and, I remember very distinctly, as I prepared this story, something that I hadn’t thought about in a very long time that’s frankly really hard to talk about. I remember taking this long shower and, in the shower, thinking about all of these things that had come to pass in understanding my sexuality in that book that I read at the library. I remember just crying and crying, feeling like a sense of relief because I was accepting that I was gay.
And I remember actually saying out loud, “I’m gay. I’m gay. I’m gay,” and just crying. It was a very interesting experience. In the gay community, we kind of call this coming out to yourself. The idea of finally accepting that you're gay in a culture that kind of frowns upon that.
Things changed for me pretty rapidly after that. I gained a lot of confidence, in general, in high school, in my intelligence, in the good person that I was becoming and feeling comfortable with my sexuality more and more. I came out to a few friends. My best friend Jessica was very nonplussed about the whole situation and wanted to know if I had more fries for her rather than really having any reaction at all. She also used to be my girlfriend, which is another story.
I came out to other friends and things in general went pretty well. I started going to a gay youth group meeting other gay kids and really gaining a lot of confidence and a lot of good sense of self from that and a healthy sense of self-esteem. I also joined the gay-straight alliance at my high school and that gay-straight alliance for a long time was just me, but apparently now it’s going really strong. It’s all me.
There was a teacher at school, Ms. Jean Matthews, who made sure that I could do that, that I could be the gay-straight alliance for some time. And whenever incidents happened in high school, like bullying or harassment, and there were a few, she always had my back and I'll never forget that.
I also came out to Nathan and I also told Nathan that I liked him. And I know what you're all hoping for right now, Nathan had a secret too. But he didn’t. He was straight. In fact, this new relationship we had where there was this unrequited love between us, at least on my side, that’s something that the 17-year-old me couldn’t quite handle and the 17-year-old him couldn’t quite handle either. In the end, we stopped being friends, although it’s important to say that he was never unkind to me, I would say.
So as time went on and I gained more confidence in myself, it then became time for college. Here, there was a confluence of events. So I had taken this AP Psych class, found this amazing chapter on the brain, I had read this book about human sexuality that, to some degree, validated me and let me feel comfortable, and so what was I going to do but become a neuroscientist. And not just that but I learned that we didn’t know much about sexuality and the science of sexuality and so I was going to be a sex researcher as well.
So I found myself at Boston University studying neuroscience. While I was there, I went to a symposium at this little school down the street called Harvard. This symposium or lecture was all about the science of sex. And who was there but Simon LeVay.
So I went to the talk, heard all about the INAH3 firsthand. I met Dr. LeVay afterwards and, let me tell you, it was like meeting Oprah.
I really enjoyed that time. I also met another professor from BU, Richard Pillard who was one of the first people to show that sexual orientation was heritable. Since he was at BU we made a connection and I ended up being his research assistant for a while. I worked in a lab. After that, studying female sexual behavior in rodents, and that was the late Dr. Mary Erskine’s lab. I got the best of both worlds, human research and animal research. I was really on my way.
In fact, I continued on that path. Eventually earned my PhD in neuroscience. I went to Georgia State for that, did my PhD in there. During my dissertation work, I studied the way that the brain controls ejaculation, the way the brain controls vaginocervical contractions. And so I like to tell people that I’m a world expert on ejaculation, which often means I don’t get invited back to people’s houses, but you might be on Story Collider.
By the way, all of that research was in the rat model so it’s not as fun as it sounds.
So I went on, earned my PhD, did my research and I now teach neuroscience at Georgia State. I direct their undergraduate neuroscience program and I think about this experience that I had and something new strikes me now. What that is is that I don't know if we should need to go two towns away to find a book to validate one’s existence. It strikes me as interesting this intersection of science and society, that science can influence the way we think about ourselves and each other. But importantly, there are many aspects of humanity that don’t need to be validated with peer-reviewed research. So our political beliefs, our spirituality, all of these things are taken at face value, but gay people have to somehow validate that they were born that way to deserve any modicum of respect, and I find that very, very strange, I would say.
So at school I teach Introductory Neuroscience class and the big theme in that class is the intersection of science and society. Because I’m so fascinated by the science of sex, we absolutely learn about that. So I ask my students, “Are people born gay?” But because of this experience that I have and my own perspective on this, there's an important next question to that, which is, “Does it matter?” Thank you.