Gay-Straight Brother Team Wins Amazing Race

On a less serious note, the gay-straight brother team of Dan and Jordan Pious won season 16 of the reality show Amazing Race. I will admit that I only watched bits and pieces of the show when I first heard about Dan and Jordan competing. The last time I watched was a few years back when two cute male models, Tyler Denk and James Branaman won Amazing Race 10. What is most moving to me is the relationship that this year's winners have with one another and how Dan supported Jordan when he came out as gay. I also hope that as more and more gay characters and contestants are on television and in other media forms, the sooner homophobia becomes a thing of the past. Congratulations to Dan and Jordan! Here are some highlights from The Advocate on the victorious brother team:

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Brotherly love may be priceless, but it was worth at least $1 million to gay and straight siblings Jordan and Dan Pious, the winners of season 16 of The Amazing Race. Rhode Island natives Jordan, 23, and Dan, 25, proved themselves formidable contenders in the round-the-world reality TV competition, and they made some controversial moves in the final leg, cutting into an airline ticket line in Shanghai, China, and then managing to get bumped up to first class so they beat their remaining two rival teams off the plane in San Francisco. (Both moves are allowed by the race’s rules.)
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The day after their victory episode was broadcast, this gay-straight alliance spoke with The Advocate about their winning strategies, their relationship with each other and with the race’s 10 other teams. . . and what it means to give the race its first openly gay winner since Reichen Lehmkuhl and Chip Arndt, then a couple, in 2003.
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Growing up, I think my brother saw me becoming a gay boy, a gay man, and at the early stages tried to get me involved with sports, like “I don’t know if want you to be gay,” etc. I was like 7 or 8. When I came out, the first person I came out to in my family was my brother. I was 14-1/2 years old and I told him that I was gay, and his reaction was, “I will never love you any differently, you are my little brother, and you mean the world to me, and do you, do Jordan, and don’t change who you are,” and he has been the most supportive person in my life, and that was no exception.
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You are the first openly gay winner since Chip and Reichen. Do you feel like you’ve helped score some points for gay visibility? Jordan: I’ve received some fan messages and stuff like that from homosexual men and women who say I’m a positive role model for the gay community hearing that means the world to me. I have never felt that I don’t have opportunities because I’m gay, and I want everyone else to think and believe that as well. It’s just a part of who I am, it doesn’t define who I am, and you can do anything you put your mind to, so I hope people definitely take that away from this experience.

Researchers study DNA of gay brothers for clues

I actually wanted to participate in this study described in a Houston Chronicle article (http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/nation/5082744.html), but my brother refuses to do so - he apparently thinks participating would mean that he is gay, whereas the study - I have filled out the questionnaires, etc., and read the study description and talked with Dr. Alan Sanders (mentioned below) - merely wants two (2) brothers, at least one of whom is gay so that there is a basis of comparison. I will ask him again to reconsider, but I will not be holding my breath. Personally, I believe that there is some type of genetic component to sexual orientation. For obvious reasons, I would love to have it scientifically confirmed that sexual orientation is genetic and, therefore, NOT a choice so that the Christianist "cure" programs could be shut down once and for all. Here are some highlights from the article:

The results may ignite controversy, the researchers acknowledge, both by providing ammunition in the raging cultural war over homosexuality and by raising fears about ethically questionable applications like genetic profiling and prenatal testing. But, they argue, the research is essential to our biological understanding of sexual behavior.

"If there are genetic contributions to sexual orientation, they will not remain hidden forever — the march of genetic science can't be stopped," said Timothy F. Murphy, bioethicist adviser to the study. "It's not a question of whether we should or should not do this research, it's that we make sure we're prepared to protect people from insidious uses of this science." While the question of whether homosexuality is a choice remains a hot topic for pundits, scientists are largely in agreement that sexual orientation is at least partially determined by biology.

Inspired by the accumulating circumstantial evidence of genetic factors, researchers in the early '90s began trying to narrow down the wide expanse of DNA to a few promising regions. By comparing the genetic codes of gay brothers, who also share 50 percent of their genes, a "linkage study" tries to detect areas that show up in both men at a frequency higher than chance, suggesting one or more genes in that region might be linked to sexual orientation.

In 1993, geneticist Dean Hamer announced his group had found such a region on the X chromosome, which males inherit from their mothers. But the number of brother pairs used in the study was small and subsequent studies failed to replicate Hamer's findings, throwing the result into question.

"In complex gene scenarios, people figured out that you need a larger sample size in order to get reasonable statistical power," said Dr. Alan Sanders, a psychiatrist at Evanston Northwestern Healthcare and the leader of the current study. To increase the chances of finding genetic areas associated with homosexuality, Sanders proposed assembling almost 10 times the sibling pairs of previous studies.

At this point, the researchers do not know what types of genes they may find; they could be related to hormones, sexual development or a completely unexpected system. "The genes would probably be doing their work by affecting sexual differentiation of the brain during prenatal life," said J. Michael Bailey, a Northwestern University psychology professor involved with the project. "But what scientists are increasingly appreciating is that genes can affect a trait in ways you could never have guessed."