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You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.

Hi, Shortwavers, Salina Simmons-Duffin in the host chair.

Years ago, I can't remember exactly when, I became aware that gay people are often the youngest kids in their families.

As a gay person, who's the youngest in my family, there was something kind of appealing about this idea, like there was a statistical order to things, and I fit neatly into that order. When I started

reporting on the science behind the idea, the whole thing turned out to be much more interesting

than I originally imagined, also stranger and darker. That darkness comes in part from how scientists first started researching what makes people queer in the first place,

near the middle of the last century.

There's a sudden visibility of underground queer culture.

And then the concern is that there yeah, there's something pathological happening with these people.

That is writer Justin Torres.

He's thought a lot about the way scientists have studied sexuality.

Last year, he won the National Book Award for a novel titled Blackouts.

My novel is kind of interested in these kind of pre-Kinsey sexology studies,

specifically this one called Sex Variants.

You know, it was really informed by eugenics,

and they were looking for the cause of homosexuality in the body

in order to treat it or cureate or get rid of it.

The queer people scientists were studying were also living in a world where this facet of their identity was dangerous.

It was criminal. It was career destroying, life destroying.

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