by Wayne Harada - Honolulu Star-Advertiser - Aug. 27, 2013:
“Kumu Hina,” a film about a transgender Native Hawaiian teacher and cultural leader, has been green-lit by national public television funders Pacific Islanders in Communications and ITVS (Independent Television Service).
Thus, the Pacific mahu, or transgender, culture commonly accepted in Hawaii and the Pacific Islands, will receive vast exposure for the first time.
The film’s key character, Hinaleimoana Wong-Kalu, pictured, is a graduate of Kamehameha Schools who transitioned from male to female more than 20 years ago. Now, she is a respected and beloved kumu and cultural scholar at Halau Lokahi, a Hawaiian values-based Public Charter School in Honolulu, where she employs her cultural grounding to empower students to be who they are and know that in Hawaii there is a welcoming “place in the middle” for everyone.
The film, two years in the making, is by the Emmy-winning Oahu-based producing team of Dean Hamer and Joe Wilson, who decided to focus on the widespread and commonly known community of the mahu to magnify the acceptance of this culture in a world today filled with prejudice and discrimination if you’re different.
“ ‘Kumu Hina’s’ message of aloha — unconditional acceptance and respect for all — is timely and sorely needed,” said Hamer.
“Told through Hina’s very moving personal and Hawaiian perspective,” said Wilson.
At a time when there is rampant discrimination against gender noncomforming people, the filmmakers hope the documentary will ultimately reverse hate to acceptance.
“The film has great potential to inspire and help audiences see themselves, their families, schools and communities, in powerful new ways – and to ensure that no one, particularly younger people, faces harassment, discrimination or violence simply because they don’t conform to modern society’s gender norms,” said Wilson.
In the movie, Hina inspires a tomboyish young girl to fight for her place as leader of the school’s all-male hula troupe as she herself takes a chance at happiness when she marries an unpredictable young Tongan man who is having difficulty adjusting to life in modern Honolulu.
“We are so grateful to be able to support this project in hopes that it will bring understanding, acceptance, and enlightenment to all who view it,” said Leanne Ferrer, executive director of Pacific Islanders in Communications, based in Honolulu.
“Kumu Hina” will premiere in film festivals in early 2014 and be telecast on national public television in 2015.
The project’s team includes co-producer Connie M. Florez, musical score composer Makana, and writer-narraor Leonelle Akana.
State House lawmakers conducting a marathon hearing on marriage equality have heard a sea of Christian voices who oppose gay marriage.
The few gay and lesbian voices who support marriage equality have stood out. One of them was Joe Wilson, a documentary filmmaker who lives on the North Shore of O‘ahu, who spoke late Monday:
During this special session, the people of Hawaii, and indeed the world, have been witness to the hell that gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, māhū, and other people deemed unacceptable by self-righteous bullies know all too well.
You have seen us sit here while people speak about us in the most dehumanizing terms as though we were not present, as though such vile mischaracterizations as perverts, bug chasers, cross-dressers, and security threats do not affect or terrify us -- as though such heinous lies do not inflict wounds or tear our souls apart.
Having seen this, perhaps you now have an idea of what it might be like to be a young gay or gender non-conforming person in one of our schools terrorized by playground bullies who act this way.
Perhaps now you have an idea of what it might be like to grow up in a family that would create such an environment in its own home, forcing their own gay or gender creative children to suppress their most human of feelings, to torture themselves with guilt for who they are, to live a childhood void of true parental love, to feel that they have no choice but to take to the streets to survive, or worse, to take their own lives to end this hell.
Perhaps now you have some notion what it might be like to be a person who lost a job or apartment or was denied any number of opportunities most people take for granted because one of these loving individuals could not find it within themselves to be accepting or to understand that their personal beliefs do not now, nor will they ever, trump our right to live our lives as freely and openly -- and equally under the law -- as they live theirs.
Perhaps now you'll know what it's like to walk down the street looking over your shoulder, wondering if the person who just called you a faggot or māhū is going to turn and chase you down, punch or stab you because you are not welcome in their world.
If so, I hope you'll agree that it is time to overcome this intolerance, and to not just pass what should be a simple thing like marriage equality, but to end these harms that have been done in the name of religion, tradition, and state-sanctioned discrimination for far too long -- and to begin to make our communities whole again.
Please, do the right thing. Pass SB1.
Rep. Richard Fale, who opposes marriage equality, represents Wilson and his partner Dean Hamer, a geneticist, called Wilson back to the podium after his testimony to explain that, as a Tongan, Fale too has experienced discrimination.
Fale asked Wilson whether there are higher priorities for the state, such as child poverty, that might merit a special session.
"Do you think the governor should have put our children in poverty first?" the North Shore Republican asked.
"I resent that you are making this a circus," Wilson replied.
The Kinsey Institute welcomes the addition of the Dean Hamer collection to the Kinsey Institute Library at Indiana University. Best known as the discoverer of the “gay gene,” Dr. Hamer’s papers, correspondence, news clips and videos provide fascinating insights into the excitement and controversy that surrounded one of the most important periods in the scientific study of human sexuality.
Hamer, like Alfred Kinsey, began his career as a research biologist. He obtained his BA at Trinity College, CT, his Ph.D. from Harvard Medical School, and was an independent researcher at the National Institutes of Health for 35 years, where he directed the Gene Structure and Regulation Section at the U.S. National Cancer Institute. He invented the first method for introducing new genes into animal cells using viral vectors, which allowed the production of numerous biomedical products, and elucidated one of the first animal gene regulation circuits to be understood at the molecular level.
As the techniques of molecular genetics became increasingly powerful in the 1990s, Hamer turned his attention to the roles of genes in human behavior. He focused on sexual orientation because it was one of the most fundamental aspects of human biology, yet one of the least studied from a molecular perspective – a situation he believed was due to a conservative political climate that stigmatized the objective study of human sexuality.
Combining classical family studies with the newly developed technology of gene mapping by DNA linkage analysis, Hamer's group produced the first molecular evidence for the existence of genes that influence homosexuality in males, and showed that one of these genes is associated with the Xq28 marker on the X chromosome. This finding was replicated in two studies in the United States but not in a third in Canada; meta-analysis indicated Xq28 has a significant but not exclusive effect. Subsequently, several additional linked regions on other chromosomes have been described. The maternal transmission pattern was also confirmed in studies showing a possible evolutionary advantage at the level of female fecundity.
Hamer’s findings, first published in Science in 1993, ignited an international media firestorm that quickly spread across newspapers, magazines, television, radio and the internet. The research was the topic of front page stories across the world, major articles in Time and Newsweek, news and talk shows including Nightline and Oprah, and even became the subject of a Broadway play.Reactions varied from cautious support from the scientific community to passionate disavowals from religious conservatives. Many gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender individuals felt the results would increase understanding and acceptance, while others feared that they might medicalize or even eliminate non-heterosexual orientations. Hamer described his work, and the range of reactions to it, in his 1994 book The Science of Desire, a New York Times Book of the Year.
The Hamer Collection includes a wide range of scientific materials including the original research protocols, sample questionnaires and participant responses, detailed statistical analyses of the data, and drafts of the research papers. His correspondence with other scientists and laypeople reveals the diverse reactions that the research evoked. Popular materials include extensive press coverage in both mainstream and LGBT periodicals. Of special interest are the materials relating to Hamer's appearance in the Colorado Supreme Court Amendment 2 trial, in which the role of biology in sexual orientation received high level judicial scrutiny.
In more recent years Hamer's research focused on related topics in human behavioral genetics, including the discovery of the “Prozac gene,” and new biomedical forms of HIV prevention. He also became a director and producer of documentary films, including the Emmy Award-winning PBS film OUT IN THE SILENCE, which examines the reactions to his marriage to his partner Joe Wilson in a small conservative town in rural Pennsylvania.
When Tim Pawlenty said the science was "in dispute” about whether being gay is genetic, that sure came as surprise to molecular biologist Dean Hamer, Co-Director of the OUT IN THE SILENCE Campaign.
In a recent interview, Tim Pawlenty was asked “Is being gay a choice?” The presidential hopeful replied that “the science in that regard is in dispute.”
As a working molecular biologist, that was certainly a surprise to me.
In fact, the scientific community has long regarded sexual orientation – whether gay, straight, or somewhere in between – as a phenotype: an observable set of properties that varies among individuals and is deeply rooted in biology. For us, the role of genetics in sexual behavior is about as “disputable” as the role of evolution in biology. Come to think of it, pretty much the same folks are opposed to both ideas.
The empirical evidence for the role of genetics in sexual orientation has steadily mounted since I first entered the field in the early 1990s. Back then, the only quantitative data was derived from studies of unrepresentative and potentially biased samples of self-identified gay men and lesbian. But in the intervening 20 years, studies of twins – the mainstay of human population genetics – have been conducted on systematically ascertained populations in three different countries. These studies are notable because they have large sample sizes that are representative of the overall population, they’re conducted by independent university-based investigators using well-established statistical methods, and the results are published in the peer-reviewed literature.
Each of these studies has led to the same fundamental conclusion: genes play a major role in human sexual orientation. By contrast, shared environmental factors such as education, parenting style, or presumably even exposure to Lady Gaga, have little if anything to do with people's orientation. While there is a substantial amount of variation that cannot be ascribed to either heritable or shared environment, the differences might also be due to biological traits that are not inherited in a simple additive manner.
One criticism frequently leveled at my work was that sexual orientation couldn't possibly be inherited because “gays don't have kids.” As the gay father of a daughter with lesbian mothers, I always had to shake my head in disbelief – but now there is a solid scientific explanation for how genes that increase same-sex attraction might persist or even increase in the population. Careful family studies by two groups of investigators show that the same inherited factors that favor male homosexuality actually increase the fecundity of female maternal relatives, and that this effect is sufficient to balance out the decreased number of offspring for gay men and maintain the genes over the course of natural selection. This explanation may not be the only one, but it serves to show that the evolutionary paradox is not necessarily overwhelming.
Another criticism frequently brought up by politically motivated critics of the research is that there is still no single identified "gay gene." However, the same is true for height, skin color, handedness, frequency of heart disease and many other traits that have a large inherited component but no dominant gene. This doesn't mean that sexual orientation is a choice; it simply confirms that sexual orientation is complex, with many genes contributing to the phenotype.
In certain animal model systems, the precise genes involved in sexual partner choice have in fact been identified and their neuro-biochemical pathways have been worked out in detail. Humans may be more socially and culturally complex, but it is likely that some of these mechanisms are preserved, as they are for every other behavioral trait we know.
Given the accumulated evidence, why might Pawlenty assert that the scientific community is still debating the role of biology in sexual orientation? Probably because that's what the religious fundamentalist groups that vehemently oppose LGBT rights want people to think, and have spent considerable time, effort and money trying to promote.
There is good reason for their opposition to the scientific findings. Studies in college classrooms have shown that exposure of students to information about the causes of sexual orientation has a direct, positive influence on their opinions about LGBT civil rights. This fits with polling data showing that people who believe that gays are "born that way" are generally supportive of full equality, whereas more than two thirds of those who believe it is "a choice" are so opposed that they favor the re-criminalization of same-sex relations.
I would never want my life, liberty, or pursuit of happiness to be subject to a DNA test or any other sort of scientific analysis. Basic rights are just that – basic. But it is essential to acknowledge that lack of scientific knowledge can actually result in having our rights and freedoms taken away through the actions of misinformed voters, legislators and judges.
At least Pawlenty acknowledged that science has some role to play. I doubt that would be the case for his competitor Michele Bachman, who considers sexual orientation to be so malleable that people can “pray away the gay”. She's hopeless. With Pawlenty, it might just take some education – and plenty of Lady G, of course.
Dean Hamer is a molecular biologist who works on human genetics and HIV prevention and is the author of several scientific books including The Science of Desire. When he's not in the lab, he is visiting small towns and rural communities with his husband Joe Wilson on the OUT IN THE SILENCE Campaign.
