DEAN HAMER, born on this date, is an American geneticist, author, and filmmaker. He is known for his research on the role of genetics in sexual orientation and for a series of popular books and films that have changed scientific and public understandings and perceptions of human sexuality and gender.
Dean Hamer was born in 1951 in Montclair, New Jersey. He graduated from Trinity College in Connecticut and earned a Ph.D. from Harvard Medical School. Early on in his career, Dean figured out that medical research would be more compelling for him than treating individual patients, and that decision made a big difference to Dean and the LGBTQ community.
For 35 years, Dean was an independent researcher at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). In the 1990s, he began to study the relationship between human behavior and genetics, and in 1993, he published the first-ever findings linking homosexuality to a particular region of the X chromosome. In later years, Dean also developed a potential form of HIV prevention which is currently entering preclinical testing. Over the course of his career, Dean’s work has been cited by fellow medical scholars nearly 20,000 times.
Dean’s published his research into the so-called gay gene in The Science of Desire, a NY Times Notable Book of the Year. Dean’s second book, The God Gene, explored the relationship between faith and genetics. Over the years, Dean has appeared on a wide variety of TV programs including Nightline and Oprah.
In the early 2000s, Dean met filmmaker Joe Wilson. Together, they produced the documentary Out in the Silence (2009), which was prompted by the uproar that resulted when the newspaper in Joe’s hometown of Oil City, Pennsylvania published Dean and Joe’s marriage announcement. The film won an Emmy Award, and served as the launch pad for an ongoing campaign for LGBTQ visibility and acceptance.
After Dean’s official retirement from the NIH in 2011, he and Joe moved to Hawaii, and produced the documentary called Kumu Hina, which focuses on gender diversity among Pacific Islander peoples. Dean and Joe’s most recent film Leitis in Waiting (2018) explores gender diversity in Tonga, the last remaining monarchy in the Pacific.
Hamer, Wilson and Wong-Kalu continued their collaboration in 2020 with the animated short film Kapaemahu, based on the hidden history of four stones on Waikiki Beach placed there as a tribute to four legendary mahu who first brought the healing arts from Tahiti to Hawaii. It premiered and won the Special Jury Prize at the Tribeca Film Festival and was shortlisted for an Oscar as Best Animated Short Film at the 93rd Academy Awards. The animated film was followed by a children’s book published by Kokila, a PBS feature documentary, a multimedia exhibition at the Bishop Museum, permanent display at the Hawai’i Convention center, and inclusion in new interprative signage at the Kapaemahu monument in Waikiki.
The team’s most recent film is Aikane, an animated short based on the Hawaiian term for intimate friends of the same sex. It won two Academy Award-qualifying film festival awards and was nationally distributed by Conde Nast on the Them platform.