The Los Angeles Times was flooded with mail after Melissa Healy wrote a ludicrous article about the causes of homosexuality. Roger White wrote: "Perhaps what Melissa Healy should investigate next is what 'causes' straightness, since she did such a smashing job of uncovering the causes of homosexuality in her hard-hitting article 'Pieces of the Puzzle.'"
Richard G. Wight wrote this: "As I read the article on the 'tantalizing clues' of some signs of homosexuality ( e.g. finger length ) , I remembered being an adolescent 25 years ago and hearing the same type of banter among my classmates in junior high school. We compared our fingers then so the "homos" could be identified and ridiculed.
"Contemporary research that seeks to identify telltale signs of homosexuality, rather than the ramifications of and solutions for social intolerance, seems as childish now as our bantering obviously was then."
Naomi Stephen gives Healy a history lesson: "Being gay is one of evolution's curious mysteries/evolutionary oddities? Even more unbelievable, being gay or lesbian can be ascertained by measuring fingers? It smacks of Nazi experiments on people with oddities and measuring people's heads to 'prove' they were Jewish or Aryan. And we know what happened to them."
But of all the letters to the Los Angeles Times, it's David Ehrenstein who hits the nail on the head: "I was surprised that for all the work Melissa Healy put into the article, she neglected to mention the chief cause of homosexuality—musical production numbers featuring Dolores Gray.
"Yes, it's true. I was a perfectly normal heterosexual child until that fateful day in 1955 when my unsuspecting mother took me to see a matinee of Kismet."