Apostolopoulos and Sönmez also focused on another phenomenon ignored by scientific journals: male truckers who have sex with other men. There are Web sites and even conventions for truck chasers, who are drawn to the cowboy mystique of long-distance drivers. But their liaisons—often arranged over the Internet—look nothing like those in urban gay communities. “Many of these truckers identify as straight,” says Donna Smith, a researcher with the Emory team. “Because they define risk as being associated with identity—and because they are not gay—they believe they are not at risk. We’ve collected ethnographies in which truck chasers are asked by truckers, ‘Are you married?’ They perceive safety in a sexual encounter with another married man.”

By studying the hidden life of truck stops, ethnographers and public-health workers are tracing the sexual networks that help give rise to epidemics.

When he began his research, Apostolopoulos had no idea his work would be held up for ridicule. In the summer of 2003, when a colleague sent him an e-mail message that four NIH-funded projects had barely survived a congressional defunding vote, he deleted it without much concern. “I assumed it was just a few unconventional studies,” he now says. “I didn’t pay attention till last fall.”


The political storm had actually started gathering force at the tail end of 2002, when a reporter for the conservative Washington Times called Michael Bailey of Northwestern at his small office overlooking Lake Michigan. The two men chatted for a while about the psychologist’s sexual-arousal study. Then the journalist blurted out his real reason for calling: “Isn’t that a little strange, that the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development is funding a study that uses porn?” On December 23, the Washington Times published an article questioning Bailey’s work, kicking off its crusade against NIH-funded sex research. (The psychologist sardonically calls the article “an early Christmas present.”) By New Year’s Eve, the Northwestern study had been ridiculed on two television talk shows, and soon Congress had joined in. “This flagrant frittering away of federal funds is borderline criminal,” declared Representative John Doolittle, a California Republican, the next summer. In July 2003, an effort to strip funding from four projects, including Karina Walters’s two-spirit study, failed on the House floor by a 212–210 vote.

Rather than settling the controversy, the close vote cranked it up. Last fall, the Traditional Values Coalition publicly challenged grants worth more than $100 million. “Some people may think it’s worthy to wire up female genitalia as they watch erotic video,” says Lafferty, the coalition director. “But dollars are scarce, and juvenile diabetes and heart disease need the funding.”

By most accounts, including Apostolopoulos’s, NIH has stood by its scientists, helping them draft explanations of their work’s scientific value. In January 2004, after ordering a comprehensive review of the institutes’ sexuality research, NIH director Elias Zerhouni sent his own letter to Congress. Biological research has done a great deal to improve the nation’s health, he wrote. But with half the country’s disease burden stemming from lifestyle, “the constant battle against illness and disease . . . has to include behavioral and social factors as well.” Critics, unconvinced, plan to press on. “The National Institutes of Health has been treated as a sacred cow,” Lafferty says. “No one is allowed to question it, and now we are. Researchers are freaking out because they realize the trough may dry up.”

Of course, this isn’t the first time science has collided with politics. Government-funded research is political by nature and designed to be accountable to taxpayers. Public pressure has sometimes helped refine science over the years, forcing researchers to treat women and minorities fairly during clinical trials, for instance, and improving the treatment of laboratory animals. Stem cell research and human cloning are legitimate topics of debate. “Science is stronger and more able to meet societal needs as a result of these conflicts,” says Daniel Sarewitz, managing director of the Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes at Arizona State University in Tempe.

The incivility of the NIH debate, however, has promoted neither good dialogue nor good science. And it has had ugly ripple effects. “We have had scientists who have received death threats,” says Simon Rosser, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for HIV/STI Intervention and Prevention Studies. “Some have been professionally slandered. Some have been mocked by colleagues. Some have received calls at 2 a.m. saying, ‘Do you know where your children are?’ We’ve got enough of a problem trying to fight HIV without also having to fight threats, fear, and intimidation.”

Others worry that the current political battles might keep potential sex researchers from entering the field. Apostolopoulos, for one, acknowledges he has considered lying low until the political climate changes, though he continues to write proposals dealing with sexual behavior and disease transmission. He believes his submissions are strong enough to survive the meticulous peer-review process. “But in the back of your mind you think, ‘Are the reviewers going to be influenced by what has happened?’”

If that chill descends, Apostolopoulos hesitates to envision the consequences. “We could have a skyrocketing of disease,” he says after a long pause. “The ramifications could be explosive.”