Gay men have the reputation as horndogs, but it’s lesbians who are aroused by male and female alike, according to new research.

Controversial sex researcher J. Michael Bailey is back, and this time it’s the lesbians who’ll be steamed. The Northwestern University psychologist has already on separate occasions rankled many transgender people, bisexuals and, to some extent, gay men.

It was only a matter of time until he shook up our preconceptions about lesbian identity as well, and he certainly has. In a New York Times report recently, Bailey claimed you gay gals have a "sexual preference," while it’s us gay guys who can truly boast to having a "sexual orientation."

Bailey’s jaw-dropping claim was part of a much broader news story on how evolution and the difference between male and female genetics makes men and women—including gay men and lesbians—so different.

The news wasn’t all pretty for gay males. Bailey believes "the male brain is sexually oriented toward women as an object of desire," making male homosexuality "evolutionary maladaptive." Nice, huh? We finally make it off the list of psychological disorders, and Bailey wants to make us evolutionary misfits.

He argues that the "masculinization of the brain shapes some neural circuit that makes women desirable." Clearly, then "this circuitry is wired differently in gay men," the Times reports.

Bailey performed experiments in which people were shown photographs of desirable men and women, and the results might surprise you. Men acted according to expectations: Straight men were turned on by women, and gay men by men.

But the women in the experiment defied expectations. Whether they identified as straight or lesbian, their sexual arousal was "relatively indiscriminate—they got aroused by both male and female images." So much for the reputation of gay men as horndogs. At least we stick to one gender!

All this led Bailey to a controversial conclusion about female sexuality. "I’m not even sure females have a sexual orientation," he told the Times. "But they have sexual preferences. Women are very picky, and most choose to have sex with men."

Stop, drop and roll, Dr. Bailey. I think you may have started another fire. The gay rights movement has a few core beliefs and among these is the premise that our sexual desire is an "orientation," not a "preference" that we can change at will.

Bailey comes off challenging that assumption, but his problem is really the way he chooses to describe his findings. He is either congenitally tone deaf to our sensibilities, or he’s purposefully provocative—or maybe both.

A less offensive way to describe his views on female sexuality is that most women are bisexual in their orientation, even if most choose to identify as straight or lesbian based on the gender of their partners or societal pressure.

That actually does a nice job of explaining why some women who say they are "lesbian" end up running off with men. Think Anne Heche leaving Ellen for a guy, or Julie Cypher dumping Melissa Etheridge for a man, just to cite a few celebrity examples.

Back in 2005, Bailey similarly botched the way he pitched his research findings on male sexuality, in another New York Times report, published under the nasty headline, "Gay, Straight or Lying: Bisexuality Revisited."

That article reported more of Bailey’s titillating research based on penis reaction to pornography, this time involving 100 men who self-identify as bisexual. Of these "bisexuals," 75 percent were attracted only to gay porn, and 25 percent only to straight porn. They were all "lying" about their sexual desire, Bailey concluded.

Not surprisingly, the report unleashed a torrent of criticism from bisexual activists, including on how Bailey selected his subjects, as well as the idea that penis response is the end-all, be-all of male sexuality, leaving out the romantic and emotional connections.

The reaction among many gay men was decidedly different. Most I know were quietly nodding, since we have come across so few actual male bisexuals and because so many of us self-identified as bisexual on the road to accepting we were full-fledged faggots.

Still, we shouldn’t reject the science simply because Bailey so badly botches his rhetoric, claiming lesbians have a "sexual preference" and bisexual men are "lying" about who they are. It’s important to understand if female sexuality is more fluid, and male sexuality is not, if we are to understand better who we are and explain ourselves in an accurate and reliable way to the heterosexual world around us.

None of this makes being a lesbian, or a bisexual man, any less "legitimate" than being a gay male. Our movement for legal equality and social acceptance has to do with treating people’s relationships equally, however they come to them, and with fighting public and private discrimination that would enforce one person’s moral or religious beliefs about sexuality and love on someone else.

We should be careful to let down our political guard long enough to remain open to what science can teach us, lest we become fundamentalists of a different but no less intolerant sort.