in Göttingen and enrolled in graduate school, where he published his doctoral thesis on the visual system before graduating with a Ph.D. in neuroanatomy in 1971. At the University of Göttingen, LeVay met an American exchange student from the University of California, Berkeley named Richard Hersey and fell in love. When Hersey left Germany and returned to the United States, LeVay followed him and began looking at postdoctoral positions in Boston, New York, and Wisconsin. He eventually got a job at Harvard Medical School working in the lab of David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel. LeVay and Hersey spent a year traveling in the United States before Hersey returned to Berkeley, and LeVay started his life in Boston. Career LeVay completed his postdoc at Harvard Medical School and began teaching in the Neurobiology Department. In 1984, LeVay accepted a job at the Salk Institute in San Diego, California where he studied the brain's role in vision. He also began working as an Associate Professor in Biology at the University of California. LeVay took a leave of absence to take care of Hersey, who had contracted AIDS. After Hersey died of the disease in 1990, LeVay returned to Salk with little interest in continuing his work on the visual centers of the brain. "Richard and I had spent 21 years together," LeVay said during an interview with a reporter from Discover Magazine. "It was while looking after him that I decided I wanted to do something different with my life...I had an emotional need to do something more personal, something connected with my gay identity." In 1991, LeVay published an article in Science that compared a structure in the hypothalamus called INAH3 in the brains of male homosexuals to that found in a group of heterosexual men and heterosexual women. He found that this region of the brain in gay men was similar to that found in straight women. This was the first scientific study that found a difference between groups of people based on sexual orientation. In 1992, LeVay took a second leave of absence from Salk to help form the Institute of Gay and Lesbian Education (IGLE) in West Hollywood with Chris Patrouch and Lauren Jardine. He never returned. After IGLE folded, LeVay would go on to speak on the topic of human sexuality at a number of venues and publish 12 books. In 2003 he became a lecturer in