In 1992, he took a 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.

[3][4][5] Before moving on to higher education, LeVay spent a gap year in Göttingen Germany where he worked as a technician in an electron microscope lab, learned German, and published a scientific article on the spinal cord of chickens.

[3][4] 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.

[1][7][10] In 1984, LeVay accepted a job at the Salk Institute in San Diego, California where he studied the brain's role in vision.

[13][14] After Hersey died of the disease in 1990,[5] LeVay returned to Salk with little interest in continuing his work on the visual centers of the brain.

[18][3] 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.

[5][3] After IGLE folded, LeVay would go on to speak on the topic of human sexuality at a number of venues and published books.

[19][12] Researchers had been comparing the brains of men and women since the 1980s, but the article that caught LeVay's attention was published by a group at UCLA.

Of particular interest to LeVay was an area the researchers called the "Interstitial Nucleus of the Anterior Hypothalamus" (INAH3),[20][3][16] a part of the brain that had been found to help regulate sexual behavior.

[5][16] They were planning to call the institution the "Harvey Milk University" after the first openly gay elected supervisor of San Francisco that had been assassinated by Dan White in 1987.

[5] Patrouch and LeVay had been hoping to get their courses accredited and start offering degrees,[28][29][5] but the situation proved untenable and IGLE shut down in 1996.

It discussed the work of pioneering sexologists such as Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and Magnus Hirschfeld, Sigmund Freud and his followers, behaviorism, and LeVay's own research on INAH3 and its possible implications.

[32] Albrick's Gold, published in 1997, was a science fiction novel, whose main character, Roger Cavendish, is partially based on Simon LeVay.

In 2010, Gay, Straight, and the Reason Why won the Bonnie and Vern L. Bullough Award which is given by the Foundation for the Scientific Study of Sexuality to the most distinguished book written for the professional sexological community.

[1][34] LeVay has also co-authored a textbook on human sexuality and books on earthquakes, volcanoes, Parkinson's disease, and extraterrestrial life.