By Paul Cameron, Kirk Cameron, & Kay Proctor

How times have changed. Fathers of the Church joined ancient philosophers in considering men with homosexual desires more apt to seduce boys. Today, these ancient warnings have been cast aside as nothing more than (bigoted, homophobic) old wives’ tales. Consider psychiatrist Thomas Plante, residing scholar at Santa Clara University and adjunct professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine. America published an essay by Dr. Plante in October 2018, entitled ‘No, Homosexuality is Not a Risk Factor for the Sexual Abuse of Children’ ¹. In it, he decries the belief that “banning homosexual men from the priesthood” would help prevent sexual victimization in the church. Instead, “it is often falsely believed that men with homosexual orientations cannot be trusted around male children and that their sexual impulse control is poor.” Indeed, Plante argues that “sexual orientation is not a risk factor at all,” contrary to the common sense notion that homosexuals must be to blame, especially since 80% of victims were boys.

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The forthcoming Boy Scouts of America (BSA) National Council vote on its membership standards has drawn national attention and passionate voices on all sides. To study the ramifications of changing its long-standing policy to allow openly-identified homosexuals to join its ranks, BSA embarked on a “comprehensive listening exercise,” drawing perspectives from both “inside and outside of the Scouting family.” The Executive Summary of this study was released on April 30, 2013. Based on its findings, the national leadership of BSA is recommending that the membership standards be changed to allow scouts of any sexual orientation, but to continue to bar participation by openly homosexual adult leaders. Read more »

The homosexual movement, many professional associations, and the media assert that whether or not a parent engages in homosexuality is irrelevant: as long as the child is loved, he will turn out OK. Traditional thought stresses the character of the parents, which they exhibit by raising a child within marriage instead of alone or in an informal union. Tradition also holds that the aberrant attitudes, behaviors, and associates of those who engage in homosexuality, illegal drug use, or criminality often have more influence on how a child turns out than their parents’ expressions of love or affirmation.

Supporters of homosexual parenting cite a number of academic studies to bolster their position. But these studies are almost exclusively based on small, volunteer samples. And their chief claim is that since ‘no statistically significant differences were found between the children of homosexual and heterosexual parents’ for this or that variable, the parenting situations must have ‘the same’ influence on the child.

The problem is that small samples generally yield ‘no statistical differences’ due to a lack of statistical power, so such findings do almost nothing to prove that the two parenting types produce ‘the same’ result. Furthermore, statistical claims of ‘sameness’ or ‘differences’ between two populations — and not just between the particular subjects in the study — rely on those subjects being approximately representative of ‘all heterosexual parents’ or ‘all homosexual parents,’ something that is rarely true of volunteers or individuals recruited by the investigators.

In addition, almost without exception, supporters of homosexual parenting refuse to acknowledge studies that support the traditional view — whether in their professional papers, in their court briefs, or on their websites. Ignoring counter-evidence is unusual in the hard sciences, but social science is heavily politicized, and the practice — especially in studies about homosexuality — is unfortunately common. While traditional beliefs are generally reinforced by careful examination of even the pro-gay literature,¹ below we compare the findings from the 2012 Regnerus study² against findings from studies that have been ‘generally ignored.’

Of all the studies of homosexual parents to date, Regnerus addressed the broadest array of variables and represents the largest random sample study of how adults turn out when they have (or had) a homosexual parent. 2,988 individuals aged 18-39 were culled from a probability-based pool of approximately 15,000 potential subjects in order to find an adequate number of adult children of homosexuals and a comparable number of adults with a similar demographic profile who were raised in other circumstances.

Regnerus’ findings support traditional beliefs that children do best in a married household, and that even sub-optimal heterosexual rearing — such as single parenthood or being raised with stepparents — is better than being raised by a homosexual.

Weighted to match population parameters, Regnerus estimated that 1.7% of the nation’s children have one or more homosexual parents. By comparison, Cameron and Cameron’s random survey³ of 5,182 adults in 1983-84 yielded unweighted estimates of 1.6% and 1.7%. Such close agreement between two nationwide studies based on random samples reinforces the credibility of both investigations. In Table 1, each of the 40 outcome measures that Regnerus studied and reported is ranked by kind of family unit. The family type that scored best on each variable is ranked #1, second-best #2 and so on, with the worst ranked #8. Family types that were tied on any outcome were assigned a common ‘midrank,’ a standard statistical rank average.

Most of Table 1 fits right in line with traditional beliefs. For instance, those with gay or lesbian parent(s) were the:

• most apt to say they were not exclusively heterosexual,
• most apt to be on welfare,
• least apt to be employed,
• most apt to have gotten a sexually transmitted infection,
• most apt to have recently thought of suicide,
• most apt to report rape,
• most apt to test impulsive,
• most apt to smoke,
• most apt to report heavy TV viewing,
• most apt to have been arrested,
• most apt to have pled guilty to a crime,
• most apt to score high on depression,
• least apt to report being able to depend on others,
• least apt to report having felt secure and safe in their family, and
• most promiscuous

Participants who have/had homosexual parents generally rank more poorly on the other variables of concern in Table 1, even if they are not always ‘the worst.’ Any random sample will exhibit fluctuations — no matter what the setting or experiences, some children do well on something when most do poorly. But since gays and lesbians report more frequent smoking, drug use, arrest, rape, and sexually transmitted diseases, as well as testing more mentally disturbed,⁴ just about all the findings in Table 1 make sense if the children of homosexuals tend to mimic them (e.g., ‘like produces like’). Heavier TV viewing, being on welfare, and testing impulsive by the children of homosexuals’ are ‘new’ findings, since previous direct data on homosexuals are mixed or absent for these variables.

Table 1. After Regnerus, Ranked Outcome Measures

Measure/Family Type	Intact Biological Married Family	Lesbian Mother	Gay Father	Adopted by Strangers
N	(919)	(163)	(73)	(101)
Currently married	1	6.5	8	2.5
Currently cohabiting	2	7	6	1
Family got welfare	2	8	7	1
Current public assistance	1	8	2.5	4
Currently employed	1	8	7	5
Currently unemployed	1	8	6	7
Voted last election	4.5	8	1	3
Recent suicide thought	1.5	7	8	3
Recent/current therapy	1	6.5	6.5	8
Identifies as heterosexual	1	8	7	5
In same-sex relationship	3	5	6	8
Had affair	2	8	6	5
Ever STI	1.5	7	8	5.5
Ever sex touch by parent	1	8	3	2
Ever forced sex	1	8	7	5
Educational attainment	2	8	5.5	1
Family safety/security	1	8	7	2.5
Family negative impact	1	8	6	5
Closeness to mother	1	2	7	8
Closeness to father	1	7	4	8
Physical health	1	8	2	3
Overall happiness	1	5	8	4
CES-D depression index	1	8	7	5
Attachment scale (depend)	1	8	7	6
Attachment scale (anxiety)	1	7	5.5	5.5
Impulsivity scale	5	8	7	2
Household income	1	8	4	2
Current relationship index	1	5	8	7
Trouble current relationship	1	5	8	5
Frequency marijuana use	1	7	5	2
Frequency alcohol use	6.5	1	6.5	8
Frequency of drunkenness	2.5	6	8	4
Frequency smoking	1	8	7	5
Frequency watch TV	2	8	7	4
Frequency been arrested	1	7	8	2
Frequency pled guilty	1	7	8	4
N female sex ptnrs (women)	1	7	8	3.5
N female sex ptnrs (men)	1	5	8	3
N male sex ptnrs (women)	1	5	8	3
N male sex ptnrs (men)	1	8	7	2
Rank average	1.56	6.88	6.39	4.24
Rank std deviation	1.20	1.63	1.78	2.08
Rank std error	0.19	0.26	0.28	0.33

Table 1. After Regnerus, Ranked Outcome Measures (cont.)

Measure/Family Type	Divorced Since Age 18	Step Family	Single Parent	Other
N	(116)	(394)	(816)	(416)
Currently married	6.5	2.5	5	4
Currently cohabiting	8	4.5	4.5	3
Family got welfare	4	6	5	3
Current public assistance	7	5.5	5.5	2.5
Currently employed	4	2	3	6
Currently unemployed	4.5	3	2	4.5
Voted last election	2	4.5	6	7
Recent suicide thought	4	6	1.5	5
Recent/current therapy	3	5	4	2
Identifies as heterosexual	3	6	3	3
In same-sex relationship	4	7	2	1
Had affair	1	7	4	3
Ever STI	3	5.5	4	1.5
Ever sex touch by parent	5.5	7	5.5	4
Ever forced sex	6	3.5	3.5	2
Educational attainment	3	5.5	4	7
Family safety/security	5.5	5.5	4	2.5
Family negative impact	7	3	4	2
Closeness to mother	5	3	6	4
Closeness to father	5	2	6	3
Physical health	5	4	6	7
Overall happiness	2	6	3	7
CES-D depression index	6	3	2	4
Attachment scale (depend)	4	5	3	2
Attachment scale (anxiety)	8	3	2	4
Impulsivity scale	6	3	1	4
Household income	3	5	6	7
Current relationship index	2.5	6	2.5	4
Trouble current relationship	7	5	3	2
Frequency marijuana use	8	3	6	4
Frequency alcohol use	4	3	5	2
Frequency of drunkenness	7	2.5	5	1
Frequency smoking	6	4	3	2
Frequency watch TV	5	6	3	1
Frequency been arrested	5.5	5.5	4	3
Frequency pled guilty	6	5	2.5	2.5
N female sex ptnrs (women)	6	3.5	2	2
N female sex ptnrs (men)	6	7	2	4
N male sex ptnrs (women)	4	7	6	2
N male sex ptnrs (men)	6	5	3	4
Rank average	4.95	4.64	3.89	3.46
Rank std deviation	1.74	1.51	1.46	1.74
Rank std error	0.28	0.24	0.23	0.27

Comparison to Other Studies

Custody Appeals Study: Cameron and Cameron⁵ and Cameron and Harris⁶ did the most unique studies of homosexual parenting to date: an analysis of child custody appeals cases. These were based on intensive examination of the real life of the parents and their children — that is, not based on answers to questionnaires as with Regnerus, but subject to cross-examination in court. The latter study examined 78 custody appeals decisions involving 79 homosexual parents and 142 children. The 142 children were exposed to a thousand child-years of homosexual parenting and found:

1. parents recorded as lying or engaging in criminality or homosexuality were more apt to be recorded as harming children;
2. homosexual parents as compared to heterosexual parents were more frequently recorded as lying and/or engaging in criminality;
3. in 54 (70%) cases the homosexual parent and/or his associates was recorded as having exposed the children to harm(s) (e.g., neglect, seduction, emotional distress, hypersexualization), as opposed to the heterosexual parent in 4 (5%) cases; and
4. homosexuals were responsible for 111 (97%) of the 115 harms to children in the appeals court record. In 78 heterosexual vs. heterosexual comparison cases, the 141 children were exposed to 12 harms, harms that occurred in 11 (14%) cases.

The study also found that lesbian mothers as compared to gay fathers:

1. were of lesser character as indexed by more frequent lying or criminality,
2. were more apt to generate harms to their children, and
3. had more contact with their children in that 84% of the lesbians vs. 15% of the gays became involved in disputing who would get primary custody.

In Table 1, there is a slight difference in outcomes favoring the gay fathers over lesbian mothers, which tends to support the notion that gays less frequently cause harms to their children. Regnerus noted that among “those who said their mother had a same-sex relationship, 91% reported living with their mother while she was in the romantic relationship, and 57% said they had lived with their mother and her partner for at least 4 months at some point prior to age 18.… Among those who said their father had a same-sex relationship, however, 42% reported living with him while he was in a same-sex romantic relationship, and 23% reported living with him and his partner for at least 4 months” (p. 757). Both Regnerus and the custody appeals study found greater contact by lesbians than by gays with their children.

‘Everybody’ would have picked the winners and losers in the Regnerus study prior to the 1980s. The courts almost always sided with the heterosexual in child custody disputes involving a divorcing parent who chose homosexuality — traditional beliefs permeated the whole culture. The analysis of the 78 custody appeals fits rather nicely into what people 50 years ago would have called ‘common sense.’ Likewise, it is likely that no one would have been surprised by the outcomes found in the study of appeals cases.

A systematic effort by Hollywood and academia — including the professional societies — to ‘clean up’ the image of homosexuality has been underway for some time. Hollywood, especially, seems to tout the importance of ‘love’ overcoming all (except, of course, when it comes to keeping actors and actresses married). Among other components of academia, the American Psychological Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the National Association of Social Workers, and the American Academy of Pediatrics have ignored and/or suppressed not only the custody appeals study, but all the following studies in their public statements, court briefs and journals:

• Javaid⁷ reported a study comparing 26 children of 11 lesbian vs. 28 children of 15 divorced mothers. The 4 children who reported asexuality (see line 10, Table 1 above) had lesbian mothers, and more lesbians’ daughters were apt to reject or be uncertain about getting married and having children (line 1, Table 1).

• Cameron and Cameron (1996) reported on 17 adults with homosexual parents (out of a random sample of 5,182) and how frequently in 986 consecutive Washington, DC obituaries (1988-1993) from gay newspapers homosexuals had children (6% of the gays, 29% of the lesbians were so listed). The 17 were disproportionately apt to report (a) sexual relations with their parents (line 14, Table 1), (b) a less than exclusively heterosexual orientation (line 10, Table 1), (c) gender dissatisfaction, and (d) that their first sexual experience was homosexual.

• Sarantakos⁸ closely matched (by age, sex, grade in school, and social class) 58 elementary school children being raised by coupled homosexual parents with 58 children of cohabiting heterosexual parents and 58 children being raised by married heterosexual parents. The children of married couples scored best at math and language skills, experienced the highest levels of parental involvement at school and at home, and had parents with the highest expectations for them. The homosexuals’ children scored somewhat higher in social studies, lowest in math and language, were least popular, experienced the lowest levels of parental involvement both at school and at home (lines 17-20, 24, 25, Table 1), were more distant from their parents, and had parents with the lowest expectations for their children and who least frequently expressed higher educational and career aspirations for them (line 16, Table 1).

• Sirota⁹ paired 68 adult daughters of gay fathers with 68 daughters of heterosexual fathers. Daughters with gay fathers tested less comfortable with intimacy and more anxious (lines 25, 28, Table 1); were less religious and more frequently engaged in compulsive heterosexuality (line 38, Table 1); less frequently married (19% if father was gay vs. 32% if father was heterosexual; line 1, Table 1); more frequently reported a bi/homosexual preference (34% if father was gay vs. 3% if father was heterosexual; almost every study has reported similarly, including Regnerus); reported less closeness to parents (lines 19, 20, Table 1); and more frequently indicated abusing drugs or alcohol (44% if father was gay vs. 7% if father was heterosexual; lines 30-32, Table 1).
• Among the families of subjects in Sirota’s study, one or more parents reportedly abused drugs and/or alcohol in 59% of gay-father families vs. 31% of heterosexual-father families. 72% of families with gay fathers dissolved, while 68% of families with heterosexual fathers stayed intact. More frequent divorce/partner changing within homosexual-headed families was reported by Cameron & Cameron (1996) and Regnerus.

Conclusion

The above studies generally jibe with traditional common sense. They also fit the findings from custody appeals cases in our court system, as well as the outcomes in the Regnerus study. At the bottom of Table 1, across all 40 outcome measures taken as a whole, intact biological, heterosexually-married families had far and away the best rank average, while lesbian- and gay-headed homes clearly ranked last.

If parental homosexuality is as irrelevant as homosexuals, our professional associations, and the media assert, why are the above studies — methodologically as sound or better than the ones cited by these entities — ignored or dismissed? Given that both Cameron and Cameron and Regnerus reported homosexual parents more frequently became sexually involved with their kids, why is the psychiatric elite so anxious to allow more children to be exposed to the risk of homosexual seduction? How did psychiatry become so wise that it knows ‘the way it ought to be’ without fulfilling the basic requirement of good scholarship — to address all the evidence, and not just selected bits that fit one’s own preconceived notions?

FRI’s Analysis of Federal Judge Vaughn Walker’s Decision on Proposition 8

September 2010

Introduction and Summary

Much of what we ‘know’ cannot be scientifically proven: man-woman marriage ‘worked’ to get us here, but we can’t re-run the world to see if something else would have done it. Since it ‘brought us here,’ ‘common sense’ (and the law until recently) considered man-woman marriage presumptively ‘necessary.’

But what if ‘everything’ was put to ‘rigorous scientific test’ — we had to ‘prove it’? That strategy works in the hard sciences, why not the soft? The mental health professional associations (arguably led by the American Psychological Association [APA]) have been pushing the notion that truth is equivalent to peer-reviewed social science or, better yet, to what either the professional associations or the ‘consensus of scientists’ say that social science proves.

Many studies can ‘prove’ that two things are different. By definition, of course, men are different from women. But men and women also generally differ in affective response, spatial abilities, mathematical abilities, etc., qualities that may not be obvious from their physical differences alone. In this fashion, social science research ‘proved’ that segregation harmed black students in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954). In a similar manner, we can distinguish between homosexual and conventional marriage by definition — one is same-sex, the other opposite-sex. But research also suggests these two entities appear to differ in average length of union, frequency of infidelity, length of fidelity, how well they raise kids, etc.

On the other hand, no set of social science studies can prove that two things are definitionally different but ‘the same’ in every other respect. In other words, that there is no difference other than name between them, a la Shakespeare (“a rose by any other name would smell as sweet”). This would include claims that “children who are raised by gay and lesbian parents are just as likely to be well-adjusted as children raised by heterosexual parents” or that ‘men are functionally equivalent to women, so gender doesn’t count in parenting.’ Such claims have to be taken with a grain of salt because they are beyond our ability to prove them.
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By Paul Cameron, Ph.D. and Kirk Cameron, Ph.D.

Summary: Over at least the past 30 years, a “shadow homosexual network,” including outposts in the Pentagon, has been established within the military. Homosexuality has significantly disrupted the military mission. Sexual activities, including homosexual flirtations, favoritism, and rapes have become part of the military subculture.

This report updates our original compilation of evidence on this issue, published in 1993. That original report indexed the degree to which those who practice homosexuality have troubled the U.S. Armed Forces, utilizing several lines of evidence:

• Heterosexual versus homosexual military violations in 1953-54;
• Review of the 1990 pro-gay Humphrey-Studds study, featuring first-person reports of homosexuals who had served;
• Review of contemporary media accounts of homosexuals in the service; and
• Independent polls and surveys conducted by FRI of those who served and their experiences with those who practiced homosexuality.

Despite more recent media attempts to highlight a fundamental shift in both public and military opinion when it comes to service by open homosexuals, the evidence we compiled in 1993 is still very relevant today. It is also consistent with our latest study¹, which not only reports additional, corroborative first-hand testimony, but also examines all cases of sexual assault investigated by the Department of Defense (DoD) in 2007 through 2009. Our statistical analysis of these new data indicates that:

• Gays and lesbians were at least 3 to 9 times more apt to be investigated for sexual assault on fellow service personnel than were non-homosexual service men and women.

Bottom line: Allowing homosexuals to openly serve would almost certainly exacerbate these disruptions.
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President Barack Obama has called for repeal of the current Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (DADT) ban on homosexuals serving openly in the U.S. Armed Forces. As of February 2010, he has commissioned the Secretary of Defense and Joint Chiefs of Staff to find a suitable way to eliminate the ban, perhaps within the next year. FRI has published previous research indicating the problems associated with homosexuals serving in the military, based on surveys of veterans.¹ We have also critically examined the Humphrey-Studds study,² which set out to show that the military ban was unnecessary, but upon closer examination proved just the opposite.³

Despite the evidence, President Obama seems determined to get rid of DADT. But at what risk to the U.S. military? This report examines very recent data on sexual assault reports in the military, as compiled by the Department of Defense (DoD),⁴ as well as telling and relevant testimony from eyewitnesses who have served. None of the evidence suggests much has changed since DADT was enacted, or that there is any justification for removing the ban on open service in the military by homosexuals.
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Homosexuals are considerably more apt to involve themselves sexually with the underage. Anyone actually in contact with the phenomenon has to acknowledge this fact, perhaps most strongly explicated by the chairman of FRI in 1985.1 While homosexual spokesmen have disputed his conclusion, in a paper published in 2000 by Blanchard, Barbareee, Bogaert, Dicky, Klassen, Kuban, and Zucker2 the authors noted that the best epidemiological evidence indicates that only 2-4% of men attracted to adults prefer men..; in contrast, around 25-40% of men attracted to children prefer boys…. Thus the rate of homosexual attraction is 6-20 times higher among pedophiles” (p. 464). These figures are quite similar to those we at FRI have used since the early 1980s — figures that for which gay activists have roundly criticized us. So how do Blanchard, et al., most of whom are from the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto, handle this fact that seems so damaging to the homosexual cause? By telling people not to notice, or if they do, not to draw the obvious conclusions.

Here’s how they ended their article:

“Implications for Societal Attitudes

A few closing comments are necessary to preclude any misunderstanding or misuse of this study. First, the statistical association of homosexuality and pedophilia concerns development events in utero or in early childhood. Ordinary (teleiophilic) homosexual men are no more likely to molest boys than ordinary (teleiophilic) heterosexual men are to molest girls. Second, the causes of homosexuality are irrelevant to whether it should be considered a psychopathology. That question has already been decided in the negative, on the grounds that homosexuality does not inherently cause distress to the individual or any disability in functioning as a productive member of society (Friedman, 1988; Spitzer, 1981).” (p. 476)

Really? “developmental events in utero or early childhood” — what is the evidence for this apparent attempt to exculpate those who engage in this behavior? Consider also “does not inherently cause distress to the individual.” Both citations are relatively ‘ancient’ in that the cited authors could not have availed themselves of the research in the 1990s — when a number of large, relatively unbiased studies on nonvolunteers were published. In 1994, the University of Chicago sex survey12 reported that homosexuals — both men and women — less frequently claimed to be happy and more frequently claimed to be unhappy than heterosexuals. More frequent mental disturbance by homosexuals of both sexes has been reported in every large, random-sample study on the issue published in the 1990s! (e.g., the Christchurch study; the NHANES study; the large military twins-registry study; the 1996 NHSDA). And in 2001, in the Archives of General Psychiatry, a large representative sample of the Dutch population3 yielded the same finding, with gays twice and lesbians two or three times more apt to have one or more disorders in either the past 12 months or lifetime So even from the rather narrow perspective of “distress to the individual” the statement is, as near as can now be determined, decidedly false.

Likewise “any disability in functioning as a productive member of society.” Where have these scholars been living? AIDS has devastated homosexual men, and disproportionately affected homosexual women. A host of self-inflicted problems (e.g., higher rates of suicide, substance abuse) as well has higher rates of physical disease, mental disturbance, murder, and accidents contribute to a sharply reduced lifespan.4 And if as a class you die young, and you are disproportionately involved in substance abuse and corruption of youth, you cannot contribute as much to society as those who live normal lifespans and do not endanger their neighbors with their drug-use or their neighbors’ children with their sexual predilections.

Another article dealing with the proportionality issue of child abuse was published by Freund and Watson in 1992. These authors5 noted the 1985 literature review by FRI’s chairman, and agreed that the ratio of female to male pedophilic victims was about 2:1, even as the proportion of heterosexual to homosexual men is about 20:1. Freund and Watson did some ‘figuring’ to arrive at an estimate that homosexual men are ‘only’ twice as apt to be pedophiles. They concluded that their findings generated support for the notion that “a homosexual development notably often does not result in androphilia [sexual desire for men] but in homosexual pedophilia [desire for boys]. … This, of course, should not be understood as saying that androphiles may have a greater propensity to offend against children than do gynephiles [men interested in sex with women],….” (p. 41). Notice that both sets of Canadian investigators went to some lengths to ‘interpret’ or ‘gloss’ their results as not harmful to the gay rights cause, but were honest enough to report ‘the facts’ as they found them.

How is either research team to account for the fact that 23% of the 671 gays in the Bell and Weinberg study in San Francisco6 said that half or less” of their partners “were 16 or younger when the respondent was 21 or older”? Might this mean that about a quarter of gays have engaged in pedophilia? Certainly, in California in 1970, the activity they admitted to met the definition of ‘illegal sexual contact with the underage’ [the age of consent was 18 yr.]. Then, some might have only had sex with those aged 16. How many had sex with boys aged 15 or less? Bell et al didn’t ask. But in the original Kinsey study7it was 27% of gays (Kinsey’s standard was having sex with the underage ‘when you were aged 18 or older’). And how many had sex with boys aged 13 or less — an age that is defined as ‘protected by immaturity’ in almost all of the nations in the world8 at this time? The original Kinsey data suggests that that figure must be somewhere around 14% of gays under his ‘aged 18 or older’ standard (7, p. 512). 14% is about a seventh of gays! Add-in the fact that a disproportionate number of homosexuals have sex with animals (most studies, including the two from the Kinsey Institute, have reported proportionately 4 to 6 times as frequently as among heterosexuals [in the Bell et al study in San Francisco,9 respondents were asked whether or not they had engaged in sex with animals. Among men, 134 (19.5 percent) of 685 homosexual men answered yes, as opposed to 18 (5.4 percent) of 334 heterosexual men. Among women, 19 (6.5 percent) of 292 lesbians said they had engaged in sex with animals, while none of the heterosexual women said they had done so [1981, p. 161]), and homosexuals are more apt to engage in sadomasochism [26% of the gays v 4.5% of the heterosexual men and 9.6% of the lesbians. 2.7% of the heterosexual women had engaged in sexual sadism (9, p. 161)] and you get a picture of people who more frequently sexualize the players and parts in life — people who are if you will, ‘omnisexual.’

Gregory Herek, an openly homosexual/gay activist psychologist at the University of California at Davis has criticized our published material on homosexuals in general and on the link between homosexuality and child molestation in particular. Herek criticizes the fact that no one, including us, knows the sexual orientation” of the man who molests boys in any study. We hold that “a homosexual” is “one who engages in homosexuality,” and even if a person caught molesting a boy called himself a heterosexual that would be irrelevant (many men who have sex with men and get HIV call themselves “heterosexual.” Self-labeling is interesting, but it is hardly determinative as to who is, by their actions, considered a homosexual. The standard of ‘what the individual does’ rather than what he says he is is the standard employed throughout AIDS research, the 1996 NHSDA, the Dutch study cited above, etc.). As a matter of fact, it appears that most people caught molesting boys call themselves “homosexual” or “bisexual” — in one study (the only one of which we are aware in which the question as to ‘identity’ was asked), 86% of those incarcerated for molesting boys described themselves as homosexual or “bisexual” (10, p. 83) — what the other 14% called themselves is not reported, but their behavior makes clear what they reasonably should be considered. A “homosexual” (or an omnisexual) is one who has sex with his own sex, quite apart from what he claims he “is.” While Masters and Johnson suggested ambisexual” to describe many homosexuals since they go ‘both ways — that is, have sex with both their and the opposite sex,’ we feel it makes the most sense to call them “omnisexual” (like ‘omnivorous,’ denoting willingness to eat both plants and animals) with a ‘major’ or emphasis in homosexuality, which suggestively accounts for their more frequent sex with animals, children, scatophilia, S & M, etc. Herek cites the 1994 Jenny et al11 study of hospital charts at Denver Children’s Hospital of 269 children molested as demonstrating that the molester was a gay or lesbian adult in only 2 of the 269 cases.” As a matter of fact, 22% of the children in this study were homosexually molested — but only 2 of the children’s hospital charts either explicitly (in one case) or implicitly (in the other case) mentioned homosexuality of the perpetrator and only one molestation by “someone who could be classified as a pedophile or preferential child molester” (11, p. 43). The rest of the ‘sexual preferences’ of the molesters were not listed on the charts and were assumed to be heterosexual and nonpedophiles by Jenny et al., — often merely because the perpetrator was living with the mother of the boy molested. Because you have sex with a mother hardly means that you will not have sex with a boy. For instance, in the large (over 20,000 respondents) random French survey, of those who “reported having had sexual intercourse with a same sex partner at least once also stated that they had had sexual intercourse with persons of the opposite sex (4% of men and 2.5% of women reported practices with partners of both sexes)” (p. 111). For the sample as a whole, “4.1% of men and 2.6% of women reported having had at least once same sex partner” (p. 108). Thus, only 2.4% of men who had ever engaged in homosexuality and 3.8% of women who had ever engaged in homosexuality failed to also engage in heterosexuality.14 This is how some married men molest boys and some married women molest girls — engaging in homosexuality is seldom the only kind of sex such an individual participates in. People whose worlds are ‘colored sexual’ often find any number of sexual things to do to and with others of many different ages, different species, and, of course, the opposite and same sex.

Returning to the Jenny et al. study, are the overwhelming proportion (over 99%) of those who molested children not “pedophiles” because they were not listed as such on the hospital charts? Perhaps “pedophiles” only commit about 1% of child molestations. But the 1% figure seems a tad improbable. Of course it depends upon what you mean by “pedophile.” if the standard that ‘any adult who voluntarily engages in homosexual activity is a homosexual’ is applied to the Jenny et al. study, then every one of the child molesters was a pedophile. If we narrow the definition of pedophile” to those who ‘major’ in sex with children,” then the Jenny et al. study does not tell us, and it still seems unlikely that only one perpetrator was a “pedophile” by this standard. The Jenny et al study also does not tell us how many of the molesters “majored” in homosexual activity (some of the girls molested by men were probably molested by ‘homosexuals’ under this definition). Why do we know so little? The sexual orientation” of the perpetrator was apparently not mentioned in any of the other hospital charts! Neither the children nor the perpetrators were interviewed for the Jenny study, only the hospital charts were examined. Hospital charts seldom record ‘guesses’ as to the “sexual orientation” of the perpetrator. If 60 (22%) of the children were homosexually molested, by any reasonable definition of ‘what a homosexual is,’ these children were molested by a person who engages in homosexuality — i.e., a homosexual. Because a person engages in homosexuality does not mean that he does not engage in heterosexuality. Very few “homosexuals” have failed to have sex with the opposite sex. Thus both FRI and the Univ. of Chicago investigators12 reported that only 5% of women who have sex with women and 9% of men who have sex with men said that they were heterosexual virgins, the corresponding figures for the FRI study were 5% and 8%. In any given 5 year period, it appears likely that most of those who have sex with their own sex also have sex with the opposite sex. A goodly number of men who molest boys also molest girls1 — all of these men are omnisexuals with an apparent ‘major’ or ‘minor’ in homosexuality. Our research has been published and defended in peer-reviewed, scientific journals. Herek’s criticisms of us have not met this standard, nor has he replied to our defense of the validity of our data. As time marches on, just about all of the findings we have reported from our 1983-84 study have been replicated by other investigators — most of whom disagree vehemently with our interpretations of those findings. But the findings are ‘the facts,’ the interpretations of those facts are just that — interpretations or reasoned opinions.

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References

1. Cameron, P. Homosexual molestation of children: sexual interaction of teacher and pupil. Psychological Reports 1985;57:1227-1236. 2. Blanchard R, Barbaree HE, Bogaert AF, Dicky R, Klassen P, Kuban ME, Zucker KJ. Fraternal birth order and sexual orientation in pedophiles. Archives of Sexual Behavior 2000;29:463-478. 3. Sandfort TGM, Graaf R, Bijl RV, Schnabel P. Same-sex sexual behavior and psychiatric disorders. Archives of General Psychiatry 2001;58:85-91. 4. Cameron P, Cameron K, Playfair WL. Does homosexual activity shorten life? Psychological Reports 1998;83:847-866. 5. Freund K, Watson RJ. The proportions of heterosexual and homosexual pedophiles among sex offenders against children: an exploratory study. Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy 1992;18:34-43. 6. Bell AP, Weinberg MS. Homosexualities: a study of diversity among men and women. NY: Simon & Schuster, 1978. 7. Gebhard PH, Johnson AB. The Kinsey data: marginal tabulations of the 1938-1963 interviews conducted by the institute for sex research. Philadelphia: Saunders, 1979. 8. Graupner H. Sexual consent: the criminal law in Europe and overseas. Archives of Sexual Behavior 2000;29:415-461. 9. Bell AP, Weinberg MS, Hammersmith SK. Sexual preference: its development in men and women, statisitical appendix. 1981, Boomingrton, Inidana Univ. Press. 10. Erickson WD, Walbek NH, Seely RK. Behavior patterns of child molesters. Archives of Sexual Behavior 1988;17:77-86. 11. Jenny C, Roesler TA, JPoyer KL. Are children at risk for sexual abuse by homosexuals? Pediatrics 1994;94:41-44. 12. Laumann EO, Gagnon JH, Michael RT, Michaels S. (1994) The social organization of sexuality: sexual practices in the United States. Chicago: U. Chicago Press. 13. Schumm WR. Psychology of the scientist: LXXXIII. An assessment of Herek’s critiue of the Cameron group’s survey studies. Psychological Reports 2000;87:1123-1132. 14. Spira A, Bajos N, and the ACSF Group. Sexual behaviour and AIDS. Aldershot: Avebury, 1994.

Copyright 2001, Dr. Paul Cameron, this is a working paper, do not cite or use without written permission.

Sex With the Underage: The Kinsey investigators indexed sex with the underage two ways, neither of which was completely satisfactorily for our purposes. First, 171 (26.5%) of 646 male homosexuals and 4 (1.8%) of 222 female homosexuals reported having had homosexual sex with someone aged 15 or less and 91 (14.1%) of the 646 male homosexuals and none of the 222 female homosexuals reported having had homosexual sex with someone aged 13 or less since they were aged 18 or older (Gebhard & Johnson, 1979, p. 512). Heterosexual respondents were not asked the same question. For a rough comparison, 79 (3.3%) of 2393 heterosexual men and 2 (0.1%) of 1840 heterosexual women reported coitus” with someone aged 15 or less and 10 (0.4%) of the 2393 male heterosexuals and 1 (0.05%) of the 1840 female heterosexuals reported coitus with someone aged 13 or under since they were aged 18 or older (p. 289). The questions don’t appear to be completely parallel (i.e., if respondents took the question to mean penile/vagnial intromission this would not parallel homosexual contact which could be oral/penile, anal/penile, mutual fondling, etc.), but may suggest a greater incidence of sexual involvement with the underage by homosexuals. Additionally, 313 (7.2%) of 4339 females reported some sort of physical heterosexual contact ranging from genital touching” to coitus” (p. 193 compared with p. 197) before their puberty with an older male. From p. 195 it would appear that around 85% of these males were aged 18 or older, which would suggest that perhaps 6% of the female respondents reported being sexually molested by a man while they were aged 13 or less. This 6% report by females of having been sexually involved with adult heterosexuals is substantially less than the 14.1% report made by homosexual male adults as to their involvement with the underage. In their partial follow-on with subjects in a hospital as controls v homosexual offenders, many of whom had never been imprisoned for their offenses (1965, p. 40), the investigators noted that [m]ore of the homosexual offenders were, while preadolescent, the recipients of approaches by adult males than were the members of any other sex-offender group: roughly a third had such experience. Note that only 8 percent of the control group were similarly approached. The approaches turned into overt physical contact for between 20 and 28 per cent of the three homosexual-offender groups — higher percentages than exist for other groups….The record of the homosexual offenders’ childhood contacts with adult males immediately suggests that their experiences may have predisposed them to subsequent homosexual activity…. physical sexual contact with an adult male would be a graphic demonstration to the child that some adult males can find sexual gratification with boys, and this concept could be of importance when the child himself becomes adult,….” (1965, pp. 275-76). On their face, these findings suggest more sexual involvement with the underage by homosexuals.

Saghir & Robins Sex With the Underaged: 15% of homosexual v 0% of heterosexual men were arrested for ‘contributing to the delinquency of a minor,” however, the investigators said that at no time was a homosexual arrested because he was with a minor who was under the age of 16″ (pp. 165-66). No homosexual or heterosexual women were arrested for ‘contributing to the delinquency of a minor.’

Bell & Weinberg Sex With Underage: Homosexuals were asked the proportion of partners who were 16 or younger” when the respondent was aged 21 or older. 156 (23.2%) of 671 homosexual males and 11 (3.8%) of homosexual women chose half or less.” Heterosexual respondents were not asked this or a comparable question. However, the point estimates for the homosexuals are similar to those reported in the first Kinsey survey. One male homosexual but no other adult reported committing homosexual rape on a child, no one reported heterosexual rape of a child (1981, p. 163). 6 (3.1%) of 192 homosexual women, 1 (1.9%) of 54 heterosexual women reported having been heterosexually raped in their first heterosexual encounter as a prepubertal child and 4 (0.9%) of 443 homosexual men reported having been homosexually raped in their first homosexual encounter as a prepubertal child. 6 (3.4%) of 174 homosexual women and 2 (4.2%) of 47 heterosexual women reported having been raped heterosexually before their puberty. 4 (0.9%) of 420 homosexual men and 1 (1.2%) of 83 heterosexual men reported having been raped homosexually before their puberty. 8 (3.4%) of 237 homosexual women and 1 (0.9%) of 112 heterosexual women said that they had been raped in their first heterosexual encounter after their puberty. 2 (0.4%) of 540 homosexual men said that they had been raped in the first homosexual encounter after puberty (1981, pp. 163-164).

FRI Sex With Underage: From the perspective of the ‘victim,’ 19.5% of 298 homosexual males, 8.1% of 210 homosexual females reported that their first physical homosexual contact with an adult homosexual” occurred before they were aged 14; while 32.3% of the males and 13.8% of the females that their first homosexual sex with an adult homosexual occurred before they were aged 16. From the perspective of the ‘perpetrator,’ 9.4% of 203 homosexual men and 8.8% of 137 homosexual women reported that the age of their youngest homosexual partner” was 13 or younger; 16.7% of the men and 8.8% of the women that the age of their youngest homosexual partner was 15 or younger while they themselves were 18 or older. From the perspective of the ‘victim,’ 3.3% of 1,758 heterosexual men and 5.5% of 2,768 heterosexual women reported that their first physical heterosexual contact with an adult heterosexual” occurred before they were aged 14; 11.9% of heterosexual men and 14.9% of heterosexual women that their first heterosexual contact before they were aged 16. From the perspective of the ‘perpetrator,’ 2.3% of 1706 heterosexual men and 0.54% of 2,376 heterosexual women reported that the age of their youngest heterosexual partner was 13 or under; 11.7% of the heterosexual men and 1.3% of the women that their youngest heterosexual partner was aged 15 or under while they themselves were 18 or older.

U Chicago Sex With Underage: Respondents were asked whether anyone had “touched them sexually” before they were aged 12 or 13. The reporting is somewhat unclear, but it appears that 11 (32%) of 34 homosexual males and 8 (42%) of homosexual females reported having been sexually molested. These percentages were higher than the proportion of all men (11%) and all women (15%) who made the same report. Overall, considering only touchings by those the respondent thought to be aged 18 or older, 56 (21.1%) of 266 touchings were homosexual. 46 (66.7%) of 69 sexual touchings of boys, and 10 (5.1%) of the 197 touchings of girls were homosexual. These findings are consonant with more sexual involvement with the underage by homosexuals.

French study Sex With Underage: About 10% of homosexuals reported that they had been raped at some point in life as opposed to about “one in 500″ for heterosexuals (p. 187). About a third of these rapes ocurred while the respondent was aged 15 or younger, but explicit differences in having been sexually molested in childhood between homosexuals and heterosexuals divided by sex were not reported.

Summary of Scout Molestations (416 cases from 1971 to 1990)

Summary of Teacher/pupil

Summary of newspaper stories about molestation

Add to other ‘character issues’ risk taking, shortened lifespan

Summary: Referenced as both supporting and weakening the case for parenting by homosexuals, 57 life-story narratives of children with homosexual parents published by Rafkin in 1990 and Saffron in 1996 were subjected to content analysis. Children mentioned one or more problems/concerns in 48 (92%) of 52 families. Of the 213 scored problems, 201 (94%) were attributed to the homosexual parent(s). Older daughters in at least 8 (27%) of 30 families and older sons in at least 2 (20%) of 10 families described themselves as homosexual or bisexual. These findings are inconsistent with propositions that children of homosexuals do not differ appreciably from those who live with married parents or that children of homosexuals are not more apt to engage in homosexuality.

Keywords: Homosexual parents, children, content analysis

Correspondence to Paul Cameron, Family Research Institute, Inc., POB 62640, Colorado Springs, CO, 303 681-3113.

Children Of Homosexual Parents Report Childhood Difficulties

Appendix

The following excerpts are from Rafkin, L. (1990) Different mothers: sons and daughters of lesbians talk about their lives. San Francisco: Cleis Press and Saffron, L. (1996) What about the children? Sons and daughters of lesbian and gay parents talk about their lives. London: Cassel. The ellipses are unconventionally employed – they just indicate that material irrelevant to scoring has been skipped.

Rafkin

1) Girl (7) California: “live with my mother now, but other times I’ve lived with lots of women…. my grandma and grandpa are kind of mad that my mom is not with a man and that everybody else is married…. They feel that women should be with men. So do most of my aunts and uncles. They don’t tell me this stuff, but grownups keep quiet about things like that…. It seems like everyone who has a dad also has a brother or a sister. It seems like lesbian mothers usually have one kid…. I don’t tell other kids about my mom. At school it kind of bothers me because when we play or tell stories, there’s always a mom and a dad…. What really bothers me is when my friends come over and them they get into [asking me] if I know my dad. So I tell them no, not really…. I ask my mom about my dad but… you see, I wonder about him. I don’t know where he is. I don’t think my mom knows either. It’s just hard to know that other kids have dads. Everybody else has a dad. My mom has had a couple of relationships with other women, but I didn’t realize it at the time. I just thought that we were sleeping over at their house, or they were sleeping over… When I grow up I want to live with someone; I don’t know if I want to get married and I don’t know if I want to have kids.” (pp. 19-22) Fa, Em, Sc, D, I

2) Boy (16) Chicago, heterosexual: “When I was two and a half years old, my mother started seeing her first woman lover…. Her lover came to live with us and stayed until I was ten. She had a son seven years older than I,… during this part of my childhood it didn’t seem that different to me to have a lesbian mom…. When my mother and her lover split up, things got a bit messy. Before they split up they were having fights, and about this time my father came back from overseas. My mother had a nervous breakdown, and my father wasn’t very good with children, so I got carted off to my aunt’s house to live…. My mother recently split up with her second girlfriend…. I don’t talk to anyone at school about my mom…. There is some cover-up that kids of lesbians have to do, because otherwise you are accused of being gay yourself. If I came out and said my mother was gay, I’d be treated like an alien…. [mom’s] parents especially really got upset when she came out…. I use to go to the lesbian coffeehouse. I used to hang out there and meet my mom’s friends, but now I’m too old and I can’t go there any more. I think boys can’t go there after they are about eleven or twelve. This makes me feel restricted, but I understand why they want lesbian-only space away from men. But at the same time I felt sad about it, and I think the women I knew there felt sad that I’m now too old to go there. I respect their rules and decisions, but I didn’t like being excluded. But the rule against boys was made in 1974 – the year I was born – and it doesn’t seem like they’re going to change it just for me.” (pp. 23-26) Sc, D, I, Dis

3) Woman (21) Indiana, heterosexual: At age 17 her mother told her she was lesbian. “It felt like all of us were getting divorced, the separation and loss would hurt all of us…. The reason I had been ‘neglected’ was because she hadn’t known who she was… now, two years after my parents split up, I am starting to feel the pain of that loss. When I recently came home from college, I missed not having one bed, one closet, or one house to settle into. I have to split up my vacations between the two houses, which doesn’t make for very relaxing vacations.” (pp. 27- 31) Em

4) Girl (10) San Francisco: lives “with my two moms… D… lives upstairs with her girlfriend. L lives downstairs and she works at a downtown job. I live both upstairs and downstairs. I didn’t know my dad until … last year…. he lives with his lover Tim nearby…. Before I was born, L and D lived together, but after they broke up they decided they both needed their own space. I think they broke up before D was pregnant. D has a girlfriend now, and L said she might want to have a girlfriend soon… I have a sister who lives in New York. L had her a long time ago and she gave her up for adoption…. When I was young, D used to go to demonstrations, and she used to sing these songs about lesbian and gay people. I went with her to demonstrations, and I guess I figured things out because of those songs. I sang the songs, too…. When I get older I might feel more comfortable telling people. Right now I don’t really know what would make things easier… When I grow up I want to be a writer…. Like I might take my turtle – his name is Speedy Gonzales – and say that he has Playboy magazines under his shell and write a story about that…. I like my life. The only thing I would change about my life is my neighborhood, because there’s a lot of drugs around.” (pp. 32-36) Hy, Fa, Sc, I, Pr

5) Girl (10) Kansas City: “One day when I was about six, I woke up in the middle of the night from a bad dream, and I looked in the bedroom and saw R and my mom sleeping together. The next day I was trying to hint at things because I knew something was up. So I asked them if they wore underwear to bed. They couldn’t understand why I asked that. They said, ‘why do you want to know?’ They never told me either. They wouldn’t say anything about it…. I was sort of scared. It felt funny. I didn’t know if it was OK or not. And I didn’t feel comfortable talking with them about it. I just found out they are gay, officially, two years ago…. I never talk to my sister about it, because we don’t feel comfortable talking about…. I consider this a really big secret. I don’t feel like anyone is trustworthy. I don’t think that if my best friend knew, she would ever come over to spend the night…. I remember my dad hurting my mom. They were fighting, and he was strangling her against the wall. I was saying, ‘Let her go!’… my dad hates gays. He also hates R living with us…. I wonder what will happen when I have boyfriends who find out about my mom. I wonder if they will still like me. And if I want to get married and the guy found out, would he still marry me? I guess if they can’t take me how I am, they can’t have me.” (pp. 37-40) Hy, D, Em, Sc, HtV

5) Girl (13) sister to girl above: “I never talk to anyone about it…. I don’t tell anyone. If somebody found out, and they were really good friends, they probably wouldn’t tell. If they did tell people and kids at school found out, I think I’d be a social reject…. [My dad] is trying to make us think being gay is bad and turn us against our mother. But it’s not working. I think he’s immature. If he can’t accept that other people are different from him, then he is really stupid. I’m thirteen and I can accept it – and I could accept it when I was six.” (pp. 41-43) Sc, HtA

6) Woman (23) California, heterosexual: parents divorced when “I was three, so I’ve always known my mother as a lesbian…. I always knew what a lesbian was, and I always knew I had a choice as to what I would be…. My mom has always been in the public eye. She’s a political activist… one of the founding members of Ms magazine with Gloria Steinem…. I am doing some recovery work and I go to anonymous meetings and I’m not really anonymous. I don’t feel comfortable in meetings where everyone knows my mother. Being known in that way is difficult…. When I was eight, my best friend was a girl called M. We did everything together: played on the soccer team, the bowling team, stayed overnight at each other’s houses nearly every night – everything. One night my mom had a party, and M’s mother suddenly stormed in and tore M out of the house and told M that she couldn’t be friends with me…. My mother suspects that M’s mother saw two women kissing on the porch…. once in junior high school my mother ask me to be on television with her, about something to do with gay rights, and I said no. They ended up showing a photo of me anyway. A girl from school, a real bully, saw the program and stood on the front steps of the school and started screaming that my mother was a faggot…. I felt really uncomfortable for about a month. I just hated everyone hassling me. Generally, lesbians with kids hang with other lesbians with kids…. There are a few times when my mother and I lived alone with each other. She always lived with her lovers, or we had housemates…. when the lover relationship was over, these lovers would leave, saying they wanted to continue a relationship with me. But they never did. When the relationship was over, their relationships with me were also pretty much over. My defense against this was that I never became attached to these women… I put up an emotional wall whenever my mom would say, ‘this is it; this is the relationship that’s going to last forever.’ But I’d predict that it would end in such and such amount of time. I had slim expectations of her being in a wonderfully long, monogamous relationship. Women were always in and out of our lives. I couldn’t let myself feel anything about these women.” Had two boyfriends, “Part of the reason I waited so long to get involved with boys is that my grandmother was always pushing me into it.” My grandmother “definitely doesn’t want me to be like [my mother]…. I don’t want to have kids.” (pp. 44-49) Em, Sc, T, I, HtE, doesn’t want children

7) Boy (12) Oakland: “About a year ago one of my mothers moved out of the house we were all living in… my brother and I go back and forth between the two houses…. Now one of my moms is seeing someone else whom I like very much. In fact, my other mother likes this woman too. In one house we live with our co-parent, another mother and her seven-year-old boy, and a gay male roommate… usually I’m not around a lot of men. I’m mostly around women… my little brother, who is half black, asked [the gay roommate] to be his father…. when school started is when I really understood things. At preschool there had been both kids with straight parents and lesbians parents. And at that time all my friends had lesbian parents…. At my old school when I’d get sick, the nurse would say ‘Who’s this other person on your emergency card?’ I never answered, and I hoped she’d stop asking…. [He explains to the school chums that] one was my aunt. … But it’s hard sometimes. I don’t know what the kids would do if they knew…. When I was younger, I went to women’s festivals with my mother. There’s this kind of famous picture of me and my biological mom. She’s on stage with long hair and her breasts are hanging out and she’s got me in her arms. I always try to hide that picture,… It’s kind of embarrassing. My mother was one of the first lesbians to choose to have a child… I might have been two years old when I first asked, ‘Where’s my daddy’. She probably said, ‘you don’t have a daddy, you have a donor’…. Right now I don’t have any reason to find out who my donor was. He could be a real asshole.” (pp. 50-53) Hy, Em, D, F, I

8) Woman (25) Massachusetts, homosexual experience: “The year following my parents’ separation was a full one for my mother. I remember her going through periods of depression, when she wouldn’t leave her bed for days…. during this time my mother came out as a lesbian…. she and my mother were lovers for nine years…. I was having trouble spending the weekdays with lesbians, who discussed the evils of the patriarchy and the value of women-only space, and then spending an orthodox Shabbos with the other side of my family… I would cry upon leaving my mother’s and I felt awkward in my father’s community. [Mom lost a custody battle, but] When the verdict was announced, my mother and I tried to run out of the courthouse, but everyone chased us and a huge fistfight ensued. Police officers, lawyers, and lesbians were all yelling and punching each other in the lobby…. [The daughter ran away] with help from friends, who risked being charged with kidnapping…. We went all the way to the state Supreme Court and set a children’s rights precedent. Previous to my case, only rights of parents were protected…. As time went on, my mother and L were more and more separatist… when I started fourth grade in our local public school, they notified the principal and the teachers that they were lesbians. Subsequently, I was placed in classes much below my level. I was in a reading group with kids who were struggling to read ‘fire hydrant,’ and then going home to read Rubyfruit Jungle, the lesbian primer novel… by junior high things were very bad at home… I was discouraged from having male friends, and any female friends were to be made aware that I lived in a lesbian household before I could have them over…. I experienced separatism as a constant level of anger and negativity…. men were called mutants, straight women were considered disowned sisters who wasted woman-energy on men, and other lesbians were sometimes accused of being government spies sent to infiltrate and undermine the community. Anyone who was not like us was evil… [at age 14] I moved out and went to live in a lesbian boarding house…. I also learned to fear the world’s judgment, to see relationships as temporary, to be distrustful, and to withhold communication as a means of self- protection and punishment…. I see evidence of how emotionally detached I’ve become.… L and my mother… explained their parenting style by saying that the patriarchy was pushing me hard in one direction, and they wanted to counteract that pressure by pushing just as hard in the other. I’m lucky I didn’t get squashed. I… was left with no appealing role models. I haven’t known who or what to strive to become…. When I have kids, I hope to do some things differently than she did…” (pp. 54-63). Hy, Em, D, Sc, I, E, C, Dis, wants children

9) Girl (15) Florida: “I have a problem… my mom’s gay… this thing with my mom is a big deal for me…. most of the time it’s really great. It’s only when my mom embarrasses me or when … the people at school – give me a hard time…. Sometimes I feel like my mom really looks different, like she doesn’t look like other moms to me. It’s the way she dresses. I feel like lesbianism just reeks off her… at school, people make jokes about dykes and fags… then there are the hard times, like when my mom had a lover move in with us, one that I did not like. They’re not together anymore,… she was really out, she had lesbian bumper stickers all over her car, and she looked like a dyke: I couldn’t stand it when she would try to hug my mom in front of my friends!… Once I told my mom that she’d have to choose between me and her lover… She said she wished I wouldn’t make her do that. I couldn’t believe that she didn’t just say, ‘oh, of course, I’d choose you.’ Now it was one thing for her lover to move in with us, but it was another for her to go on the Oprah Winfrey show and come out to the whole world without telling me first. That’s how all my friends found out about her and my mom…. it got all over school. That must have been one of the worst experiences of my life. People teased me and stuck mean notes in my locker…. my dad… really hates my mom…. my dad’s wife said that one reason they didn’t want me to come back early was because they thought that if I was with my mom full time I would grow up ‘to be like her.’… They said their family was a ‘real family.’” (pp. 64-68) Em, D, Sc, T, I, HtA

10) Boy (10): at 9 “I really flipped out. I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to like her and live with her as a regular mom like before…. four different girlfriends and I got to know them all. It was difficult to know the first three…. her last girl friend has stayed with her a long time… I’ve never talked to my dad about any of this… My dad doesn’t know that my mom is a lesbian. I think if kids at school found out about my mom, they would tease me…. I went to the gay and lesbian parade. I saw men in women’s costumes and women in men’s costumes. It was weird. This made me confused…. It wasn’t fun for me to find out my mom was a lesbian.” (pp. 69-71) Hy, Em, Sc, I

11) Girl (7) adopted Indian girl: “My family is L, my mother, and Z, my other mother… and A, who is L’s lover…. Sometimes all the moving gets confusing… I used to have two lesbian mothers, but now I only have one…. Because Z isn’t a lesbian anymore…. Z has a boyfriend now…. I say daddies are as dumb as bubble gum. I like L being with A because I get to snuggle with them in the nighttime…. I might get married. I might not like men. I might be a lesbian. I might like to be with both, I don’t really know yet. There are a lot of choices.” (pp. 72-74) T, I

11) Girl (7) adopted, sister of girl above: “When I was a little girl my two moms were lovers; then they broke up. Then L fell in love with someone else. Now L is lovers with A. Z is lovers with a man…. all my friends know I have two moms, but some of them think that one of them is my mom and one of them is my sister’s mom. But that’s not true. Both of them are my moms….. I don’t want to have a father…. When we were little we used to go back and forth and back and forth all the time, but now we stay at each house longer and it’s much better. It used to be exhausting….I don’t know if I want to be a lesbian.” (pp. 75-76) T, I

12) Girl (15), Michigan, heterosexual, with gay father and lesbian mother: parents were married and then got divorced. Mom “and C were together about four months… my mom dated for a long time. Then she started seeing N. She was with her for about three years… there was one woman that I was really close to, and when my mom broke up with her, it was really hard. That was when I decided not to get so close to mom and dad’s lovers…. it’s hard having two gay parents, because I can’t really talk to anybody about it…. Sometimes I think about being gay. At first, I thought my mom would love me more if I was gay…. I guess I’m straight right now. I don’t really know how old you have to be to know you’re gay. I guess it’s just when you know that’s what you are…. I would say I’m a feminist…. My mom is telling me about the political part of things…. I’m learning about women’s rights… I’ve gone to… the Gay Pride marches. Most of the adults I know are gay,…. I feel… probably more comfortable [with them] than if I was walking around with friends from school.” (pp. 77-82) Em, D, Sc, I, E

13) Boy (13) Oklahoma City, heterosexual: “there’s a rumor going around school that my mom’s a lesbian and that there are naked women hanging all around our house…. When people ask me about it, I say, ‘Hell, no! My mom’s not a lesbian! Shut your face!’… No one at school knows one hundred percent sure that my mom is gay and I haven’t told them…. but… I think people will suspect…. I figured it out [when] I was in kindergarten…. my mom explained to me what being a lesbian was and what a great responsibility it was for me to know that she was…. my mom has a lover now… we stay at her house on the weekends. They do a lot of hugging, touching and kissing…. I know a lot of gay people, some who are my mom’s friends…. [one of his friends said gay wasn’t good] he’s sure not [my friend] any more…. I am quite straight. I like girls very much.” (pp. 83-86) Hy, Sc

14) Woman (21) student from New York City, bisexual: When I was seven my “mother called me and T, my brother, into her bedroom. We saw A – the woman who had moved into our apartment two week before – lying next to mother in the queensize bed. Mother rolled onto her side and said “I want you to know that A and I are lesbians. That means that I’m married to A the way I used to be married to your father. But you can’t tell anyone about this…. all of mother’s friends, few of whom were heterosexual…. most lesbian couples we knew stayed together between three to five years. Mother could never stay tied down that long. She changed lovers every year to eighteen months. We moved a lot because mother always lived with her lovers…. Every year she apologized for being a lesbian, for making us keep her secret, and for changing lovers like shelf paper… my first year at boarding school – tenth grade – I developed a physical attraction for my roommate. I had just learned what it meant to be gay or lesbian – it took me that long to understand the sexual aspect…. I wrote in my journal about my attraction and my strong fear that I might be a lesbian just like mother…. my roommate read that entry of my journal to every girl in our hallway…. Nasty words were written on my walls. Obscene pictures were taped to my door…. I was ‘D the dyke’ and that was it…. Mother wasn’t the only one in the closet. I was in there with her…. This summer I realized that I am bisexual. I don’t know if living with my mother had influence on this or not. [her mother said] after observing me all those years, you’re following my example.” (pp. 86- 90) Hy, Em, Sc, T, I

15) Woman (approximately 21) Boston, heterosexual: “I must have been nine, my brother seven… The last time we talked about it, he told me that not many of his friends knew about mom… I remember the awkwardness in high school and wanting to believe that I was not different. Neither my brother nor I had many friends sleep over at our house during those high school years because it would mean explaining things… my brother [lives with] secrecy all the time…” (pp. 91-95) Em, D, Sc

16) Woman (18) student in New York: apparently totally accepting of her mother, her mother’s lover, and gay friends. (pp. 96-98)

17) Boy (10) Florida: “I have a lot of friends who are lesbian…. When I visit my dad he always says that it’s wrong for my mom to be a lesbian.… He says he hates C and that he doesn’t like my mother very much…. No one at school knows about my mom. I think my friends would feel pretty bad if they knew…. I went to the Southern Music festival with my mom… I see a lot of naked women there… at the festival I got my hair dyed… blue… now I have stripes.” (p. 99-101) Hy, Sc, HtA

18) Woman (19) student in Wisconsin, heterosexual: “My parents were liberal and I was raised to think of homosexuality as nothing more than another option. After dad died, when I was nine, I felt fine when she told me she was gay…. Growing up is hard enough thing to do, and I sometimes resented my mother for making it harder…. none of what I did mattered, because of what my mother ‘had become,’ boys thought my mother was reason enough not to date me. I would date a boy, and sooner or later I’d have to spring him with news of my family’s hidden – or sometimes not so hidden – secret…. my mother, my sisters and I attended these [lesbian/feminist] merrymakings before mom had her sexual metamorphosis…. I’d sometimes bring my best friend and we’d pretend to ‘be together’ to avoid being hit on.” (pp. 102-106) Em, Sc, E

19) Girl (6): “I feel different. I don’t tell most of my friends I have two mothers… I don’t tell other kids at school about my mothers…. when I was really little, I lived with my grandfather and grandmother because my mother was doing drugs. I got back with my mother when I was three. Then when I was four, my mother lived in this special house because she was getting off drugs…. [at five] we started to live together again…. I feel kind of good and kind of bad about not having a dad…. I know my real dad was always drunk. I had another dad for a while, and he hit me all the time…. [M moved in] M is going to have a baby next year…. I have thousands of friends who are lesbians. I mostly see them at AA meetings… D and D are these men who are giving us sperm. We’re putting it in a bag and using a little shooter thing…. Last year my teacher found out. She saw both of my moms at PTA night… I didn’t want her to know, because I wanted her to think of me the same as the other children.” (pp. 107-109) Hy, Em, D, F, Sc, HtV, I, C

20) Man (27), heterosexual with homosexual experience: “Lesbians should not fill their children with their own fears and hatred. I say this after considering the causes of needless pain in my past, and my troubles understanding the present. I was eleven when my mother sat me down and told me she was a lesbian. It meant nothing to me… she kept her sex life out of the small one-bedroom apartment we lived in…. my stepfather… abused me sexually, physically, and emotionally… [then his mother kidnapped him] I suspect she knew her action was illegal… I was very troubled at that time; reclusive, quiet, withdrawn, unsocial… from about the time of the divorce on (I was seven or eight) I was the kid whom all other kids – including the kids who got picked on – picked on…. I met lesbian friends of my mother’s who also had kids…. I do recall our wishing our mothers were more attentive to us than to each other. We kids would get together and have sex, males or females in any combination – unbeknownst to our parents, but ironically I don’t think any of us really knew what our mothers’ lesbianism really meant…. in sixth grade I joined the Boy Scouts, and it was then that I started to be called a new word: faggot…. that one word was really harmful to my development… Since my parents had sex with the same sex (my mother with other women, my stepfather with me), I had not understood that homosexuality was wrong. Also, at the time I couldn’t figure out my own sexuality, because I was having sex with people of both sexes…. in the feminist lesbian movement in Washington, D.C…. I was being exposed to damaging experiences… I was twelve at the time – would be left with other lesbians who said horrible things to us. I distinctly remember a woman telling me, ‘you are a most despicable thing on earth because you are nothing but a future man’…. for me, this kind of hatred ruined my life. This hatred, of men by women, of women by myself, has existed in my life until recently…. Until I was sixteen or so, I was sexually abused by many straight men, ‘friends’ of my mothers’ whom I was occasionally left with…. today I don’t trust people. Period…. she was a lousy mother. Her friends thought so too. … I was into drugs by the age of fifteen…. Since I turned seventeen my relationships have all been heterosexual, except for a couple of one-night stands with men in the pre-AIDS era…. I don’t fight for any cause, because I know better than to be deceived by promoters of causes. I believe that people in causes are motivated by selfishness, not by principle…. my mother wasn’t there for me when I needed discipline or parental support. She was out with the girls instead of being at home when her child needed her…. A few female lovers have described me as emotionally withdrawn, difficult to talk with, at times not there, exclusive, shut in. I find relationships hard to believe in…. I don’t know what a normal relationship is supposed to be like…. I have a lot of experiences; I just don’t feel them very deeply. I have built such immense and thick walls around my spirit that nothing but the thinnest vein of emotion seeps through…. I have survived by staying in shallow water.” (pp. 110-116) Hy, Em, Sx, T, V, E, Dis, N, C

21) Woman (19), student, heterosexual: “my mother met her lover at college; I think my mother was her teacher. Five years later they got together, and they’ve been together now nine years. I have never gotten along with my mom’s lover…. she’s real stubborn and had a problem with drinking… when she’s drinking she doesn’t really have a middle ground; she is either angry or happy….. There was a time when I was angry at my mom because I thought her being gay wasn’t fair to me…. it looked to me like [mother would] do anything her lover said to do…. I haven’t told a lot of people about it [mother’s lesbianism]… sometimes I felt embarrassed about her… my grandmother… doesn’t like it, and she was worried about me living with lesbians.… My mother has also worried about my dad finding out about her being gay… [but] he never really wanted me, even before she was gay…. He has been married four times… I’m engaged to be married now, and my fiancee likes my mother and doesn’t mind her being gay… his family is in Germany. They don’t know anything about my family…. we’re planning a long engagement… My mother has many friends who are gay, many of whom are men” (117-121) Em, Sc, engaged to be married, substance abuse in home

22) Girl (6) San Francisco, result of artificial insemination: “I found out that my mom is a lesbian the first time I went to a gay and lesbian parade. I was about four…. I really want to know him [her father]… Sometimes they [kids] tease me about it because all of them have dads… They think that one of my mom’s is a fake mom…. I’m different than all the other kids in my class…. I’m the only kid in school with a lesbian mother… Sometimes I get called names like ‘No-Dadhead’ and that makes me feel bad…. [after a friend’s divorce, she told her] every day you wonder what’s going to happen. That’s how it was when my moms split up…. [she met her ‘donor father’ who is a gay writer] who lives on the east coast.” (pp. 122-127) Em, D, F, Sc, T, I

22) Girl (13) San Francisco: “I told people [at school] I didn’t have a dad, and they started laughing… none of those kids know about my mothers…. If it did get around, I think I would be treated differently because of my mom’s sexuality…. I don’t have many men in my life, so I’m not as comfortable around them as I would like to be… if kids found out… [they] wouldn’t want to come over to my house or maybe their parents wouldn’t let them come over. I think the older I get, the more pressure there is from other kids. When you are young, kids don’t really understand…. I wish sometimes that we had a dad that lived with us…. it’s really hard for kids of lesbians… I don’t know if I’m gay or straight, but I don’t feel pressure to be either way…. I’ve liked most of the women that my mom has been in relationships with…. right now I need more attention than she is giving me…. I spend one weekend a month with one woman, and another one I see two times a week. Sometimes I wish there was a second person in the house so when my mom goes out there would be someone else to watch me.” (pp. 122-127) Em, D, F, Sc, T, I

23) Girl (5), North Carolina: “I was four when my mommy met her, and they got married when I was five. I call her Aunt S… My own family I don’t like very much. I don’t like my Grandma, because she didn’t want my mom to marry Aunt S…. she wanted to shoot her. One time my grandmother went to this person who helps other people hurt people that they don’t like. She tried to put a spell on Aunt S… I don’t want to grow up gay, because it’s hard. There’s a lot of argues and stuff… I know a lot of people who have dads. My best friend has a dad… Sometimes when they [my mom and Aunt S] argue, it hurts my ears… some friends ask me questions about my moms, and I get embarrassed and scared to answer. And sometimes I’m mad that I don’t have brothers and sisters.” (pp. 128-130) Em, F, Sc, HtV

24) Boy (10) foster child in San Francisco: An attempt is being made by two lesbians to adopt him and his sister. “It took a while to find out about I and S…. when we started to spend the nights with them, we noticed that they stayed in the same room together… they are nicer to us than if we had a mom and a dad. We’re lucky. I think it’s funner to have two moms, and I think it’s fine for lesbians to adopt kids…. My real mom wants us to live here. And most of my friends know about us having two moms and it’s okay with them, too. If I ever have kids, I’d want to adopt them. I’d like to help other kids who don’t have families.” (pp. 131-132)

24) Girl (9) foster child in San Francisco: “we met L…. Two ladies are better than a mom and a dad…. You know when other kids say ‘Your Mama?’ It’s a bad thing to say. But when they say it to me I say, ‘Which one?’” (pp. 131-132)

25) Girl (13) Hawaii: “my mom and dad were never married…. I’ve been around gay people all my life. I like it when my mother has lovers, because she seems happier then… some kids at school have teased me about my mother being gay, and this makes me mad…. because of my mother’s work [edits a gay newsletter] we’ve received crank calls…. It’s scary, and for this reason I sometimes wish my mother was straight. And it’s difficult to bring people to the house. There’s stuff about lesbianism all over the house, lesbian books and things. I think this stuff would be a problem for my friends, so I don’t bring them home much. I don’t want to give them more opportunity to tease me. Right now my mother isn’t so open about it because I’ve asked her not to be.” (pp. 133- 134). Em, Sc, T, I, E

26) Woman (39) California, homosexual: “In my memories, I’m always looking for my mother and finding her with women doing things I don’t understand… Sometimes they blame me for opening a door that wasn’t even locked…. [at about the age of 10] I noticed a door that I hadn’t yet opened. Inside I saw a big bed. My mother sat up suddenly and stared at me. She was with B… and then B shouted, ‘you fucking sneaking brat’… my mother never said a word…. I came to hate N because of the way she and my mother fought every night. They screamed and bickered and whined and pouted over everything… N closed my mother’s hand in the car door… [mother told her recently that] she and N hadn’t made love in seven years…. I’m living a good life… I’ve been with my lover, Mary, since we met in college… my mother showed me that lesbianism is a possibility.” (pp. 135-141) Hy, Em, V, I

27) Girl (9): “My biological mother is S and my other mother is L. We’ve lived together for a year. Before that L lived across the street… My mom met L…, L had just broken up with someone. So they started going out. Then they started seeing each other more often. We moved in together because it got complicated going back and forth every night. All of a sudden I felt like I was a different person because my mom was a lesbian. Before that I didn’t really know any lesbians. So it was amazing that my mother was a lesbian…. Once in a while I wish my dad was in my life, because I never knew him as my father…. Sometimes I get angry because I can’t tell anybody about my mom. The kids at school would laugh…. they say awful things about lesbians… then they make fun of me.… having lesbian mothers is nothing to laugh about. Those kids should think about putting themselves in my shoes… I have told my [mother] that she has made my life difficult.” (pp. 142-144). Em, D, F, Sc, T, I

28) Man (19) San Francisco, heterosexual: “When I was about seven, my mother told me that this woman, D, was going to stay with us for a while – and she never left!… I didn’t think anything much about it until I was about ten…. it just became obvious because she and my mother were sleeping together…. If anyone asked, I said that D was a close friend from London… I felt a bit odd, but I got the idea that this was how things were… D moved to London… It was all very painful…. It had been nine years… over half my life, and it was hard not to see D every day…. A few months after D left, my mother started to see another woman, but that didn’t last… then she got involved with a different woman… she’d be violent toward my mother… my mom went back to University and she started to get political. Then my mom was dismissed from her job because she was a lesbian, and after that she started to go on marches and to women’s groups… there were some women in these groups who objected to men altogether, and I couldn’t cope with that. There was one woman who was working on my mom’s case, and she went at me one time because I was a male – and I was only twelve or thirteen then…. I don’t really talk about my mother to anybody. But once I told a close school friend that my mom was a lesbian… This boy got mad and started shooting his mouth off about my mom… [mom] said she was going to get married to a gay man so that she could live with her American lover… I really didn’t know any gay men until I came here,… and I find the idea of two men touching each other a little hard to take. Whenever I meet them, they usually try to figure out if I’m gay…. I’m not,… I don’t think having a lesbian mother has really affected me, except that I think she talked to me more than most parents… I wish I’d had somebody to talk to about this when I was young, someone who wouldn’t tell anybody. Instead I kept quiet. To this day my brother doesn’t tell anybody about my mother. I don’t even think he has even told his wife. But it’s a lot easier to talk about all this here in America. Homosexuality is just not as accepted in Britain.” (pp. 145-148) Sc, V, I, Dis

29) Woman (approximately 20), student in Washington state, possibly homosexual: “My mother is a lesbian. It took me until my senior year of high school to be able to say those words without remorse… The biggest hardship was T’s [my mother’s] separatism. This lasted throughout most of my younger years. T was very serious about this issue,… I just remember thinking that all lesbians felt the way my mother felt about everything. If that were true then all lesbians would talk about men as crude, destructive, dishonest, sleazy creatures that were really not supposed to exist. They were a mistake. Yet while she told me these things… I chose not to believe her… I already thought lesbianism meant treating men as inferior. From there I decided that lesbians were a bunch of hypocritical women. Just a bunch of women who preach freedom and individuality, yet their values and beliefs were basically homogeneous…. lesbianism looked like a bleak future to me. T called my sister and me ‘baby dykes,’ making us wear those small hand-crafted lesbian signs she had made for us by a local lesbian jeweler. Both my sister, M, and I have always been extremely resentful of that… I felt I was cheated out a normal childhood… at age nine I earnestly asked my mom for my own checking account and a small apartment, sincerely believing I could handle it…. I want a life partner, yet I don’t know if there is any such thing. I am not sure if I can trust anyone enough to let them be my lifelong friend, much less my lifelong lover. Many women have passed through my life. Some I saw as mentors and friends, while others were just my mother’s lovers…. Sometimes I would open up and hope that one of these women would be there forever, but it never happened.… It wasn’t until more recently that T and I developed our own relationship, separate from and less affected by our lovers.” (pp. 149-152) Em, I, E, Dis, wants children and a “life partner”

30) Girl (13) adopted, from Puerto Rico, heterosexual: “Each of my mothers already had a girl when they got together, and now they have one together, too. So now that makes four of us. [She was adopted when she was 3] I consider both M and J my mothers. When I was little I never noticed anything different about us; I never felt it was different having two moms. But in the last three years I’ve started to feel the difference…. I always told people that M was my mother’s best friend,… but I’ve never told anyone the real story. I don’t think I’ll ever tell it. I think if anyone found out about my mother being a lesbian, they would think us kids were strange because we have these strange mothers…. I’ve gone to the gay march for the last few years. It’s kind of strange, because all during the parade I was worried that my friends might see me…. I think being gay is kind of strange. Sometimes when my mother and M are hugging, my brother and I say ‘Ugh!’ and go to our rooms. We don’t like to see it. If it was my decision I wouldn’t be gay…. My aunt is a lesbian, too, and she adopted my brother. So my brother J lives with her.” (pp. 153-155) Hy, Em, D, Sc, E

31) Woman (21) student from San Francisco, homosexual: “I was adopted at the age of three by my aunt, who is a lesbian…. I refer to my aunt as my mother and think of her as such. None of my biological mother’s first four children grew up with her, and we all went our separate ways…. My mother, brother, and I moved around a great deal… later moved to a woman’s co-operative in Texas. Many of the kids I knew had gay moms, .and everything seemed natural to me… I naively accepted her as she was… when I started school… things began to shift…. I began to have a different view of my mother and myself… about nine or ten, I began to hear words such as ‘fag,’ ‘dyke,’ and ‘queers’…. We moved out of the women’s co- op, and I remember vividly knowing things were different in the bigger world…. because of this, I began to lie and hide. I also learned to keep quiet…. Friends would come to my house, and I would run ahead to check if my mother was home or if she was with her lover. All I could imagine was my friends coming home with me to find my mother kissing another woman in our living room…. I built up a great deal of fear and frustration. I was angry that I want not part of a ‘normal’ family and could not live a ‘normal’ life with a ‘normal’ mother. I wondered what I did to deserve this. Why did my biological mother let a lesbian adopt me? How could she think that this life was better than what she could have given me?… my brother felt a lack of identification with men. He also felt some rejection due to his gender by some ‘radical’ lesbians. It felt to me like my brother was taken away from me because my mother was gay…. I now had to take responsibility for who my mother was. I had to learn to protect her, and myself, from the harsh reality of society’s prejudice… As a child I was always involved with her community, and with other lesbians. I went to concerts, marches, and to many other events. Now I rejected it all. In response, my mother became upset and, sometimes, started to exert her parental authority…. there was a concert… featuring Holly Near, Cris Williamson, and Meg Christian. I refused to go, and my mother forced me to attend. I was not only angry that I had to go to something so lesbian-oriented… but [also]… that she made me go anyway…. I talked with my sister… we swore we would never be gay…. [but one night] my sister confessed to me that she was dating a woman…. Then when I was sixteen, I met and fell in love with a woman. I was really shocked. I didn’t understand how this could happen. Up to that point I had dated men – one relationship lasted a year and a half, and several others spanned months at a time…. What I began to understand about being gay was that it was a feeling, rather than a choice I was making…. I am involved with the Lesbian/Bisexual Alliance.” (pp. 156-161) Hy, Em, D, Sc, I, E, Dis

32) Man (23) from New York, heterosexual: “My parents were divorced when I was eight… I do recall us spending a lot more time with a friend of my mother’s and her three kids, all of whom had been friends of ours for years…. in the six years of living in Queens, I was exposed to and learned a lot about people: gay people, straight people… I certainly didn’t tell just anyone about my mom, as most people would not understand due to their lack of exposure…. I have always had an accelerated knowledge of sexual education due to the nature of my mother’s and her first lover’s occupations. They were both physical and sex education teachers [in NYC]…. When my mom broke the big rule – the one that says only men and women get married – I began to question other rules which had designs on my life. Her breaking out of traditional heterosexuality really put a kink… into my way of thinking…. I… will always be heterosexual. I’m confident that my [two] sisters, too will remain heterosexual. None of us seem to have the urgency toward marriage. This has freed us up a little so that we can live our lives and concentrate on ourselves….” (pp. 162-165) Hy, Sc

33) Woman (26) San Francisco, homosexual: “My mother found a new, very close friend right before I left for college…. We came out to each other at the same time…. my mom was almost forty and still living with my father, although they had different bedrooms… The woman she was seeing was about to go through a divorce. Both of them were married and had families… her lover was worried about her kids.” (pp. 166-170) wants children if she can find right “co-parent”

34) Woman (18) student in San Jose, heterosexual: “My mom met her lover, L, fourteen years ago…. After the divorce, L moved with us… I saw them kiss – they didn’t sneak off or anything… I always told my friends soon after I met them, and few of them have had problems with it. I also tell my boyfriends about it…. it seems relationships don’t last. Lesbian relationships are hard… my grandmother has never accepted L… My dad… doesn’t know about my mother and L… It doesn’t matter what kids have – fathers, mothers, or both – they just need love and support. It doesn’t matter if you are raised by a pack of dogs, just as long as they love you! It’s about time lesbians and gays can have children. It’s everybody’s right as a human being.” (pp. 171-174) Hy

Saffron

35) Girl (15) London, bisexual: “My biological mother, S, got pregnant by accident… she realized that she didn’t want to be heterosexual any more. She lived in a communal household… and all the women there agreed to help… over the years the number of women in the household dwindled away… I ended up living with J, who is S’s sister, and J’s girlfriend R and F… S stayed in Bristol… one day when I was four, S came and took me away… ‘you’re coming to live with me… and you’re not going to see J, F, and R again’…. Three weeks later [she was kidnapped by J and R, who eventually got legal custody]. “I’ve been trying… to fit in [with other kids]. But I’m just fed up with all of them. They can go their way, I’m very happy now being me. Now I say, ‘This is me and if you don’t like it, well that’s tough…. I always go to Gay Pride every year with my parents…. I’m interested in boys or girls, depending on my current mood…. I see myself as different, and it’s kind of because my mothers are lesbian.” She considers her parents to be J, F, and R, who live in two different houses, although she now also sees her biological mother S (pp.15-23). D, T, I, E, C, Dis

36) Boy (14) London, heterosexual: “Mum…used [a man as a donor].” Lived with mum in a communal household and H. “Mum recently split up with H…. I missed having a relationship with a man when I was growing up…. then I do wish I had my Dad around more…. I feel different. I don’t trust anybody unless I know them…. I’m quite closed to everybody, I don’t tell anyone much… one kid started teasing me about my mother. I beat him up…. I can’t be that open about my family to people I don’t know. I didn’t feel bad about it initially, because I didn’t notice it. I think from about the ages of ten to twelve, I began to realize that I was odd because of having a lesbian mother… But I’m different because I want to be different. I don’t want to be like other people” (pp.15-23). D, F, Sc, T, I

37) Boy (12), Brighton, England: Mother was artificially inseminated by a gay man. “Mum… has had several girlfriends in my lifetime…. I don’t go around saying that I’ve got two mums…. The kids at school were asking me whether I’d got a dad. I wanted S to come… so that they could see that I did…. [Mum’s sister is also a lesbian.]… If we are sitting in a restaurant eating, she’ll say, ‘I want you to know about all these sex things.’ And she’ll go on about everything, just shouting it out…. sometimes when mum embarrasses me, I think, ‘Oh god I wish I had a dad.’… Been to every Gay Pride march. Last year, while attending “we went up to a field to play football, when two men came up to us. One of them started touching me. We just ran. I didn’t want to go this year because of that” (pp. 24-30). Hy, F, Sc, Sx, I, E

38) Girl (11) Leicester, England: “I say that A’s [her mother’s lover] living with us, just sharing a house with us…. Most of the kids are the sort of people who make jokes about all of this…. Sometimes I’m scared that my friend C might actually say something to one of them about my family… at school, I have another best friend, but she doesn’t know about this either.” (pp. 31-39). Sc, probably wants to have children someday

39) Girl (17) London, possibly bisexual: “My Mum took me to a lot of women’s functions and it was never hidden from me…. [First C was her mother’s partner.] I was eleven when they split up, and that was a shock… [the next lover] T was scary. They had a big fight in the kitchen… I’d never seen such damage and I didn’t like it at all… Then my Mum met R, whom I now hate with a passion…. If I did see her on a dark night, I probably wouldn’t hesitate to beat her up…. I miss the idea of a father. I worry when I haven’t seen him for ages… I may have wished for a father-figure in my life, but that was a dream really. I never had one…. I do like it when some male gets all protective over me…. I never had it from my Dad…. As I was growing up, I would hotly deny it if my Mum was accused of being a lesbian…. Mum was aware that I didn’t want everyone to know… house used to be plastered with lesbian and feminist posters…. [At age 15, one boy] was a malicious, conniving little git… He knew about Mum and he told everybody…. they started making jokes against lesbians… C’s [Mum’s first lover] daughter is the same age as me, and Mum told me that she’s a lesbian now. She used to be boy-crazy. We were both tomboys, but I went all girlie at some point. Hearing about C’s daughter made me question my own sexuality… I think perhaps I might be a lesbian. I’ve pushed myself to be heterosexual because I know my Mum wants me to be a lesbian. I’d like to have a lesbian experience, because otherwise how will I know what I want?” (pp. 40-48) Em, F, Sc, T, V, I, E

40) Boy (15) London, disabled, possibly asexual: Mother and C lived together for 4 years, split up. Now he lives in both households, going back and forth. “this woman helper… knew my mother was a lesbian. She made fun of me… I’ve been bullied in school.” Arrested for blocking traffic in a demonstration for “disability rights.” (pp. 49-53). T, I

41) Woman (20) from London, sexual preference uncertain: “All my life I’ve lived in a communal household…. At the moment I live with my dad, T, L, and S.” Mother split up with dad when she was 2, and died when she was 5. “because my Dad’s gay, I’ve also had the added benefit of a positive experience of homosexuality…. I feel comfortable with gay men and can enjoy myself at Gay Pride…. His homosexuality influenced me to question my sexuality more than I might have done. Until recently, I would have said I was straight, but I’m not sure at the moment…. When I was twelve… I felt nervous about revealing my secret. I was worried that people would hold it against me…. [Dad has had a number of boyfriends but none have lived in the commune.] There were a number of other men messing him about, which upset me… In the last six months, tension has grown between me and my Dad…. I’m also angry at my Dad and confused about my feelings toward him…. I don’t want anything to do with men. I’ve been having a hard time with them…. my boyfriend was unfaithful to me… I felt insecure about my femininity. I started feeling that I was too masculine in my mannerisms, attitudes and dress. In my early teens, I was often mistaken for a boy.” Has been on TV supporting gay rights. (pp. 54-62) Hy, Em, Sc, I, E

42) Woman (19) from Scotland, heterosexual: Father was pastor, became gay when she was aged 11, divorced his wife. Respondent went to live with him at age 16. “It was a difficult time for me. I used to find myself crying, mostly because of the responsibility of knowing my Dad was gay… Not being able to talk to anyone about it was hard…. He was in a gay Christians’ group… That’s where he met A…. If I do fall in love with a woman, then I wouldn’t be particularly bothered about it. At the moment, I’m heterosexual…. A year ago, Dad and A split up. Dad’s with G now… I don’t think of my Mum as family, not now…. Being a father isn’t great for my Dad’s image…. When we go together to the supermarket and I call him Dad, he tries to shush me up… He’s serious when he says that… He thinks men won’t look at him if they know he’s got a daughter… [Her best friend’s] boyfriend jumped up and said, ‘God, your dad’s a fucking poof.’ I was shocked and went out of the room…. after that I didn’t want to be around him at all…. I don’t think there’s any point in getting married. I don’t really agree with marriage.” (pp.63-70). Em, T, I, anti-marriage

43) Woman (21) homosexual: Mother became a lesbian after marriage to dad. “when I was twelve… Mum said, ‘Do you know what a lesbian is?’… ‘Well, I’m a lesbian.’… When I was eleven, Mum finally left for good… six weeks later Dad had a nervous breakdown and disappeared for several weeks to a mental hospital… We were spread out round the country and it was very confusing… I naively told some staff at the school that Mum was a lesbian… turned into a major village scandal. I ended up leaving the school because of the homophobia that emerged… The court welfare officer wrote that I was idolizing my mother and that I was gay because Mum was… After hearing the welfare officer’s report, I started feeling that my sexuality was subversive, that I was different because of my sexuality…. My first affair was with a woman at Dad’s school…I was also extremely heterosexually promiscuous. That was the way I coped at the time… I was very lonely, made suicide attempts… I used to self-mutilate… I have an addictive personality… The reason I stopped cutting myself is that I woke up and realized it wasn’t helping me at all. My girlfriend at the time was incredibly unsympathetic… Whenever my friends, most of whom are dykes…. I’ve had a few problems getting Mum and her partner to recognize the commitment and seriousness of my relationship with J. I tell them, ‘Treat her as a daughter-in-law.’ They’re backing off, because every time they’ve got to know one of my girlfriends, six months later they’ve had to meet a new one. They find it hard to take me seriously… I’d like to have my own family…. the main problem is that I only want a girl. I don’t like myself for it, because I can’t justify it ethically…. I hate heterosexual sex” (pp. 71-79) Hy, Em, T, I, wants a girl child

44) Woman (33) heterosexual, single mother: Didn’t know her mother was lesbian when her parents divorce occurred at age 8. “It’s only when a friend confides in me something that’s relevant that I would share something about Mum back…. generally I don’t drop it into the conversation…. I wasn’t totally comfortable bringing friends home because of Mum’s lifestyle…. I hated being different from my friends. I don’t want my children to go through what I went through…. I always wished that I had a family with a mum and a dad together like the majority of my friends…. [Lost her virginity very soon after being informed about her mother’s lesbianism at age 16 because] knowing about her sexuality made me feel the need to find out about my own…. [Her dad] never allowed me to have friends, either girls or boys, in my bedroom. I had to entertain them in the living room with him sitting there behind the newspaper. He told me recently, ‘With a mother like yours, what did you expect?’ I was very upset by that…. I don’t have any faith in marriage guaranteeing relationships. (pp. 80-90) Em, D, F, Sc, anti-marriage

44) Woman (25) heterosexual, single mother, sister to woman above: “Before I was born, Mum fell in love with a woman friend who lived nearby…. [Later] Mum didn’t have permanent partners, just women who stayed a couple of nights a week and went out with her…. [When her mother revealed her lesbianism] I had a brief dramatic reaction and wrote an entry in my diary which read: ‘Oh God, what am I going to do? Why can’t this family be like everybody else? God help me.’… It’s not something that I would talk openly about with friends until they were close enough to be trusted… I’ve accepted that my Mum is lesbian, but it’s a slightly uncomfortable subject, if I’m honest…. I was aware of being different… I never had a loving relationship with Dad and grew up without a father’s love…. I would have liked the same type of love from a man that my Mum gave me…. after my Mum told me she was lesbian, I wondered if I was too. My mother’s brother is gay as well…. [Respondent was promiscuous perhaps because] I was also trying to prove to myself that I wasn’t a lesbian. My Mum was cool about my sexual experimenting” (pp. 80-90) Em, D, F, Sc, I

45) Woman (24) heterosexual: Both parents were homosexual. “our family life wasn’t great. There were a lot of arguments and we were always going to family counseling…. I wanted my father to be that perfect dad that all the other kids have. I didn’t want a dad who’s different, who’s gay and who sleeps with men…. On top of everything else that made me different, I suddenly had two gay parents. It was just about tolerable to have one gay parent, but not two. The whole thing embarrassed me. I felt angry with both of them… I wanted to punish and hurt her…. [Mom and her current partner J] talk to me about my life, ask me why I want to get married…. [Respondent moved out on her own when she was 16, butI had to live with my mother for a month, and that helped me learn an awful lot about the lesbian lifestyle. When I learned that both my parents were gay, what I needed to clarify was whether I am gay…. I think she’d be quite chuffed [i.e., pleased] if I turned around and said, ‘Mum I’ve met a woman.’… She always tries it on, ‘K, why don’t you try women?’… I think she’d be quite pleased if I did…. [Her mother’s] become an ardent feminist… She’s become anti-men…. I used to not say anything until I had to. I’ve found that it’s like a big secret that I’m keeping.” (pp. 91-98). Em, D, F, Sc, I, E, Dis, wants to get married

46) Woman (24) from London, heterosexual: When I was ten, [mother was to go on a TV program about homosexual parents], she asked me if I wanted to go on TV, and of course I did…. The TV program changed my life. Three days later, my father started a custody case to take me away from my Mum. He’d found out she was a lesbian by watching the programme…. My world went to pieces… I left school on Friday evening a secure and happy child. When I went back to school on the Monday, I’d lost all my friends, I was picked on… I became frightened of being rejected. I didn’t want to tell my friends…. We had a rule that my Mum and her lover didn’t hold hands or make any display of their relationship when we went out or were near my friends…. My Dad has always been the deepest, most painful issue for me…. When I was twelve, I went to my Mum and said that I’d like to see my Dad…. I cried when I had to leave him…. [Mother] was always open about her sexuality. I was involved in her political activities and went on marches and demonstrations…. [Mother had a number of lovers.] my world fell apart again when I was sixteen. Mum and S separated because S wanted to have another relationship… three weeks later, J separated from J. Suddenly I lost two major figures in my life. That was all very peculiar. One minute the relationships were fine and the next minute they were over. And they both went out of my life completely…. lost my virginity on my fifteenth birthday…. I doubt very much I’ll ever get married. Marriage represents absolute pain.” (pp. 99-107) Em, F, Sc, T, I, E, anti-marriage

47) Man (29) West Midlands, England, homosexual: Mother got pregnant by another man, married and then divorced his father when he was aged 6. Lived with his father for three years when his “father and stepmother both beat me with their hands and belts for minor indiscretions… I was becoming increasingly disturbed – I had nightmares, phobias, permanent bed-wetting, and nervous twitches and habits. [His mother remarried and re-divorced and became lesbian around the time he was aged 15.]… My mother was thirty three [but she was seeing a 23-yr old woman. Mother had a number of different live-in partners.]… from fifteen onwards I was around a lot of lesbians…. Some of the lesbian separatists found me difficult, because I was becoming a man. I really disliked those who saw me only as a man, not as a person…. I started cottaging [having sex with strangers in public toilets] when I was thirteen years old and was promiscuous for fifteen years…. [at age 15] I met a man in a toilet in Birmingham who was thirty. He was the first man I’d ever met and I fell head over heels in love with him… [Mother was not happy that his lover was aged 30]…. Compared to most of my friends, I had it lucky. They were getting beaten by their parents and at school. Some were in care. We were very angry and confused. We took our revenge whenever we could by being vile and loud and hateful. Coming out is one of the biggest things in your life. It’s the self-consciousness of walking down a street knowing that I had just sucked a man’s dick in a toilet, thinking that people know and despise me, that there must be something wrong with me. It’s a mixture of being proud to be gay at the same time as thinking I’m a disgusting pervert. I’d had fifteen years of indoctrination by straight society to overcome… having a lesbian mother helped me to come to terms with being gay very young and to be quite vocal about it…. I often feel oppressed and threatened by heterosexual society. It’s important for gays not to turn the other cheek but to educate people on their heterosexism, to challenge them in a direct and positive manner, to let people see that we are strong and powerful… From the ages of fourteen to twenty-two, I was out of control, depressed, attention-seeking and very unhappy. I made a couple of fake suicide attempts… the pattern of instability I’ve repeated all my life, moving from one relationship, job, school and house to another.” (pp. 108-116) Em, HtEm, HtV, I, Dis, wants to foster parent

48) Woman (19) Brighton, England, heterosexual, single mother: Mother became lesbian and divorced her father at age 3. Her stepmother “abused” her. “My sexuality isn’t influenced by my Mum’s at all. My Mum encouraged us to have relationships, but she didn’t mind whether it was with boys or girls…. My parents are liberals. They’ve been easy about me having sexual relationships with my boyfriends. As a result, here I am with a baby at the age of nineteen!… I wish that my parents had been stricter. I didn’t get any messages from them that what I was reading or hearing was wrong…. There have always been gay people in my life. My Mum used to bring me and my brother to gay events…. I went on a lot of demonstrations [with her]. (pp. 117-123) Hy, HtHy, HtV, HtI, E

49) Man (34) from London, homosexual: “My mother always had lots of women friends…. I could hear them making love when I got up early or woke at night…. My mother started to have long-term live-in relationships with women when I was in my early teens. I was quite grown up. I knew what lesbianism was and I knew that’s what she was. It wasn’t traumatic for me at all.… When I was seventeen, my mother started living with S, who was the same age as me…. Each successive long-term relationship was a good thing, and the one with S was fantastic…. Her being lesbian didn’t affect me, …[but] I did want a more conventional mother… My mother’s relationships used to be very volatile with lots of screaming and arguing…” He reports that his younger brother and sister are heterosexual. (pp. 124-132) Hy, I

50) Woman (20) bisexual: Mother married a man, he turned out to be gay. She married again, and the new man was gay – the father of the respondent. “When I was about ten, Daddy came to look after us in the flat which Mummy went away on a retreat. Daddy brought a beautiful young man with him who was about twenty. At the time, my Dad was forty. There were in bed together when I came in…. [Mother became a lesbian. One of her lovers] used to stay the night and I got annoyed with her prancing around in the morning without her clothes on. I didn’t actually want to see her body. It felt like she was taking liberties in my house…. [Another lover was a teacher for whom the respondent had a crush at age 14.] Once we saw the little Gay Pride badge she wore, we knew for sure, and my friends and I used to go and talk to her about our crushes on other girls. She became our dyke counsellor…. I became the school dyke… I wasn’t interested in boys at all. I kept trying to proselytize little girls, saying it’s all right to be gay. People got a bit annoyed with me over that… I’ve been going out with a boy… and I’ve slept with a couple of women since then. It’s good fun… That my parents were gay made it a lot easier for me to come out and to see that there could be a physical dimension to my friendships with girls…. I have experimented sexually, and my parents have created a supportive environment for that…. you could do what you want in my house. We were allowed to smoke pot in the house when no one else was…. I would like to have children… I don’t believe in marriage.” (pp. 124-140) Hy, I, E, C, anti-marriage, wants kids

51) Woman (24) student in Birmingham, England, bisexual: Lived in a commune with her mother since first year of life. Two of the other women were mother’s lovers. “My Mum wears a lesbian necklace and I remember saying to her, ‘You’ve got to hide your necklace when you come in to school.’… I was concerned that someone was going to see it… My Mum always respected the fact that I might not want my friends at school to know…. When I was a teenager, I would try to make sure that there weren’t any lesbian leaflets or books lying around when my friends came to visit…. Apart from those two, none of her other lovers lived in our house. I got on with most of Mum’s lovers…. Until recently I was in a relationship with a bloke… so I considered myself heterosexual. I just became involved with a woman called Sam…. I still maintain that my mother being a lesbian has not actively encouraged me to be a lesbian myself. It has simply meant that I feel comfortable being sexually involved with a woman.” (pp. 133-140) Sc, I

52) Man (66) heterosexual, married father of six: Mother divorced his father when he was aged 6 and “began having affairs with both men and women… started to prefer women. She developed a powerful relationship with a woman gynaecologist, who got cancer and died soon after…. [At his age 8 mother lived with N, an art teacher.] My mother died quite young, at the age of sixty… my mother’s father… was so disgusted by the fact that she’d joined the Communist Party… that he cut her out of his will…. When I was eight… sent to a boarding school so my mother could sort out her emotional life [he stayed there and then was sent to the U.S.; returned home at age 14. He was then sent to a boarding school until age 18. He only saw his mother and N at holidays.]… My mother was a manic depressive, and I think that’s one reason N went off and had an affair with another woman… they slept in the same bed, but there was never anything that would remotely suggest a sexual relationship… When my parents separated, my father had said he’d see a lot of us, and he did.” (pp. 157-163) Labour peer in House of Lords, highly supportive of lesbian and gay parenting as a legislator

A rebuttal to the accusation that Dr. Cameron was dropped from the American Psychological Association (APA)

-A reprint of an article in the Family Research Report, Nov-Dec, 1994.A number of attacks against Dr. Paul Cameron and Family Research Institute have appeared lately. While such attacks are not new, their volume and intensity is increasing even as the reach and importance of FRI grows.

The New Republic, a left-wing magazine with a circulation of 100,000 and a newly installed homosexual editor, Andrew Sullivan, attacked Dr. Paul Cameron with a two page article October 3,1994 (click here to view this article and resulting correspondence…). His reply and facsimiles of the key documents that were sent to The New Republic are included in this online rebuttal.

* Dr. Cameron was not “dropped” from the APA. The first document, dated November 7, 1982 is a copy of the letter sent by Dr. Cameron announcing his resignation from the APA. By this point, all previous disputes between him and the APA had been settled, and there were no other charges or inquiries into possible ethical violations pending against him. The last previous correspondence from the APA was dated October 18, 1982, reminding Cameron that it had closed his dispute with 6 U. Nebraska psychologists.

November 29, 1982 marked the APA President’s acceptance of Cameron’s resignation. In March 1983, the APA Monitor (the official internal organ of the APA) published Cameron’s letter detailing his reasons for resigning. As per the APA President’s request, this letter had been sent January 12, 1983.

A commentary on the March letter was published in June 1983 (click here…). Although Pietrzyk asserts that one cannot resign from the APA while under an ethics probe, this rings hollow considering that the APA President and APA Monitor did nothing to challenge Cameron’s decision to resign. Only after the accepted resignation did the ethics committee “drop” Cameron for non-cooperation (see December 2, 1983 letter). Most of this and considerably more was covered in exchanges between Dr. Cameron and various adversaries from the U. Nebraska between October 1985 and March 1986 in the Nebraska Medical Journal.

* On October 12, letters editor Amy Sheffer said that editor Sullivan had just told her to delete Cameron’s observation that “Scientists besides myself have noted the addiction to falsehood and deception that is characteristic of homosexuals. Why didn’t The New Republic reveal that your author is a member of a gay rights group?”

She said that since they had noted that Pietrzyk wrote for the Log Cabin Republicans, such a designation was unnecessary. FRI replied that this was deceptive since few knew that the Log Cabin Republicans was a gay rights group. The sentence was retained.

There are a number of criticisms raised in The New Republic article. Some appear plausible, and some have been picked up and repeated as gospel truth by nonhomosexual newspapers.

Addressing some of these:

* “he is the architect of unreliable ‘surveys’ that purport to show strains of violence and depravity in gay life.”

Response: Gays create myths for their political and psychological comfort. They want to be seen as “shocked by any claim that we are other than kind, gentle people.” One homosexual contends that “gays are an experiment by nature in an attempt to create a human nature more compatible with the requirements of civil society.”1

But the gay life is a life of violence and depravity:

– FRI has published2 estimates from its national sex survey that suggest that 80% of gays have engaged in oral-anal contact at least once in their life. Such unhealthy and unsanitary practice is commonplace among homosexuals.

– 40% of 4,808 Canadian gays in 1991-1992 admitted to oral-anal sex in the last 3 months, according to a governmentfunded study run by gays representing the largest survey of homosexuals in Canada.3

– In the largest-ever study of homosexuals, completed just this year by The Advocate, the national weekly gay magazine, 13,000 readers responded to the questionnaire. The Advocate said that 45% of respondents “loved” anal/oral sex. Additionally, 20% said that they had engaged in bondage and discipline and 10% in sadomasochism in the past 5 years. And, most tellingly, among those who knew that they had the AIDS virus, “11% have said or implied that they were HIV-negative in order to have sex.” (8/23, p. 23)

FRI 2 found that about 13% of gays said that they had been raped, and a third had participated in sadomasochism.5

A study of 930 English gays asked whether they had ever been “sexually molested or raped?” 28% answered “yes.” In half (47%) of these cases the victim was either forcibly anally penetrated or an attempt to do so was made. Of men over 21 years of age, 52 cases (66% of the total reported) “were assaulted by regular or casual sexual partners.”

The authors of the English study (who appear to be homosexuals themselves) note that “Fantasies of the sexually forceful man, the pleasure of ‘being taken;’ and the excitement of power-driven sex are very common in gay culture and pornography. All these collective sexual fantasies normalize sexual abuse and rape of gay men by gay men, providing motivation, justification, and normalization for the assault. It is difficult to see how a climate of intolerance towards sexual aggression can be achieved when sexual aggression is one of the mainstays of collective sexual fantasies.” (p. 293)

* “Although thousands of heterosexuals allegedly responded to his survey, Cameron could get only 41 gay men and 24 lesbians to respond. The extremely small sample size should have invalidated any conclusions about the sexual behavior of the gay population.”

Response: There are two problems with this criticism: 1) Pietrzyk didn’t accurately report how many gays and lesbians were in our sample; 2) he fails to understand modern statistical sampling theory.2

We reported all our comparisons between those who were exclusively heterosexual v the combined group of bisexuals and homosexuals. We had approximately 85 gays and 70 lesbians for each comparison though, as in all such studies, not every respondent answered each question. Combining bisexuals and homosexuals has become rather typical because their distinguishing characteristic is having same-sex relations. The new U. Chicago sex survey also combined bisexuals and homosexuals. It captured only 43 bi/homosexual men and 27 bi/homosexual women in its sample.6

The reason for these seemingly low numbers is that FRI, unlike Kinsey and the bulk of studies in the sexological literature, utilized random area cluster sampling techniques. Because homosexuals make up only a tiny fraction of the population, they show up in small numbers in any survey that randomly draws from the places people live. However, it is possible to have a fair degree of confidence in the generalizability of our results to “urban homosexuals-in-general,” at least for the time we did the survey.

Kinsey had 2,000 volunteer homosexuals. But our findings, based on a random sample a twelfth the size of his, are far more apt to be representative of homosexuals-in-general. With more money and time, we would have drawn a larger sample and our results would be more certain still. Having said that, however, as the studies about gays accumulate, the parameters we published look “solid.”

For instance, we reported that 4% of men and 16% of women claimed that they had been “raped.” The U. Chicago survey did not ask about rape, per se. Instead it reported that 22% of women and 2% of men were “forced to do something sexually at some time.” (p. 223)4
9 In his counter reply, Pietrzyk says he’d “sure like to know the source for Cameron’s claim that ‘one third of American men have served in the Armed Forces.”‘

Response: On p. 343 of the Statistical Abstract of the United States 1990, we find that over 27,000,000 men have served. Since there were under 79,000,000 men over the age of 18 in 1990, the math is straightforward.

We can only report what our respondents tell us. It is noteworthy that Pietrzyk considers “preposterous” that ” 13 percent have served time in prison.” Since FRI actually asked “Have you ever been jailed or imprisoned for a crime?” Pietrzyk demonstrates his inability to get the facts straight. By comparison, the U. Chicago sex survey6 reports that “about 13%” of its respondents (both men and women) had “ever spent the night in jail.” (p. 219) It actually asked if respondents had ever “spent one night or more” “in (a military jail), jail, prison, reform school or detention center.” (p. 612)

*Pietrzyk rails about our utilizing obituaries from gay journals and calls it “a methodology that would not pass an undergraduate statistics course.”

Response: Our methodology was good enough for the Eastern Psychological Assn convention in 1993. Dr. Charles Smith of SUNY at Buffalo, chair of the session, publicly commended our novel approach and said he was going to warn the gays at his institution about the hazards of their ways. Further, it was good enough for the refereed scientific journal Omega in 1994, a journal specifically devoted to studies of death and dying.

The U. Chicago study provides grist for FRI’s mill as well. Note p. 305:

age	% men gay	% women lesbian
18-29	2.9	1.6
30-39	4.2	1.8
40-49	2.2	1.3
50-59	0.5	0.4

These results should have given the authors a clear warning that homosexuals were much less apt to be old, yet they chose not to comment. Our lifespan study offers a plausible reason for the paucity of older homosexuals in the U. Chicago study: they die young. Other explanations for these findings require much more convoluted logic. For example, note that the proportions of homosexuals do not top out in the youngest age group. Therefore, it would be difficult to attribute the distribution of findings solely to the growth of the gay movement. Another plausible explanation would be that older homosexuals simply drop out of the lifestyle (if they don’t die first). However, if proved true, this would simultaneously argue that gays can and do change, as well as suggest that the gay lifestyle offers scant long-term satisfaction.

*Pietrzyk repeatedly questions Dr. Cameron’s scholarly credentials and “conveniently” avoids using his professional title of “Dr.”

Response: Pietrzyk is a political science graduate student at George Washington University. He has failed numerous times to get his facts straight in this brief article in the New Republic. Dr. Cameron has published over 60 articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals and has written several books. How does being a member of a gay club qualify Pietrzyk to engage in scholarly critique?

*Pietrzyk complains that we have analyzed only “sexual mass murder” and found homosexuals responsible for about half of these sprees.

Response: He doesn’t deny the facts about sexually- motivated murders, he merely tries to divert attention toward serial and other non-sexual mass murders.

*Pietrzyk claims that we have “distorted” the evidence for disproportionate child molestation by gays.

Response: He cites our 1987 pamphlet on child molestation. It was updated in 1993. With new information our estimate of the proportion of homosexuals has dropped from 4% to between “1% to 3%” and our estimate of the proportion of homosexual molestations to “between a fifth and a third.” Thus the relative proportion of homosexual molestation has remained about the same (“the risk of a homosexual molesting a child is 10 to 20 times greater than that of a heterosexual”).

*Pietrzyk claims that Cameron advocated the “extermination of male homosexuals.”

Response: The Forum interviewer remarked that many societies have considered homosexuality a capital crime. Noting that it would be cheaper to kill homosexuals in primitive societies than jail or quarantine them is hardly an endorsement. In fact, Cameron is quoted in the same article as saying that such an idea is “not politically, ethically or socially acceptable” today. Where former Surgeon General Koop got his information is mystifying. He never asked Dr. Cameron whether he advocated such a policy.

*Pietrzyk calls “extreme” and “absurdly high” FRI’s estimate that lesbians are “nineteen times more apt to have syphilis than straight women and four times more apt to have had scabies.”

Response: Pietrzyk finally has it right. That’s just what we reported in the Nebraska Medical Journal in 1985.7 We also p. 6 reported that lesbians were three times as apt to have had a genital discharge, and twice as apt to have sores on their genitals.

The new U. Chicago6 survey does not report its sexually transmitted disease findings for lesbians. However, it reports that lesbians had about 4 times as many sexual partners as heterosexual women, were considerably more apt to engage in 11 unusual sexual practices,” and that a larger number of partners was associated with higher STD rates. It is probable that it found essentially what we found but was reluctant to publish the findings. [see ‘New Sex Survey: Dishonest Science’ in this issue of Family Research Report]

*Pietrzyk calls our 1983 national sex survey “discredited.”

Response: Since results from the FRI survey have been published in a number of scientific journals (e.g., Nebraska Medical Journal, Psychological Reports, Lancet, and Science), and have formed the basis for a number of scientific papers presented to the Eastern Psychological Assn, it would appear that it is “discredited” by gay activists, not by scientists.

FRI’s sex survey was one of the first national sex surveys to be drawn on a random sample. Random samples are supposed to give representative samples. Theory aside, however, proof is always in whether the technique “works;” that is, whether FRI’s results stack-up against other well-done surveys. For instance, how do FRI’s results compare to the recent U. Chicago effort?

FRI, in attempting to interview people from age 18 through the end of adulthood, ran into a buzzsaw of high rejection rates in people aged 50 or above. Overall, almost half of our potential respondents refused to fill out our questionnaire. But the median age of those who rejected was 55, meaning we got high rates of compliance for those in their 20s and 30s and miserable rates of compliance for those in their 60s, 70s, and 80s.

The lore that has developed from doing Gallup polls and similar surveys is “those who don’t respond are generally much like those who do.” So FRI reported its rejection-rate and then ignored the nonresponders when reporting results – just as the U. Chicago study did. We assumed that a person who initially rejected the survey would not be worth the effort and cost of a follow-up appeal. So we put our limited resources (about $100,000) toward fattening the size of the sample rather than re-visiting rejecters. All told, we got usable responses from almost 5,200 adults.

U. Chicago paid its respondents $25 to $35 apiece and apparently repeatedly called-back its rejecters, offering them more money to get them to cooperate. It got almost 3,200 adults for $2,400,000. Still, 20% of their respondents refused to take the survey though offered considerable sums of money. So their findings, like ours, could be way off if those who rejected were quite different from those who cooperated. No one will ever know. But since they found “no relation between respondent fee [up to $100] and quality of the information provided” (p. 56), it fits the model that such pursuit is probably unwarranted.

Beside detail about sampling theories, what proof emerges from the empirical pudding? How do the results of these two surveys, one greased with high levels of effort on the part of a few highly-trained and closely supervised interviewers while essentially ignoring refusals, the other with over 200 interviewers and the willingness to expend significant time and money to reduce the rejection rate, compare? They were very close. 6,7

Where both surveys asked similar questions, similar point estimates were generated. Comparing the two samples:

– ever syphilis in life?
FRI men – 2.4%, women – 0.9%
U C men – 0.9%, women – 0.7%.

– ever gonorrhea in life?
FRI men – 11.2%, women – 3.7%
U C men – 9%, women – 4.7%

– ever genital warts in life?
FRI men 5.0%, women – 4.3%
U C men 3.3%, women – 5.9%

– ever hepatitis in life?
FRI men – 3.6%, women – 2.4%
U C men – 1.3%, women – 0.9%

The lower figures on hepatitis for the U. Chicago study may be related to their claim that “hepatitis A is not sexually transmitted but hepatitis B is.” Subsequently they “eliminated the cases that were evidently type A from the counts.” (p. 380) More generally, the FRI study was only done in urban areas compared to the broader geographic coverage of the U. Chicago study. Still, examination of the unweighted comparisons above suggests that all the differences were within one or two percentage points.

Furthermore, about 21% of FRI females reported having “obtained an abortion” while 19% of the U. Chicago women said that they had ever “had an abortion.” (p. 457)

9% of gays and 5% of lesbians in the U. Chicago effort reported that they were heterosexual virgins. (p. 311) 8% of FRI’s gays and 5% of our lesbians reported that they were heterosexual virgins. Since few homosexuals in either survey were over age 50, where rejecters became a significant problem, we could expect high levels of agreement between both methodologies.

*Associated Press: The AP article (click here to view…) was carried by the Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph on 9/16/94. FRI called AP on 10/12 about the falsehoods that Cameron: 1), “is barred from practicing psychology in Nebraska” and 2) had falsified data about homosexuals. AP was faxed a copy of Cameron’s license and a copy of the Bangor Daily News correction (see above). The Gazette Telegraph published the AP correction on 10/26/94 after FRI informed it of its existence.

* The Advocate wrote on 11/1/94 that “Cameron, who contends that gays and lesbians are sexual deviants, was expelled from the American Psychological Association in 1983 for falsifying research data about gays. He was also barred from practicing in Nebraska, the only state in which he had been licensed.” (p. 16)

* The Bangor Daily News, 10/10/90, had the following as part of its story of a Cameron visit to Maine: “The APA, however, said that Cameron was dropped from the membership because of a violation of the APA’s code of ethics involving the misuse of colleagues’ research.” It published the correction. Maine has a constitution which permits suits for libel irrespective of their proven economic impact. Newspapers in Maine publish corrections with dispatch.

References: 1. Harry J. (1982) Gay children grown up. NY: Praeger, p. 168. 2. Cameron P, Cameron K., & Proctor, K. (1989) Effect of homosexuality upon public health and social order. Psychological Reports, 64, 1167-1179. 3. Doing it in the 90s. Canadian AIDS Society, May 1993.4. Michael, RT, Gagnon, JH, Laumann, EO, & Kolata G. (1994) NY:Little, Brown. 5. Hickson, F.C.I., et al. (1994) Gay men as victims of nonconsensual sex. Archives Sexual Behavior, 23, 281-294. 6. Laurnarm, EO, Gagnon JH, Michael, RT, Michaels, S. (1994) The social organization of sexuality: sexual practices in the United States. Chicago: U. Chicago Press. 7. Cameron, P, et al. (1985) Sexual orientation and sexually transmitted disease. Nebraska Medical Journal, 70, 292-299.

Objective: To inform and convince students that personally avoiding certain kinds of choices and avoiding those peers who make those choices will further their interests. Further, to instruct them that society wants them to avoid certain choices and be chaste until marriage.

Methods: Lecture, discussion of the lecture, peer “skits” or role-playing (optional), and class discussions.

Specific Principles:

First, that most people who do “bad” or “unwise” things are like just about all of us, “nice guys” most of the time;

Secondly, irrespective of how “nice” they are, or how much fun they are to be with, or how enticing or interesting their activities, it is wise to avoid them and their chosen activities because we all are influenced by our associates. If we “hang around” people who engage in these activities – even when they are not specifically engaging in disapproved activities – we will be influenced to accept what they do and influenced to eventually try what they do as well.

The three “As and a B“ are:

Avoid drugs and those who use drugs,

Avoid homosexuality and those who engage in homosexuality,

Avoid prostitution and those who engage in prostitution, and

Be chaste.

Time Frame: It is expected that the total program will take around 12 class hours. Since each of the disapproved activities (the As) has proven interesting to or rewarding to a considerable number of people, there is always the danger that too much pupil exposure to any one of these disapproved activities might stimulate interest on the part of students who “hadn’t thought much about it before” or who might wonder whether “adults are just trying to keep us from experiencing the same fun that they have.” Likewise, since chastity for the unmarried (the B) consists of declining involvement in coitus, the emphasis must be placed not on the joys of sexual bliss (which students are being encouraged to avoid), but the short-term and long-term benefits of delaying that bliss until marriage. It is assumed that the “plumbing” and “mechanics” of coitus are well known to pupils and do not need to be addressed.

Overview of the Lessons

Lesson One focuses on how we get used to certain things. Being raised in our family “gets us used to” particular foods, customs, attitudes, and values – often the foods, customs, attitudes, and values of one family are quite different from those of other families, even those living on the same block. Likewise, when we are around others – particularly those we choose to be with such as friends and acquaintances, we “get used to” many of their tastes, customs, attitudes, and values. When we choose to be around those who are enthusiastic about an activity that is not socially approved, those we are with seek to justify what they are doing by attempting to get their friends and acquaintances to, at the very least, express approval of their activities, or even better to “just give it a try and let me know what you think.” If they can gain approval they feel better about their activity, and they feel even better if they can make a “convert” to their activity (just about everybody, not just misery, “loves company” in what they do). Under social pressure from associates who do socially disapproved things, we are prone to “try it” and thus run the risk of acquiring the same interests, tastes, or proclivities as they have. The major point of lesson one is to try to get students to be careful about whom they befriend or “hang out with.” Students are to learn that their choice of friends and acquaintances will probably have a profound influence on them, and that the time to consider whom they will befriend or “hang out with” is before they “commit” to the relationship. The power of “try it, you might like it” and “don’t knock it until you try it” will pressure them if they continue to associate with the disruptive or rebellious. Lesson one will probably take two class periods.

Lesson Two focuses on drugs and drug users. The harmful and frequently addictive power of tobacco, alcohol, and illegal drugs is addressed. Tobacco and alcohol (the legal substances) and marijuana, cocaine, and heroin (the illegal substances) will each be considered. Some people consider the “high” or “relaxed” state that they reach when taking these substances worth the health and legal risks involved. The dangers associated with each (and the small possible benefits associated with tobacco and alcohol) and the illegality of each of these substances for those under age in the case of tobacco or alcohol, or for anyone in the case of marijuana, cocaine, and heroin, will be addressed. At least in the case of the “hard drugs” – cocaine and heroin – there is evidence that those who use them, particularly intravenously, live considerably shortened lives. The principles learned in Lesson One will be reiterated, namely, about “getting used to” things that people do with whom we associate possibly leading to experimenting with and possibly acquiring a taste for drugs if one associates with those who take drugs . Courtesy toward, but avoidance of, drug users will be emphasized. “Scripts” for how to courteously avoid the company of drug users will be learned. Lesson two will probably take two class periods.

Lesson Three focuses on homosexuality and those who engage in homosexuality. The harmful and sometimes addictive aspects of homosexual relations are addressed. Students will learn that both men and women who engage in homosexuality get more Sexually Transmitted Diseases and experience high levels of various forms of violence. Further, that men who engage in homosexuality disproportionately experience organ failures. These and other harms contribute to a decided shortening of the life spans of those who engage in homosexual practices. Students will learn that homosexual relations are illegal in almost half the states, and that teenagers who engage in homosexuality report higher levels of drug-abuse. Courtesy toward, but avoidance of, those who engage in homosexuality will be emphasized. “Scripts” for how to courteously avoid the company of those who engage in homosexuality will be learned. Lesson three will probably take two class periods.

Lesson Four focuses on prostitution and those who engage in prostitution. The dangerous aspects of either engaging in prostitution or employing a prostitute will be emphasized. Students will learn that prostitutes suffer high levels of infection with various Sexually Transmitted Diseases and experience high levels of violence including beatings, murder, and suicide. As well, prostitutes frequently engage in multiple forms of substance abuse. Those who hire prostitutes often catch Sexually Transmitted Diseases and not infrequently find themselves subject to violence and robbery. Students will learn that prostitution is illegal in almost all states (the current exception is Nevada), and many foreign countries. Courtesy toward, but avoidance of, those who engage in prostitution or visit prostitutes will be emphasized. “Scripts” for how to courteously avoid the company of those who employ prostitutes or those who engage in prostitution will be learned. Lesson four will probably take one class period.

Lesson Five focuses on chastity. The psychological, physical, and social benefits of chastity will be promoted. The following values will be emphasized: 1) the psychological value of “saving oneself” for a committed marital relationship and “greater value” to a prospective spouse; 2) the avoidance of any physical problems (e.g., pregnancy, infections, an awkward pregnancy and birth or a possible abortion); and 3) the avoidance of a bad reputation (e.g., boys “only interested in one thing” or girls “who are willing”) and being shamed in the family. The long-term statistical relationship between waiting for sexual intercourse and scholastic and marital success will be taught and emphasized. Lesson five will probably take two or possibly three class periods.

Lesson Six will review what has been learned. Students will be asked to compare and contrast the three “avoids,” and to explain the advantages of chastity. Questions they should address and discuss include:

1. 1. How are the three As similar?
   2. Some people talk about getting “addicted” to drugs or homosexual activity; can people get addicted to prostitution or going to prostitutes?
   3. Why do you think that most societies made drug use, homosexuality, and prostitution illegal?
   4. Why has no society made chastity illegal?
   5. What are the advantages of chastity?
   6. Why do most parents warn their children to “watch out who you hang around with?”
   7. Some societies have been very harsh with those caught in homosexuality, prostitution, or illegal drug use, sometimes executing those convicted. Why do you think they would consider these activities so wrong?
   8. What are the unusual hazards of or dangers associated with each of the three As?
   9. Are we all influenced by “try it, you might like it?”
   10. Why do most people prefer someone who has not “gone all the way” as a potential spouse?

It is anticipated that Lesson six will take one or two class periods.

Lesson Outlines

Lesson One focuses on how we get used to certain things.

A. Being raised in our family “gets us used” to particular foods, customs, attitudes, and values – often the foods, customs, attitudes, and values of one family are quite different from those of other families. Have you ever noticed how different families are? Some families eat foods that are considered very unusual or even “disgusting” by other families who might live right next door.

Exercise: Have students relate some of the different customs and eating habits they have noticed among other families, either in a short paper or class discussion. Have students discuss how others could “eat that stuff” or “act that way” – and then ask themselves that very question about their family habits. Consider, how “neat” is your house or yard as compared to others? Do you change clothes once a day or not? How often do you bathe (it was around the 1920s before most people bathed more than once a week in the U.S. And in Colonial times, people often bathed once or twice a year). How often do you wash dishes (e.g., after every meal, at the end of the day, when all the dishes are dirty)?

B. Likewise, when we are around others – particularly those we choose to be with such as friends and acquaintances, we “get used to” many of their tastes, customs, attitudes, and values.

Exercise: Have students discuss in class how they have tried things (e.g., food, games, amusements) with which they were not familiar because they were with some other people (even adults or another family).

C. When we choose to be around those who are enthusiastic about an activity that is not socially approved, those we are with seek to justify what they are doing by attempting to get their friends and acquaintances to validate it or “just give it a try and let me know what you think.” Not everybody runs into this kind of situation, but most people will eventually run into it. If they can make a “convert” they feel better about what they are doing (just about everybody, not just misery, “loves company”).

Exercise: Have students discuss experiences that they might have had where this principle was evident (many students will have had at least one such experience). This might be a good time to have students divide into two or three groups, with the task of each to illustrate the different things we can get used to. It might be pointed out to one group that in the U.S. up through the 1800s, all teenagers who committed crimes were treated as adults. If they were convicted of murder they were hung, if they were convicted of robbery they got the same kind and length of imprisonment as any adult – only children aged 7 or less were exempted from the full thrust of the law. Students should discuss how this fact might have influenced associational choices and how being regarded as “ignorant adolescents” today might encourage kids to “hang around” those engaging in socially disapproved activities.

D. Under social pressure from associates who do socially disapproved things, we are prone to “try it” and thus run the risk of acquiring the same interests, tastes, or proclivities as they have. People almost always “relent” and try something if they permit themselves to be badgered about it. Since everyone knows this, if you continue to “hang around” someone who is “into” something, it kind of becomes a matter of “when,” not “if” you will “give it a try”). Girls know that if a boy just wants “one thing” and they continue to be around him, eventually they will succumb.

Exercise: Have the class answer the question “why do people try things that other people are doing, and why are we especially apt to try things if the other person ‘begs’ us or ‘dares’ us?” Class members might be chosen to “be” other families who eat different foods, have different customs, etc. [the teacher might look up family customs in other lands or have the students look up family customs in other lands to “play the part” of some of those other families].

The major point of lesson one, is to try to get students to be careful about whom they befriend or “hang out with.” Students are to learn that their choice of friends and acquaintances will probably have a profound influence on them – for both good and ill. All of us “go along with” those with whom we associate. This is not a bad thing, but rather a characteristic of humans. But the best time to consider whom you will befriend or “hang out with” is before you “commit” to a relationship or begin “hanging out” with those who are doing disapproved, wrongful, or harmful activities. “Hanging out” at church is almost always more apt to be beneficial than “hanging out” at a bar – have students discuss why.

Lesson Two focuses on drugs and drug users.

A. Facts for lecture or lecture-discussion. Tobacco, alcohol, and illegal drugs are often addictive. Tobacco and alcohol are legal substances. For both tobacco and alcohol, as well as illegal drugs, some people can “take it or leave it.” People who use one of these substances are much more apt to use two or more of them – that is, smokers are more apt to use marijuana or heroin than nonsmokers.

1. It looks like a majority of people who use tobacco are not “addicted.” That is, most people who smoke can, with what ranges from either a little to a great deal of effort, stop smoking for days, weeks, or even permanently if they really want to. Such smokers are almost always not the “pack a day” smokers. Those who smoke two packs or more of cigarettes per day are almost always “addicted.” That is, the vast majority of these smokers have a “real habit,” and as such, have come to depend on or crave the feelings associated with nicotine and the other chemicals found in tobacco. Further, they smoke so much that they find that smoking “gives them something to do, ” particularly “something to do with their hands.” Most of those addicted to tobacco report that smoking makes them “feel sharper” or “relaxes” them. When asked, almost all of those who are addicted say that they “want to quit,” but find it very difficult to do so. A large minority of people who join a group or take drugs to help them stop smoking end up quitting. But most smokers must make two or three serious attempts before they finally succeed.

Tobacco use is associated with a reduction of life span of between one and 8 years, depending on the study. It appears almost certain that smoking causes lung cancer – in fact, about 7% of those who smoke will develop lung cancer (v. about a third of one percent of those who don’t smoke). It is likewise almost certain that smoking causes emphysema, various forms of cancer other than lung cancer, and various forms of heart or circulatory ailments. The only medical “up sides” are that it appears possible that smoking tobacco reduces one’s chances of Parkinson’s disease and certain other neurological problems (e.g., eggplant has a considerable amount of nicotine – a naturally occurring and often beneficial substance).

Socially, tobacco use is associated with an odor on the body and clothes that about half of teenagers find offensive or unpleasant. Additionally, “tobacco breath” is judged unpleasant or offensive by about two-thirds of teenagers. Even most kids who smoke consider it unpleasant, that’s why mouthwash or breath mints are big with smokers. Tobacco use stains the teeth yellowish and little bits of ash make tiny holes in clothing and furniture. Smoking often “smokes” the skin, making it leathery and wrinkled before its time. As such, the choice to smoke reduces the number of potential dates, friends, and people who want to be around you (especially close to you). There are no “up sides” to the smells, wrinkles, holes and stains.

2. Most people who use alcohol are not “addicted.” In fact, most can “take it or leave it,” although most enjoy the “buzz” associated with drinking. About a fifth of those who drink have some difficulty controlling their drinking and perhaps 10% of those who drink become “alcoholics” – that is, they behave as though they were addicted. While most people can drive a car safely after having had a single drink (a beer, a glass of wine, a shot), almost everyone experiences some slowdown in reaction time and cloudy judgment after two drinks, and their performance continues to deteriorate with every additional drink. Drinking reduces inhibitions, so it has effects upon judgments having to do with sexuality, business, school, or socializing. Most people who drink feel that it “relaxes” them, and drinking is associated with conviviality and socialization for most.

Overall, the life span of those who drink is about the same as the life span of those who do not. However, the life span of “alcoholics” is significantly reduced (by about three to five years). Alcoholism is associated with cirrhosis of the liver and thinking irregularities. There is evidence in some studies that moderate alcohol use is good for the heart and circulatory system (in other words, there may be some “up sides” to moderate drinking). However, benefits from alcohol to the overall life span have not turned up in some well-done studies, so the “jury is still out” on the possible health benefits from moderate drinking.

Further, there is no doubt that even moderate drinking has short-term negative effects on coordination and one’s ability to control impulses. There does not appear to be a way to predict who will abuse alcohol to such an extent that they become alcoholics or have problems with drinking. However, those who have an “alcoholic” or “heavy drinker” in their family or in a near relative are much more apt to become alcoholics or heavy drinkers as well. Many Asians and American Indians appear particularly susceptible to becoming heavy drinkers, so individuals with this genetic background ought to be especially careful about alcohol. Alcohol use is illegal except in certain family situations for those under the age of 18 throughout the U.S.

On a social level, numerous unplanned pregnancies, decisions to do stupid things, auto and industrial accidents, and around a third of physical fights and murders are associated with alcohol consumption. Once a person becomes addicted, cure is very difficult.

3. Most people who use marijuana are not “addicted.” Most people who use it can “take it or leave it.” Possession of even small amounts of marijuana is illegal in almost all the states, and possession of a few ounces “to have some fun” is generally illegal in every state, although one is seldom sentenced to prison for a first offense involving “personal use” quantities. The “buzz” associated with marijuana is similar to the buzz associate with drinking alcohol. It is likely that the negative effect of marijuana on the lungs is similar to the effect of tobacco, although marijuana is typically used less frequently.

The scientific evidence about the harmful effects of marijuana tends to suggest that the body can probably overcome the negative effects of small doses, but that regular use is associated with mental impairment and a kind of “addiction.” Marijuana is a “gateway” drug. That is, if you are willing to break the law and use a socially disapproved substance that can lead to addiction, and that has an effect upon coordination and judgment similar to the effect of a number of drinks of alcohol, it is much more likely that you will try “harder drugs” such as cocaine and heroin. The long-term effects of marijuana use are largely unknown, but it is unlikely that they are other than harmful. For certain medical conditions (such as glaucoma), marijuana may be beneficial; however, it is likely that the same benefits can be obtained with legal substances.

Socially, the effects of marijuana use are similar to the effects of alcohol. Marijuana use may not have as dramatic an effect upon coordination as alcohol, but seems to have more pernicious effects upon judgment. Thus, marijuana use is associated with the same list of “horribles” as alcohol – e.g., fights, pregnancies, etc. Heavy users tend to develop an “odor” that most people find objectionable, and of course, there are holes in the clothing and furniture, and skin wrinkling with heavy use.

4. Most people who use cocaine and large numbers of those who use heroin are not addicted. It is illegal to possess either of these substances or other “controlled substances” such as LSD, angel dust, etc. in any amount in the U.S. Even first convictions for small amounts of these substances often result in prison time, since these are considered much more serious drugs. While cocaine is not physically addictive, many people become psychologically addicted to it. Heroin can be and often is physically and psychologically addictive. There is evidence that those who regularly use either substance, particularly intravenously, live considerably shortened lives. Indeed, regular “shooting” of any drug or controlled substance is associated with about a 30-to-35-year reduction in life span. Both cocaine and heroin use are associated with dramatic impairment of mental functioning (possibly due to changes in the brain) and probably coordination as well.

Socially, because the use of these drugs almost eliminates inhibitions, the violence associated with their use is considerable. In addition, because of their illegality and high cost, many killings, robberies, and assaults are also encountered by regular or even casual users – who are more apt to be caught in the “cross fire” of competing sellers and situations they had not anticipated. Both of these drugs readily lead to a quest for “the feeling” associated with their use to the exclusion of almost any other social concern (e.g., “he loved coke more than he loved anyone else”).

Frequently, those addicted are unable to perform well on the job or in school for any extended period of time. Many users are more interested in getting “a fix” than socializing, raising children, holding down a job, talking, making love, etc. Many people who become regular users of these substances become “drug people,” keeping to their own kind, and flitting from “fix to fix.” Most of these end up being “drags” on society, using up social resources but contributing little in return. At this time it does not appear possible to predict who will and will not become an “addict.” It appears that at least a quarter of regular users become “addicts” and that, once addicted, “cure” is extraordinarily difficult. No known medical “up side” to the use of these substances has appeared.

B. Those principles learned in Lesson One about “getting used to” things that people do with whom we associate, and how this can possibly lead to experimenting with and possibly acquiring a taste for drugs by associating with those who take drugs should be reiterated. People who smoke, drink alcohol, or use drugs typically try to recruit others to their habit. Sometimes their attempts at recruiting are subtle, but often at some point they directly confront their friends and acquaintances with “try it, you’ll like it” or “don’t knock it until you’ve tried it.” When this point is reached in a relationship, the teenager who has been invited is at a choice-point. If he “brushes the question off” but continues to associate with the user, he has indicated that he “might” go along, and only needs more pressuring – and the odds are he will go along. So, at this point whether he “brushes the question aside” or confrontationally refuses, he must stop “going with” or “being around” the person who did the inviting.

Courtesy toward, but avoidance of drug users is the best rule. “Scripts” for how to courteously avoid the company of drug users should be “dreamed up” by the class as a whole. Non-confrontational ways include “ignoring the question” or “I’ve got to think about it,” or “not now” and then avoiding the questioner so that the question cannot be put again. Confrontational ways include “no, I think its dumb (stupid, foolish)” or “no, I don’t want to get involved,” or “no, I promised my parents (girlfriend/boyfriend/God) I wouldn’t,” and then avoiding the questioner so that the question cannot be put again. People almost always “relent” and try something if they permit themselves to be badgered about it. Since everybody knows this, if you continue to “hang around” someone who is “into” drugs or alcohol, it kind of becomes a matter of “when,” not “if” you will “give it a try”). An optional exercise is to have three or four members of the class devise a “skit” that illustrates how pressure is applied and how it can be deflected.

Lesson Three focuses on homosexuality and those who engage in homosexuality.

A. Homosexual activities are often medically and physically harmful. Both men and women who engage in homosexuality get more Sexually Transmitted Diseases [STDs] (e.g., syphilis, gonorrhea), including AIDS than those who only have sex with the opposite sex. Men who engage in homosexuality much more frequently get STDs, particularly AIDS and the various forms of hepatitis (viral diseases of the liver). Gays get AIDS about 500 times more frequently than straights. High levels of various forms of violence, including sadomasochism, beatings, overdosing, murder, and suicide are associated with homosexuality in both men and women. Men who engage in homosexuality experience disproportionate organ failures (e.g., the anal sphincter and liver) and heart conditions. High levels of various forms of cancer, especially those associated with the reproductive system (e.g., breast, uterine) are associated with homosexuality among women. These and other harms contribute to a decided shortening of the life spans of those who engage in homosexual practices. It appears that those who engage in homosexuality reduce their life spans by between 20 to 30 years – almost as much as those who shoot drugs intravenously.

Socially, those who engage in homosexuality tend to associate with others who engage in homosexuality. If they become part of the “gay movement” their associations tend toward almost exclusive social contact with other homosexuals. Homosexual practitioners, particularly those who consider themselves “gay,” tend to be very evangelical. They will tend to advertise their involvement in homosexuality to just about everybody in their social space. Sometimes they will wear clothing or adopt an interpersonal style that advertises their homosexuality. They will frequently attempt to get others to “try” homosexuality.

Sometimes subtly and at other times more directly, they will invite those in their social space to participate with them or with other homosexuals in their sexual activities or at the very least, to “endorse” what they do. Although those who engage in homosexuality probably occur in every profession, certain professions (e.g., hairdressing, florists, interior design, acting, women’s sports and women’s military) have higher concentrations. There is a substantial “divide” between the social worlds of those who do and those who do not participate in homosexuality. It is unclear whether the “divide” between homosexuals and heterosexuals is as wide as or wider than the social “divide” between Blacks and whites, or between smokers and nonsmokers.

Outside of employment, Blacks tend to disproportionately voluntarily associate with Blacks and whites with whites. Likewise, smokers tend to associate with other smokers and nonsmokers with nonsmokers. But both Blacks and whites generally condemn or deprecate homosexual activity by those within their own race and generally do not associate with members of their race who engage in homosexuality. The same phenomenon of people liking to “be around their own kind” is evident in dividing smokers from nonsmokers, and divides regular drug-users from nonusers. Around 2%-3% of adults engage in homosexuality.

Homosexual involvements tend toward being addictive but do not appear to be ingrained or genetically inherited. Very few adults who claim to “be homosexual” have not had successful sexual relations with the opposite sex. In a number of studies it has been found that only about 5% of gays and lesbians are heterosexual virgins. Further, most men and most women who report having engaged in homosexuality in the past year also report having engaged in heterosexuality in the past 5 years. That is, there are very few exclusive “homosexuals.” This is one of the reasons that most scientists for most of this century have regarded homosexuality as a “preference” (obviously, if people can “go either way,” and prefer homosexuality at this particular time, it makes little sense to consider them to have been “born that way” – what way were they “born” when they switch again?).

While heterosexual sexuality requires that people get to know each other, date, socialize, and have at least some interests in common, homosexual relations tend to be very “sexually” oriented, and complete strangers can and do “have homosexual sex” with each other. Boys wonder about “what makes girls tick” and girls wonder what “makes boys tick,” and both sexes have to accommodate each other before any sort of dating or marriage might occur. Homosexuality short circuits this requirement. Boys know about boys and girls know about girls. It is therefore “easy” to get on and “get to the sexual point of the relationship” if the relationship is homosexual.

Many people “get a thrill” out of doing the verboten and being in the “out crowd.” Some of the charm of homosexuality (as with drug use) undoubtedly stems from the “out” status that comes from being “in” with a fairly secret society. A great deal of the charm of homosexuality comes from knowing “where to go” and “how to act” to meet other homosexuals and engage in sexual relations. These are “secrets” not shared by most non-homosexuals. Engaging in homosexuality puts you into an “elite in crowd” that offers a great deal of sexuality for little interpersonal investment. In contrast, heterosexuality offers a modest degree of sexuality for a great deal of interpersonal involvement. Although the studies upon which the findings are based are not rock-solid, teenagers who engage in homosexuality report higher levels of drug-abuse, criminality, and exposure to violence than teenagers who do not. Homosexual relations were illegal in every state until 1962 and are illegal in almost half the states today.

Courtesy toward, but avoidance of, those who engage in homosexuality is the best rule. Socially, those who associate with “openly homosexual” teens will find themselves suspected of dabbling in it themselves. “Scripts” for how to courteously avoid the company of those who engage in homosexuality should be “dreamed up” by the class as a whole (they will build on their ideas of the previous lesson concerning drug users). Non-confrontational ways to react to invitations to participate in homosexuality include “ignoring the question” or “I’ve got to think about it,” or “not now” and then avoiding the questioner so that the question cannot be put again. Confrontational ways include “no, I think its dumb (stupid, foolish, wrong)” or “no, I don’t want to get involved,” or “no, I promised my parents (girlfriend/boyfriend/God) I wouldn’t,” and then avoiding the questioner so that the question cannot be put again. People almost always “relent” and try something if they allow themselves to be badgered about it. Since everybody knows this, so if you continue to “hang around” someone who is “into” homosexuality, it kind of becomes a matter of “when,” not “if.”

Lesson four focuses on prostitution or those who go to or use prostitutes. The dangerous aspects of either engaging in prostitution or employing a prostitute are considerable. About the same proportion of the adult population gets involved in prostituting themselves as is involved in homosexuality. Perhaps 2% to 3% of adults have prostituted themselves, and perhaps a fifth of men and a much smaller proportion of women at some time have employed prostitutes. A much larger proportion of the general population uses legal or illegal substances. Prostitutes suffer high levels of infection with various Sexually Transmitted Diseases, including AIDS. The clients of prostitutes are therefore often exposed to all kinds of STDs. Further, there is evidence that prostitutes, similar to drug-users and those who engage in homosexuality, are more apt to try to infect those with whom they have sexual relations.

Because of the nature of the intimate contact with large numbers of different people, prostitutes get and give more than their “fair share” of diseases other than STDs. Prostitutes experience high levels of violence, including beatings, murder, and suicide. Prostitution is illegal almost everywhere (certain parts of Nevada excepted), and while prostitutes are usually the ones arrested, their clients are also sometimes arrested. Most prostitutes operate with a pimp who protects but also typically exploits the situation for his own benefit. While customers of prostitutes are seldom robbed, beaten, or killed, all of these things happen much more frequently to their customers than to those who avoid prostitutes.

Prostitutes frequently engage in multiple forms of substance abuse. It is probable that they live shortened life spans. Though they may make “good money” while they are young and attractive, most find themselves disinclined to “go to a job” after their prostitution days are over – the habits built up during a prostitute’s career emphasize sleeping late, staying up long hours, not doing much in the way of work, and generally “being lazy” and often “high” on some sort of drug to “get through the night.” Further, habits of thrift and carefulness are seldom cultivated.

While Hollywood glamorizes prostitutes, their life is almost always fairly degrading and depressing. There is generally plenty of excitement (e.g., “will this John be a beater or a killer?”), but most of the “action” takes place in seedy surroundings, often cheap rooms, fields, parking lots, bars or cars. Many, perhaps most, prostitutes are homosexual or bisexual. It appears likely that about one out of every two or three prostitutes is employed for homosexual activity. Perhaps a third to a half of prostitutes are men, and a considerable number of prostitutes who service men are actually gays disguised as women or transsexuals of one sort or another. There is a great deal of overlap between heavy drug users, those who engage in homosexuality, and those who engage in prostitution. Similarly, those who use prostitutes are disproportionately apt to be heavy consumers of drugs or alcohol. Drug users, homosexuals, and prostitutes include more than their fair share of people who feel betrayed by parents or society, and are vengeful and dishonest. It is likely that their practices either create or exacerbate these undesirable traits.

Courtesy toward, but avoidance of, those who engage in prostitution or those who visit prostitutes is wise. “Scripts” for how to courteously avoid the company of those who employ prostitutes or those who engage in prostitution should be created by the class, which will by this time have dealt with the same issue regarding substance abuse and homosexuality.

Lesson Five focuses on chastity. Chastity has psychological, physical, and social benefits.

A. From a social-psychological standpoint, it is wise for teenagers to focus on schooling and to ignore or minimize sexuality until their schooling is completed. Sexuality, like schooling or work, takes time. Sexuality is exciting and indulging in some sexual activity often results in attempts to expand one’s experiences. Frequently, the time expended on sexuality comes at the expense of school-time or work-time. Asian students in the U.S., in particular, are known for their willingness to delay sexuality until their schooling is over or almost over. This is undoubtedly part of the reason Asian students, as a class, do so well in school and are much more apt to get college degrees, join professions, and make good money than white students.

Blacks in the U.S. much more frequently “jump start” their sexuality in the early teens. This is undoubtedly part of the reason that Black students, as a class, do less well in school, are much less apt to achieve a college degree, are less apt to be professionals, and tend not to make as much money as white students. One’s exploration of sexuality is never “risk free,” but if bad things happen while exploring sexuality in the teen years (e.g., pregnancy, STDs), their long-term consequences are much more severe than if bad things happen to someone in their 20s who has finished schooling. So from either a goal-setting perspective or from the standpoint of risk, delaying your sexual debut conserves psychic and time resources for school while at the same time delaying the risks associated with sexual indulgence.

Fifty years ago, the average age of loss of virginity was about 17 yr. old for boys and 18 to 19 years of age for girls. By the 1980s this figure declined to about 16 yr. for boys and 17 yr. for girls. In the 1990s, the average age of loss of virginity is rising again because more kids are practicing chastity. While many other factors are involved, those students – both boys and girls – who delay their sexual debut, are considerably more apt to achieve scholastically, monetarily, and socially. In the longer run, getting a degree is accompanied by many more rewards than early sexual experience. Delaying the gratification of exploring sexuality in favor of getting one’s schooling completed and then exploring sexuality translates into many times the amount of income over a lifetime as compared to those who don’t complete a degree. At a base level, the choice is generally “have fun now and pay for it later,” or “be chaste today and have the same or greater fun later – but with much more money.”

Sexual activity is not only interesting and powerful, it is also quasi-addictive. Once started, it is quite difficult to stop. Many of those who “play the field” in their teen years discover that they have cultivated a taste for sexual “variety.” As such, they find it difficult to “settle down” to just one partner. This may be related to evidence that early sexual debut is associated with higher chances of divorce later in life. For instance, in one nationwide study, it was found that both men and women who had gotten a divorce on-average had lost their virginity two years younger than those who never got a divorce. While those who “save” their first experience for their marital partner are in the minority, what evidence we have suggests that the sex lives of such individuals are more satisfying and their marriages more durable.

B. Physically, pregnancies have their best prospects for success if the woman is between about 19 through 29 years of age. There is good evidence that various forms of cancer of the reproductive organs accompany exposure to sperm from different men (that is, it is safer for the woman if she has sex with only one man). There is also some evidence that abortion creates scar tissue that can lead to infertility, and that these complications of abortion are more frequent among teenagers. Earlier sexual debut is associated with higher probabilities of acquiring STDs in both men and women. However, most of the physical problems associated with early sexual debut fall upon the woman.

C. Psychologically, the intensity of feelings accompanying sex does not appear to vary by age, but commitment to the partner is considerably less among teenagers. For most people, the “first time” is a memorable and special occasion. Some girls become psychically disturbed when their “first partner” leaves them – a phenomenon much more likely if the partner is a teenager. Girls, especially, suffer from feelings of having been “used” rather than “loved.” Likewise, some girls become deeply disturbed if they have an abortion, experiencing “anniversary reactions” and deep regrets over the child they might have had, particularly if it turns out to have been the only child she could ever have had. Obviously, abortion is a much more likely outcome of teenage sex than sex between those in their 20s or of those who are married.

D. Socially, a large minority of girls and close to a majority of boys express a desire that their marital partner not be “sexually experienced.” Many boys are concerned about their “ranking” with other boys a girl may have had (“was I as good?”), and boys are also often concerned that they are somehow getting “damaged goods.” Girls’ concerns about their partner not being sexually experienced may be related to her “ranking” relative to other girls a guy may have had, but more frequently their concerns revolve around the degree of commitment the fellow presumably had before and whether he can be “trusted” to be faithful now. There appears to be no “down side” to having been chaste before marriage, and for a significant minority, not having been chaste is a strong mark against such a person as a potential marital partner. Religiously, all the major faiths celebrate chastity and condemn fornication.

Males have a tendency to focus in on sexual conquest to the exclusion of much in the way of communication and commitment, females tend toward being more interested in communication and commitment than sex (e.g., “boys trade love for sex, girls trade sex for love”). Both sexes establish psychological patterns in their teen years that influence them for the rest of their lives. Since sexual expression is such an important aspect of adulthood, it is wise to be guarded in the sexual habits one acquires.

Lesson Six reviews what has been learned. The main task for students is to compare and contrast the three “avoids,” and to address the advantages of chastity. Questions they should discuss include:

1. How are the three As similar?
2. Some people talk about getting “addicted” to drugs or homosexual activity; can people get addicted to prostitution or going to prostitutes?
3. Why do you think that most societies made drug use, homosexuality, and prostitution illegal?
4. Why have some Muslim countries made adultery a capital offense?
5. Why has no society made chastity illegal?
6. What are the advantages of chastity?
7. Why do most parents warn their children to “watch out who you hang around with?”
8. Some societies have been very harsh with those caught in homosexuality, prostitution, or illegal drug use. Why do you think they would consider these activities so terribly wrong?
9. At one time, 11 states outlawed the use of tobacco. Are we heading that way again?
10. What are the unusual hazards of or dangers associated with each of the three As?
11. Are we all influenced by “try it, you might like it?”
12. Why do most people prefer someone who has not “gone all the way” as a potential marital partner?
13. In which kind of situation – marriage, cohabiting, singlehood – are children better off?
14. Why do you suppose that people who engage in one of the three As are more apt to engage in two of the As?
15. Have any American presidents engaged in one of the three As?
16. Why does Hollywood glamorize the three As so frequently?

Class discussions and role-playing skits would be highly appropriate for stimulating class discussions. A history assignment about expected standards of sexual comportment in the early U.S. and Victorian England would be useful. Assignments concerning the ideals regarding sexuality as taught by Christianity, Judaism, and the Muslim faith would be appropriate.

Much like the media hype surrounding the alleged “gay gene,” a great deal of attention and speculation still surrounds the published study ⁽¹⁾ of the brains of 19 homosexual males. Simon LeVay studied a neuron group (known as INAH-3) in the anterior hypothalamus and noted a difference in size compared to that of a group comprised of 16 presumably heterosexual males and 6 females. The author, the editors of Science, and the media rashly related this size difference to “sexual orientation.” The New York Times headlined it “Zone of Brian Linked to Men’s Sexual Orientation,” the Washington Post ran “Node Seen as Key to Gay Orientation,” and Newsweek wrote “A Study Pinpoints a Difference in the Brain.”

Although LeVay’s report was first published five years ago, it is still frequently cited by gay activists, the media, and others as a basis for the supposedly biological cause of homosexuality. Simon LeVay himself has parlayed the attention given to that one article into two additional books on the research into biological explanations of homosexuality, including The Sexual Brain, published in 1993. Along with the “gay gene” study and research on the sexual orientation of identical versus fraternal twins, LeVay’s “homosexual brains” study has become one of the three “pillars” in the argument supporting the notion that homosexuals are “born that way.” As such it is well worth understanding and reviewing in detail.

While the technical aspects of LeVay’s small study approximate those of other researchers in the field, the interpretations of the findings are fanciful and unrelated to any evidence that this locus of neurons has any function whatsoever. It is highly speculative to suggest that this neuron group is associated in any way with human sexual function, let alone sexual behavior. To suggest that “sexual orientation” can be located in this group of nerve cells strains credulity and calls into question the scientific sensibilities of those claimsmakers.

THE HISTORY OF THIS GROUP OF NEURONS

In 1989, a group of investigators ⁽²⁾ seeking gender-related dimorphisms [sex differences in anatomic structure] in the preoptic-anterior hypothalamic area of the brain discovered that thionin (a histologic stain) “stained darkly” ” (4) relatively discrete cell groups” in 11 male and 11 female brains. These cell groups were named Interstitial Nuclei of the Anterior Hypothalamus (INAH). It must be noted that this was a hunt for microscopic structural differences – no attempt was made to tie any structural differences to any function, sexual or otherwise. These investigators noted that they “were unable to identify any cell group clearly homologous to a sexually dimorphic nucleus of another species,” but they decided to study these 4 nuclei anyway, of which INAH-2 and INAH-3 seemed to be dimorphic at least in their human subjects.

Further, they noted that “without knowledge of connectivity or neurochemical characteristics of these nuclei, it is difficult to assign any as a homolog to a sexually dimorphic nucleus of another mammalian species.” In other words, it is not known if animals have such a group of cells (so animal experiments could not help in deciding the function of the group) – a major drawback to future studies. Indeed, despite extensive “histological and histochemical characterization of sex differences in the [medial preoptic nucleus] of the rodent, little is known about its functions.” Scientists have dissected and studied the brains of countless rats in the pursuit of such knowledge, but for all of their efforts we still know “little.” Because “the human being cannot be manipulated experimentally as can laboratory animals, it is difficult to extrapolate from animals to humans regarding structural, behavioral, or physiological sex differences.”

In short, the findings of Allen et al relate to 4 areas of the hypothalamus that stain darkly to thionin, but: 1) these nuclei may merely have a common locus – it is possible that propinquity [i.e., physical closeness] is the only thing that these particular neurons have in common; 2) these nuclei have no known function and do not correspond to nuclei of animals whose function is known; thus, 3) there is no evidence that INAH-2 and INAH-3 are related to sexual function and certainly no evidence whatsoever that they are related to “sexual orientation,” if such a relationship could ever be established.

The first report of a difference between male and female brains came out of Swaab’s laboratory in the Netherlands (³⁾. He reported on what Allen et al consider to be INAH-1. The typical course of “new” findings regarding the brain is illustrated by this study of INAH-1. In 1985, Swaab found that for his sample of males and females, INAH-1 was 2.5 times larger in his sample of males than it was in his females. In 1989 Allen et al found INAH-1 only 1.2 times larger in males (not a statistically significant difference) and in 1991 LeVay found INAH-1 slightly smaller in his sample of men than it was in his small sample of women. In other words, LeVay’s findings contradict previous studies. Such seems to be the fate of findings based upon small samples gathered hither and yon.

The first report of a difference between homosexual and heterosexual brains came out of Swaab’s laboratory in 1990⁴. Swaab found that the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) of the hypothalamus was 1.7 times larger in a sample of 10 homosexual men who died of AIDS than it was in 18 other men, and in 6 heterosexuals (including women) who died of AIDS. He construed this and his finding regarding another nucleus as evidence that does “not support the global hypothesis that homosexual men have a ‘female’ brain.” Of course, the hypothesis that male homosexuals are different from heterosexuals because they have brains structured like females is the basis for all recent research seeking a link between the brain and sexual orientation.

Interestingly, LeVay, although aware of Swaab’s finding, chose to dismiss it [he said, because there “is little evidence, however, to suggest that SCN is involved in the regulation of sexual behavior”] in favor of looking at differences in INAH-2 and INAH-3. Note that the Swaab finding of a larger SCN in homosexuals, if it were to hold up to further testing, would make the homosexual male brain “super-male” rather than “female-like” as LeVay’s finding of smaller nuclei in homosexual males would imply.

ENTER SIMON LEVAY

Framing his research as a quest for the “biological substrate for sexual orientation,” Dr. LeVay explored the relative sizes of INAH-2 and INAH-3 in 19 homosexual males who had died of AIDS, 16 presumed heterosexuals (6 of whom died of AIDS) and 6 women (1 of whom died of AIDS). INAH-3 “was more than twice as large in the heterosexual men ¹ as in the homosexual men ²” and “the women ³.” Countless explanations might account for the apparently smaller size of homosexual male INAH-3 nuclei, but to interpret the size differential as bearing upon a “biological substrate for sexual orientation” is reminiscent of how graduate students find “the solution” in almost every one of their projects.

Since there is no homolog to a nucleus governing sexual orientation (or even a sexual function) in animals [as the commentator in Science noted “there is no animal model for studying homosexuality ⁽⁵⁾“], future studies using animals would not be helpful. Even if further work on many more human brains replicated the finding of generally larger INAH-3 among those not known to be homosexual, the emphasis would have to be placed on “generally.” The size differentials reported by LeVay denote the average or mean size of the INAH-3 nucleus. That is, the average size of the INAH-3 nucleus in the set of homosexuals was smaller than the average size of the INAH-3 in heterosexual males.

Despite some media misinterpretations that LeVay had shown all the homosexual brains to be smaller than all the heterosexual brains, there was actually a fair amount of variability in INAH-3 size from individual to individual and definite overlap in the size distributions among the three sets of brains. For instance, 3 out of the 19 homosexuals had a larger INAH-3 than the average size for LeVay’s group of ‘heterosexual’ males. In addition, 3 of the 16 ‘heterosexual’ male brains had a smaller INAH-3 than the average homosexual in LeVay’s study. If heterosexuals and homosexuals could truly be classified by size of the INAH-3 nucleus, why didn’t all the homosexuals have smaller INAH-3 nuclei and all the heterosexual males have larger INAH-3 nuclei?

Even the supposed sexual dimorphism [i.e., size difference between male and female] exhibited in INAH-3, as first reported by Allen et al, was less than clearcut in LeVay’s study. In one of LeVay’s females, INAH-3 was larger than the “heterosexual” male mean, while in 3 of the “heterosexual” males, INAH-3 was smaller than the female mean size. Of course, the small samples of individuals used in LeVay’s study make it difficult to determine what if anything these results really mean. In fact, it is not certain that LeVay’s ‘heterosexual’ males were all necessarily even heterosexual. LeVay did not verify the sexual orientation of his dead subjects before examining their brains. It appears suspicious that 6 of his 16 ‘heterosexual’ males had died of AIDS. But LeVay classified them as heterosexual anyway. If some of these individuals were really homosexual, the average INAH-3 sizes for the two groups of males would almost certainly change, increasing the degree of overlap between the heterosexual and homosexual brains and muddling the results even further.

Dr. William Byne (⁶⁾ has also noted that “The reliance on the brains of AIDS victims poses a serious interpretive difficulty because decreased testosterone levels are common in their cases…. In some mammalian species the size of sexually dimorphic hypothalamic nuclei varies with the amount of testosterone circulating in the blood stream…. Furthermore, some of the drugs used to treat opportunistic infections associated with AIDS are also known to lower testosterone levels…. it is conceivable that the size of the INAH3 in the men in LeVay’s study reflected endocrine status at the time of death or some other aspect of AIDS or its treatment rather than sexual orientation. Unfortunately, the medical histories published in the LeVay study are inadequate to test this hypothesis.”

THE KEY ISSUE

The key issue in the LeVay study is not whether INAH-3 is, in fact, smaller in homosexual men than in heterosexual men, but whether INAH-3 has anything at all to do with sexual function, let alone sexual orientation. Until and unless this is “nailed down,” talk about cause/effect [e.g., does INAH-3 affect sexual orientation or does sexual orientation cause changes in INAH-3?] is just so much groundless speculation. LeVay’s data is consistent with the hypothesis that sexually intimate contact with females causes growth in INAH-3 – after all, the bisexual in LeVay’s sample had an INAH-3 size in line with the “heterosexual” male mean. But his limited data is consistent with any number of alternative hypotheses. For instance, that promiscuity or exposure to bodily waste bears a relationship to the size of INAH-3; or that participation in competitive sports [which is reported infrequently by homosexuals] causes its growth, or that nonparticipation causes shrinkage; or even that a bigger INAH-3 enables one to better control his emotions. It could also be that exposure to the AIDS virus itself has an impact on the INAH-3 nucleus, at least in some cases, since so many of the individuals in LeVay’s study had died of the disease.

To have a “hunch” about something, then to argue that one’s hunch is proven by evidence that could just as plausibly be used by someone with a totally different “hunch” [e.g., a classical music instructor who “just knew” that smaller INAH-3 caused an appreciation of fine music], is much more like “wishful fishing” than serious scientific hypothesis testing. Since Science noted that there are no animal models for homosexuality, LeVay’s hunch could not have come from studies of any similar animal nuclei. It is certainly not “obvious” that women are more like homosexual men than they are like heterosexual men – there are numerous ways that heterosexual men are more like females than homosexual males are.

As an openly gay researcher, LeVay’s credibility must also be questioned on other grounds. LeVay promised publicly, both in debates with Dr. Paul Cameron of FRI shortly after publication of his article in Science and to various media reporters that he was going to replicate his findings on live subjects in the near future (presumably through MRI techniques). However, LeVay left the Salk Institute, the only plausible place he could have tried to carry out such experiments, in favor of starting his own Institute of Gay and Lesbian Education in West Hollywood, CA in 1992. In his 1993 book ⁽⁷⁾, LeVay claimed that MRI techniques were currently impractical for measuring such a small nucleus as INAH-3. It is now 1996 – five years later – and LeVay has not entered the refereed scientific literature again.

Perhaps this is because, as noted by Byne ⁽⁶⁾, “LeVay’s study was initially rejected by the in-house reviewers at Science…. the paper did not meet the minimal standards to which even animal research in this area is held. This paper had a single author who did all of the tissue processing as well as all of the anatomical measurements and statistical tests. Even in animal work, the standard has been that all measurements are made not only blindly but also by more than one investigator. Certainly, the editors at Science should have been more cautious and required that a co-investigator repeat and verify LeVay’s measurements prior to publication of a study that was sure to be of great interest to the general public as well as to the scientific community.”

Furthermore, with respect to another brain structure, Dr. Byne has noted that “Despite the lack of evidence for a sex difference in the corpus callosum, LeVay (New York Times, letter, October 7, 1991) suggests that male homosexuals may be found to have female-typical callosa. He erroneously asserts that the 1982 study of de Lecoste-Utamsing and Holloway has been replicated in its entirety and that the sex difference they reported is like that reported in laboratory animals. As shown above, however, the 1982 study (de Lecoste-Utamsing & Holloway) stands alone in finding women to have a larger splenium and is contradicted by nearly two dozen studies. Furthermore, when a sex difference in the corpus callosum has been reported in laboratory animals, it has been larger in males….”

LeVay’s explanation may be satisfying to some segments of society, but it remains nothing more than a wishful explanation – a hunch. LeVay’s hunch not only ignores some of Swaab’s earlier finding, but also fails to take into consideration the many other “hunches” that might explain the phenomena he was examining. To summarize, LeVay ignores previous studies, incongruities in his own data, and numerous alternative explanations for the “differences” he cites. Yet the media was quick to hail this study as the final proof. In Vancouver, Washington, The Columbian editorialized that INAH-3 “is always smaller in the brains of homosexual males than it is in other brains…. Now [gays] have evidence to back [their] faith [that they didn’t choose to be gay]. Anti-gay zealots won’t surrender their positions in the face of one scientific report; zeal may be defined as the refusal to see reason no matter what the evidence says. Anyone else should be able to see more clearly that hating a sexual preference is no more valid than hating eye color, skin tone, hair twist or any other characteristic based on biology.”

A similar media circus was generated in 1984, when Science published an analogous study (⁸⁾ on physiological differences between 17 heterosexual and 14 homosexual males. In spite of all the excitement, it led nowhere – again, a study using an extremely small sample. The chances are good that LeVay’s study will meet the same fate.

REFERENCES

1. LeVay, S. A difference in hypothalamic structure between heterosexual and homosexual men. Science 253 (1991): 1034—1037.

2. Allen, L.S., Hines, M. Shryne, J.E., and Gorski, R.A. Two sexually dimorphic cell groups in the human brain. J of Neuroscience 9 (1989): 497—506.

3. Swaab, D.F. and Fliers, E. A sexually dimorphic nucleus in the human brain. Science 228 (1985): 1112—1115.

4. Swaab, D.F. and Hofman, M.A. An enlarged suprachiasmatic nucleus in homosexual men. Brain Research 537 (1990): 141—148.

5. Barinaga, M. Is homosexuality biological? Science 253 (1991): 956—957.

6. Byne, W. Science and belief: psychobiological research on sexual orientation. J of Homosexuality 28 (1995): 303—344.

7. LeVay, S. The Sexual Brain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993.

8. Gladue, B.A., Green, R. and Hellman, R.E. Neuroendocrine response to estrogen and sexual orientation. Science 225 (1984): 1496—1499.

I. Mythic Status of the 10% Figure

A. Until very recently, 10% figure has been accepted lore within media and academic circles

1. Newsweek, 2/15/93, p. 46: “For years, the gay-rights movement has sought safety in numbers. Its leaders have long claimed that homosexuals constitute 10 percent of the American population. They cited Alfred Kinsey, who interviewed thousands of men and women for landmark studies on human sexuality in the 1940s and 1950s. Activists seized on the double digits to strengthen their political message–that millions of citizens are excluded from the mainstream by anti-gay discrimination. Policymakers and the press (including NEWSWEEK) adopted the estimate–despite protests from skeptical conservatives–citing it time and again.

2. Fortune, 1991, p. 42: “Kinsey’s classic 1948 studies suggest that about 10% of American adults are homosexual, a figure that more recent surveys support.”

3. Washington Times, 11/19/91, p. A3: “10 percent of American men are homosexual and 5 percent of women are lesbian.”

4. Professional journals like the Family Therapy Networker, 1991: “from Kinsey’s historic study in the 1940s to the present, surveys consistently show that 10 percent of the population is either gay or lesbian–that’s 25 million people.”

5. Even the head of the American Psychological Association, Bryant Welch, testified on 2/6/89 that the APA had found “in fact all the research supported the conclusion that homosexuality… is a sexual orientation found consistently in about ten percent of the male population and approximately 5 percent of the female population…. research showed that across different historical eras and in totally different cultures the incidence of homosexuality remained the same irrespective of public attitudes and prohibitions.”

B. Figure is embodied in names of homosexual groups such as “1 in 10” and the adolescent support project for homosexual adolescents called “Project 10,” which started in the L.A. public school system but has now spread to San Francisco and Minnesota also.

C. Proof of the pudding: so many “shocked” by much lower recent numbers reported in Alan Guttmacher-sponsored study of men aged 20-39, which estimated that only 1.1% of men had had only male homosexual partners within the last 10 years.

1. Washington Times, 4/16: “‘If everyone examines their own conscience, they know that more than one in 100 people is gay…. Common sense tells you this survey is nonsense,’ said Gregory King, spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign Fund, the nation’s largest homosexual rights group. ‘I feel the 10 percent figure is probably about right’ because many homosexuals fear to admit their sexual orientation, said Cathy Renna, co-chairwoman of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Againse Defamation.”

NY Times, 4/16: “Yesterday, gay groups scoffed at the 1 percent figure, saying that even though the researchers promised respondents anonymity, many homosexuals were afraid to disclose their sexual orientation.”

2. NY Times editorial from 4/17 called the new survey results a “surprise”

3. Letter to the Washington Blade entitled “Out in America”: “Up until now, we have always based our estimates of the size of our community on the Kinsey studies of the late 1940s. Researchers revisiting the question in the 1970s reaffirmed that ‘one in ten’ view. Until now. A sociological study published by the progressive Alan Guttmacher Institute, that interviewed over 3,300 men throughout the country in 1991, found that only 2.3 percent of those interviewed admit to a same sex experience in the last ten years; only 1.1 percent say they have been exclusively Gay. Although most of believe in our heart of hearts that these are gross underestimates, the controversy will continue to be fueled by experts and homophobes from everywhere.”

4. NY Times election poll buried: A journalism seminar reviewing 1992 nominated the NY Times for one of the most significant “buried” stories of the year. The Times own presidential election exit polls asked about voters’ sexual orientation and found less than 3% claimed to be gay. Times staffers couldn’t believe the results, being so much lower than the standard 10%, and so they did not report the story.

D. More revealing: gay leaders now admit to abusing the 10% figure for their own gain

1. NY Times 4/16: “Gay leaders have contended that the number of gay and lesbian Americans was around 10 percent, a figure that many of them suspected to be inflated. But they repeated the number often, they said, as a way of encouraging the nation’s large population of closeted homosexuals to be open about their sexual identity.”

Newsweek, 2/15: “Some gay activists now concede that they exploited the Kinsey estimate for its tactical value, not its accuracy. ‘We used that figure when most gay people were entirely hidden to try to create an impression of our numerousness,’ says Tom Stoddard, former head of the Lambda Legal Defense Fund.”

II. Why Has 10% Figure Been So Sacred to Gay Activists?

A. If 10% is true, gays constitute a significant minority not easily ignored by:

1. Media and politicians

NY Times 4/16: “The size of the nation’s homosexual population has long been at issue, all the more so in recent years as the gay civil rights movement has gained momentum. The number has political implications, since it translates into constituents, which translates into votes.”

NY Times 4/17 editorial: “What does it matter? In the political realm, power depends partly on numbers, so the new data may weaken the gay rights movement just as it is struggling to lift the ban against homosexuals in the military, head off laws in several states that would allow discrimination against homosexuals and press President Clinton to back gay causes.”

2. American public–1 in 10 means someone you know and love or work with is gay

B. If true, why would homosexuality be so prevalent even under intense social disapproval?

1. Genetic basis more plausible to many if 10% of population is consistently gay

2. Can explain 1 or 2% gay as a fringe group making radical choices. Harder to explain actions of 10% of the population as “fringe” behavior

C. Until now, the esteemed reputation and work of Alfred Kinsey was at stake

1. For years, we at FRI have found rough sledding trying to have scholarly criticisms of Kinsey’s work published in reputable journals. There has been a tremendous bias against criticizing Kinsey.

III. Kinsey’s Role in History of 10% Figure

A. Before Kinsey, homosexuality considered fairly rare

1. Medical and psychiatric communities speculated that the figure was around 2% or so

2. Columbia Univ. psychiatrist David Abrahamsen wrote in 1944: “it is difficult to say how frequent homosexuality really is. One is apt to say that male homosexuality is found in only 2 percent of the total population, but there is a general feeling that female homosexuality is more frequent.”

3. Despite the speculation, no substantial data existed except for isolated, small studies of volunteers or clinical patients

a. Ironically, given the problems we now know about Kinsey’s own methodology, Kinsey strongly criticized previous studies of sexual behavior in a review included in his first book, Sexual Behavior and the Human Male. He wrote to a reviewer that it “is amazing how many people have been willing to base generalizations about human sexual behavior on general gossip and a handful of clinical cases, while they now object strenuously to an adequate and carefully selected 5,300 cases.”

B. No probability-based or randomly drawn surveys existed. Why?

1. The science and theory of statistics were still in their infancy in the 30’s and 40’s

2. Research design and survey methodology in social sciences were barely born as fields of study

3. Sex was a taboo topic for general discourse

a. Even today, we have found that people who refuse to fill out sex questionnaires tend to be more conservative and sexually staid

b. Random questionnaire survey on sexual behavior could easily have failed in Kinsey’s time due to unwillingness on part of most Americans to fill it out

C. Enter Kinsey, changing the face of sex (and social science) research

1. Entymologist with fair academic reputation from studies of gull wasps

2. Began collecting sexual “histories” in late 30’s

3. Asked detailed series of intimate sexual questions of over 18,000 subjects

4. Made systematic and extensive efforts to organize and present data in 2 massive books

a. So massive that most people have never read through the Kinsey volumes first-hand

D. Without competing data, Kinsey’s figures eventually became “fact”

1. Sheer size of his database was intimidating to critics

2. Methods heavily criticized at first, but no counter data or studies put forward to challenge Kinsey’s estimates

3. Critics were eventually forgotten, but Kinsey’s database remained and gained acceptance in the scientific literature

E. As psychology and sociology grew in stature and popularity, Kinsey’s research held up as “gold standard” in sex research

1. Partly due to Kinsey’s detailed data collection methods and unique interviewing style

2. Also due to acceptance on the part of social scientists of Kinsey’s basic philosophical approach

IV. Kinsey’s Impact

A. Kinsey’s philosophical approach: erase distinction between sexually normal and abnormal behavior

1. Argument based on sheer force of numbers: if a behavior is common or practiced frequently, it can’t be abnormal

a. Kinsey wrote that “In view of the data which we now have on the incidence and frequency of the homosexual… it is difficult to maintain the view that psychosexual reactions between individuals of the same sex are rare and therefore abnormal or unnatural, or that they constitute within themselves evidence of neuroses or even psychoses.”

2. Kinsey ignored moral distinctions between right and wrong behavior; sexual behavior just came in different varieties

a. Robinson, in his biography of Kinsey, wrote that “[h]e would never have tolerated the proposition that sexual taboos were justified because they guaranteed social stability.” Kinsey also said he believed “most people would exercise greater Christian tolerance of all types of sexual behavior, if they understood… why people do what they do sexually.”

3. Kinsey was actually indignant about the effects of religion on our sexual life

a. Pomeroy, Kinsey’s co-worker, wrote that Kinsey “was indignant about what it [the Judeo-Christian tradition] had done to our culture. He often cited the inaccuracies and paranoia in which he asserted it abounded. He was quite blunt in talking about this tradition and its effect on the sexual lives of people in our own time…” Kinsey also wrote that “moral attempts to control particular forms of sexual outlet are designed to perpetuate the mores and are often devoid of any logic, not to say scientific justification.”

4 Zealously tried to show taboo behaviors were pretty common (and therefore OK)

a. Estimated high rates for masturbation, premarital sex, adultery, oral sex, etc.

B. Kinsey on homosexuality

1. Issue of huge political and social significance

a. How many homosexuals?

b. How much homosexual behavior?

2. Kinsey’s claims

a. 10% predominantly homosexual for at least 3 years of adulthood

b. 18% bisexual or homosexual for at least 3 years of adulthood

c. 4% exclusively gay throughout adulthood

d. 37% of men with some post-pubertal homosexual experience

3. These estimates were a serious and often shocking challenge to prevailing popular and professional thought

C. The unsettled question

1. Were Kinsey’s claims accurate? Question has hung around for last 40 years

2. Meanwhile, Kinsey’s estimates have greatly impacted cultural attitudes toward sex and homosexuality. Weight of counter evidence hasn’t been amassed until now

V. The Truth as Best We Know It

A. FRI research: we examined over 35 of “best” studies available

1. Methodology limited to studies with non-biasing methodology and design involving some form of random selection

2. Probability-based studies are the best shot for getting believable, unbiased population estimates

B. Looked at two fundamental questions

1. What fraction has ever had a post-pubertal homosexual experience?

2. What fraction is bi-/homosexual in orientation?

C. Findings on post-pubertal homosexual experience

1. Overall, certainly less than 10%, probably <5% for men and women

2. The best studies include:

a. USA:

Kinsey-NORC 1970 – 8.2% M, 4.3% F after age 15

FRI-Dallas 1984 – 10.7% M, 7.4% F after age 12

NCHS 1988-91 – ² 3.5% M since 1977 (over 50,000 respondents)

GSS 1989 – < 6.3% M after age 17

RTI-Dallas 1989 – 7.6% M, 2.7% F since 1978

GSS 1990 – 4.8% M after age 17

Billy/Guttmacher 1993 – 2.3% M in last 10 years

b. Australia:

Ross 1986 – 11.2 M, 4.6% F

c. Great Britain

Forman/Chilvers 1984-86 – 1.7% M in random controls, 2.7% M among patients

Johnson 1992 – 6.1% M (almost 19,000 respondents)

d. France

Spira 1992 – 4.1% M, 2.6% F (over 20,000 respondents)

e. Norway

Sundet 1987 – 3.5% M, 3.0% F

f. Denmark

Schmidt 1989 – 3.8% M

Melbye 1989 – 2.7% M

3. Median of studies listed above: 4.1% M, 2.0% F

Upper quartile: 7.0% M, 4.6% F

D. Findings on homosexual orientation

1. Overall, certainly less than 4%, probably around 2-3% M, 2% F are homosexual or bisexual

2. The best studies include

a. USA:

Bell/Weinberg 1970 – < 2% total M and F (ratings of siblings)

Cameron/Ross 1975-78 – 3.1% M, 3.9% F

FRI 1983 – 5.4% M, 3.6% F (4,340 respondents)

Trocki 1988-89 – 3% M, 2% F

NCHS 1988-91 – ² 3.5% M (over 50,000 respondents)

Catania/NABS 1992 – 2% M, 2% F (4% in urban areas; 10,600 respondents)

Billy/Battelle 1993 – ³ 1.1% M

b. Denmark

Schmidt 1987 – 0.6% M

c. Canada

MacDonald 1988 – 2% total M and F (> 5,500 college student respondents)

3. Median of studies listed above: 2% M, 2% F

Upper Quartile: 3.3% M, 3.7% F

E. Other evidence consistent with these findings

1. Census Bureau count of gay/lesbian couples

a. Figure of 157,400 is less than 1% of all US households

b. Washington Blade reported that “The total includes 88,200 Gay male couples and 69,200 Lesbian couples. The overall total of 157,400 represented less than one percent of the 91 million U.S. households. Unmarried heterosexual couples totaled approximately 3.1 million… representing about three percent of the total households.”

2. Admissions from the NY Times on 4/16

a. First a belated report on Presidential exit poll results the Times had previously “buried,” showing only 3% M and 2% F homosexuals: “In fact, one survey analyzing the President vote found that 3 percent of men and 2% of women said they were gay, lesbian, or bisexual.”

b. The Times also quoted a marketer to the homosexual community: “Sean Strub, who runs a marketing firm in Manhattan that keeps mailing lists of homosexuals for sale to advertisers and politicians, estimated the size of the country’s gay population at 2.5 percent to 3.5 percent.”

3. Simple capitalism: gay bookstores in D.C.

a. There are 11,000 bookstores of all types nationwide for an average of 18,000 adults/store

b. DC’s 2.9 million adults support 210 bookstores or 14,000/store (more educated populace)

c. Deacon MacCubbin, owner of Lamba Rising, the largest gay bookstore in the world, claimed there exist 534 gay or feminist/lesbian stores worldwide

d. Only 116 stores are strictly gay/lesbian; only 60 of these are located in US

e. Even tripling this number of stores to account for lesbians who frequent feminist bookstores, gay and lesbian bookstores only slightly over 1% of the total

f. Furthermore, Mr. MacCubbin claims gays buy 8 times the books of the average person

g. Yet there are only two gay/lesbian bookstores in DC

h. Even if each supports 15,000 gays/lesbians (not likely if gays really buy so many books relative to the average reader, for then more gay bookstores would be supportable), get total of 30,000 homosexuals in D.C, approximately 1% of the total adult population

VI. Why Was Kinsey So Far Off?

A. Sample skewed tremendously by non-typical populations

1. Had interviewed over 1,500 convicted sex offenders in first 10,000 histories

2. Included histories of 600 male and 600 female prostitutes in database

3. Regularly visited not only prisons but known homosexual communities of his time. In fact, in very few years did Kinsey fail to hit either a prison or gay enclave in his sampling efforts

4. All Kinsey’s histories were thrown together for analysis with little regard for proper statistical weighting or handling of the data

B. Kinsey’s sampling scheme was not systematic but rather haphazard

1. No random or probability-based design

2. Used underworld contacts to get into gay and sexually deviant groups

3. Kinsey became very interested in documenting the extremes of sexual diversity, even going so far as to film participants in sexual activity. The Kinsey Institute contains an archive of such films.

4. By being so interested in diversity, Kinsey was much less interested in the relatively “dull” sexual histories of most ordinary Americans, and these “dull” histories did not show up in his sample nearly as often as they should have

VII. Is Recent Research Any More Reliable Than Kinsey?

A. Usual criticism: gays won’t reveal themselves on surveys, won’t tell truth

1. NY Times, 4/15, reporting on the recent Guttmacher Institute study: “‘The big question mark over every survey like this is, Are people telling the truth?’ said Jacqueline Darroch Forrest, director of research for the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization focusing on sexual behavior and contraception.”

2. Researchers usually assume gays are undercounted

3. But is this necessarily so?

B. In many sex surveys, half or more completely refuse to fill out the questionnaire or respond at all

1. These non-respondents are the crucial swing vote in determining whether gays have been undercounted

2. Several investigators, including we at FRI, have suggested that non-respondents are more sexually conservative than respondents, based on experience in working with sexuality questionnaires

3. This would tend to mean that survey estimates with high rejection rates overstate rather than understate figures on homosexual activity and orientation, but evidence is not completely unequivocal

C. Evidence from three studies

1. FRI reanalysis found partial non-responders to be most like conservative heterosexuals and not sexually liberal

2. U. Maryland study had two types of data collection

a. Study of student volunteers and a separate anonymous postal questionnaire sent to a random portion of the student body

b. Comparison of the results showed that the volunteer students were more sexually liberal and active than the students who responded to the random mail survey

c. Given the anonymity associated with the mail survey, and the lack of anonymity associated with being a volunteer participant, these results suggest that the sexually liberal are indeed willing to share their experiences in a sex study

3. RTI study

a. Paid up to $175 to initial refusals to get them to cooperate

b. Increased overall response rate to 88%

c. Found higher rate of homosexual contact among initial refusals than among those who responded the first time, suggesting that some with homosexual experience did initially try to hide that fact, at least until the ‘price was right.’

d. However, a public ad campaign by gay leaders against the study may have caused more initial refusals than would have normally occurred

e. Also, and very importantly, the target study population was cut off at age 54 even though most refusals in other studies tend to be older (heterosexuals)

D. Overall, current set of studies seems adequate and sufficient to estimate size of gay subpopulation

Produced by Family Research Institute for the 1995 Conservative Political Action Conference
The struggle between freedom and egalitarianism rages. On one side is the traditional constitutional view: People should be left alone to do with their own as they see fit unless they do gross harm to themselves or others. While everyone is equal before the law, people should enjoy the product of their labors and the fruit of their loins limited only by compelling societal interests. Radical egalitarianism holds that because they are human, everybody deserves an approximately equal share of what the productive generate. Since people obviously differ in height, intelligence, perseverance, etc., it demands that society focus on those human attributes for which no clear ranking exists: opinions and feelings.

The state comfortably sides with egalitarianism, enhancing itself by taking material from the productive and giving it to the non-productive. Similarly it seeks to wrest control of children from the family and put them into the hands of professionals and bureaucrats beholden to the state. The state is jealous of any God and continually seeks to limit belief and allegiance to anybody or anything but itself. The Framers of the Constitution recognized that the state, though necessary, is inherently evil – only to be contained with great effort. They designed it to be weakened from without by continual electoral cleansing. They weakened it from within by setting up competition between the various branches of government. But it is always the enemy, because those who come to control it quickly become corrupted by its power.

The contemporary elite has weighed in on the egalitarian side. Profoundly embarrassed by the Christian tradition of the U.S., the elite assumes that there is no objective truth and is determined to impose its resulting confusion on everyone. Therefore anyone’s opinions and feelings, especially if hostile to Christianity, must be protected and advanced. The elite’s anti-Christian bias extends to foreign as well as domestic affairs.

The rights of the people must be asserted against the power of the state. In our times conservatives also demand that the traditions that brought us to the dance, even if they happen to be Christian, be retained unless compelling empirical evidence to the contrary surfaces. We are in favor of:

1. term limits for all governmental officials (including judges)
2. the initiative and referendum as well as the initiative and recall
3. lower taxes (the less money government controls, the less oppressive it can be)
4. checking the power of the judiciary (the Constitution does not mean “whatever the Supreme Court says it means”)
5. canceling civil rights laws and civil rights commissions. Whatever good the civil rights laws did has already been accomplished. “Special rights,” “special preferences,” or “set asides” for any group should be abolished. The state is using these laws to intrude into our lives, and then divide, conquer and control us. It is unjust to “make up” for past injustices by taking from the descendants of one group and giving to the descendants of another. Instead there should be equality of opportunity for individuals.
6. getting the government out of our lives in as many ways as possible (e.g., allowing school vouchers, stopping taxes to support the “artsy-craftsy community”)
7. leaving traditions alone unless harm is empirically demonstrated (e.g., Christmas decorations and songs; English as the sole official language; homosexuals not allowed to adopt or marry; children taught that they are expected to work, marry and raise children; homosexuals banned from the military)
8. private property should be interfered with only if compelling community interest exists (e.g., environmental laws should be enforced only if they are proven to be necessary and proven to correct the problem; employers should be free to run their businesses free of regulations that have not been proven to be necessary).

On March 9, 1995, the School Board of Fairfax County, Virginia voted to continue the homosexuality component of its sex-ed program (Family Life Education or FLE) with only minor changes after an advisory committee had been given the charge to perform a thorough review. Conservative members of this advisory committee became aware of FRI only weeks before the final vote and so turned to us at only the last hour. However, Dr. Kirk Cameron, FRIs statistical scientist, was urged to speak before the school board on February 23rd. Excerpts of his testimony concerning the proposed curriculum follow below. Please take note: this same curriculum is being touted as a model for sex-ed programs across the country. Perhaps it is being considered in your own district. We cannot stand on the sidelines any longer. We must stand up for what is right.

Testimony Before the Fairfax County School Board on the FLE Curricula for 9th Grade (2/23/95)

After reviewing the proposed FLE curriculum materials and the FLE Curriculum Advisory Committee report, I can state with great confidence and solid scientific evidence that you as a School Board have been conned….

[I]t flies in the face of the available empirical evidence to argue that the best way to prevent suicide attempts among gay youth is for the Fairfax County schools, and the FLE program in particular, to promote discussion and encouragement of homosexuality as a positive lifestyle alternative to heterosexuality. In the words of the FLECAC report, that gay students must have safe places, like school health classes, to receive accurate medical and scientific information… that it may be desirable to provide more information on the subject of homosexuality… that in view of the amount of time spent discussing behaviors from a heterosexual perspective, gay students continue to be shortchanged… The FLECAC report further added that the current curriculum revision does not go far enough in supporting gay adolescents. The committee found that directing teachers to provide a supportive environment which neither endorses nor condemns homosexuality, but provides all students with factual information about homosexuality and other sexual issues can help educate students to be tolerant; [however] this statement as applied withholds from gay students information they need to be healthy, happy, and well-adjusted… that providing some positive role models for gay students may help improve the self-esteem and lower the high suicide rate of the gay adolescent population.

In the 1992 Remafedi study of nearly 35,000 Minnesota adolescents, sexual orientation was not fixed at an early age (1). In fact, about a quarter of the 12 yr-olds were unsure of their orientation, a percentage that steadily declined to about 5% of 18 yr-olds. Likewise, the percentage with predominantly homosexual attractions steadily increased between these ages, giving lie to the notion that sexual feelings are somehow fixed early-on. Furthermore, as Remafedi notes The observed relationship between sexuality and religiosity, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status provided further evidence of social influences on perceived sexual identity. For example, The reporting of homosexual attractions among boys and girls rose steadily with socioeconomic status, reflecting parental education level and, perhaps, tolerance for sexual diversity. That is, the greater the level of education and tolerance, the more these students expressed explicit homosexual attractions.

If homosexual orientation is inevitable and not influenced by social or learning factors (contrary to Remafedis results), then more education and tolerance and less discrimination against homosexuality ought to simply provide a more comfortable environment for gay students to express themselves. But the available data suggest just the opposite.

The real kicker is Remafedis 1991 study of 137 gay and bisexual male adolescents (2), the largest of its kind. Thirty percent of the subjects had attempted suicide, many had tried on multiple occasions. But rather than being attributable to hostile classroom environments, Remafedi found that suicide attempts were not explained by experiences with discrimination, violence, loss of friendship [after coming out], or current personal attitudes toward homosexuality.

What did differentiate those who attempted versus those who had not attempted suicide? However, gender nonconformity and precocious psychosexual development were predictive of self-harm…. For each years delay in bisexual or homosexual self-labeling, the odds of a suicide attempt diminished by 80%. These findings support a previously observed, inverse relationship between psychosocial problems and the age of acquiring a homosexual identity. In other words, the most important risk factors for suicide in gay youth were getting into sex early-on, adopting feminine characteristics and mannerisms, and most significantly, adopting a homosexual orientation earlier in adolescence.

Can we afford to continue this grand social experiment on our students, hoping that orientation is basically fixed early-on so that the promotion of gay-friendly curricula and positive role models will result only in the development of healthy, happy, and well-adjusted gay students, hoping against hope that if only the dust of discrimination would just settle, homosexuality could take its place alongside heterosexuality as a healthy, normal alternative lifestyle?

The fact is that orientation is not only impacted significantly by type of early sexual experience and family dysfunction but is often not established until adulthood is near, that the promotion of homosexuality in schools may be nudging a percentage of sexually confused youth into that lifestyle, heightening greatly their risk of attempted suicide [As Remafedi notes in yet another study (3), The very experience of acquiring a homosexual or bisexual identity at an early age places the individual at risk for dysfunction. This conclusion is strongly supported by the data.].

The gay lifestyle is a lonely and isolated one, but not primarily because of discrimination and intolerance. Even in San Francisco, easily the most gay-friendly city of this country, the gay life is not a happy one. Rather, it is a lifestyle of either shallow or short-lived relationships; brief, noncommittal and often violent sexual encounters; sexually transmitted disease; normative promiscuity, and gay vs. gay violence. In the final analysis, the gay life is a short life. Our study of over 7,000 gay and lesbian obituaries, published last year in Omega (4), indicates clearly that gay males are dying on average at age 42 in this country, over 30 years sooner than average married heterosexual males. The same holds for lesbians, who are dying on average at age 44.

How can we discriminate against smokers because of the medical risks and not do the same for homosexuality? The last thing we need to do is to encourage a lifestyle that is so self-destructive and dangerous to its participants. I urge you to reject the proposed FLE curriculum.

References

1. Remafedi, G., Resnick, M., Blum, R., & Harris, L. Demography of sexual orientation in adolescents. Pediatrics, 89(4), 1992, pp. 714-21.

2. Remafedi, G., Farrow, J.A., & Deisher, R.W. Risk factors for attempted suicide in gay and bisexual youth. Pediatrics, 87(6), 1991, pp. 869-75.

3. Remafedi, G. Adolescent homosexuality: psychosocial and medical implications. Pediatrics, 79(3), 1987, pp. 331-37.

4. Cameron, P., Playfair, W.L., & Wellum, S. The longevity of homosexuals: before and after the AIDS epidemic. Omega Journal of Death and Dying, 29(3), 1994, pp. 249-72.

Summary:

Fifty percent of foster parent abuse in a general population survey and 34% of abuse as determined by the Illinois DCFS was homosexual. In news stories in the 50 largest newspapers and wire services from 1980-2003, 175 foster parents sexually abused 351+ charges. For the 169 whose sex of victim could be determined: 149 (88%) were men; 76 (53%) victimized homosexually; and 85 (50%) were unmarried. Men assaulted 319 (91%) victims, homosexual practitioners assaulted 222 (63%), and the unmarried 164 (47%). From 1980-1994, 57% of the victims were girls; after 1994, 56% were boys. In 21 group homes, the molestation was homosexual in 15 (71%) and 31 of the 32+ perpetrators were male and at least 334 of 349+ victims were boys.

Introduction

Common opinion holds that, as with those who enjoy drugs, those pursuing homosexual activity recruit the young.¹ Traditional child-placement policies were therefore based on assumptions that children fostered by those who engaged in homosexuality would be more apt to be sexually molested, socially isolated, and engage in homosexuality themselves.²

A new view, initially advanced by homosexual enthusiasts around the turn of the 20th century, holds that homosexual activity should be irrelevant to social policy and since it is of the same personal and social worth as any other kind of sexual entertainment, it is terribly wrong to discriminate against it in any way. This view, requiring social sacrifice on behalf of homosexuals as a downtrodden class, was appealed to by nationally syndicated New York Times columnist, Maureen Dowd. Regarding the 11 states in the U.S. 2004 Presidential election which voted to ban gay marriage, she complained:³

“[the religious were] stirred up to object to social engineering on behalf of society’s most vulnerable: the poor, the sick, the sexually different”.

The major psychological, psychiatric, and social work associations came to adopt the view that ‘homosexuals are merely sexually different and therefore deserve protection’ after the American Psychiatric Association’s 1973 decision to consider homosexuality non-pathological. Thus, in 1975 the American Psychological Association [APA] said it

“deplored all public and private discrimination in such areas as employment, housing, public accommodation, and licensing against those who engage in or who have engaged in homosexual activities”

and urged discrimination in their favor, e.g.

“the enactment of civil rights legislation at the local, state, and federal level that would offer citizens who engage in acts of homosexuality the same protections now guaranteed to others on the basis of race, creed, color, etc.”

On July 28, 2004 the APA declared opposition to “discrimination against lesbian or gay parents adoption, child custody and visitation, foster care and reproductive health services.” Since the APA cited no comparative empirical studies on fostering by those who engage in or have engaged in acts of homosexuality, its stance appears ‘philosophical’ rather than empirically based.

In 1995 the major professional associations told the U.S. Supreme Court (Romer) that tradition was completely wrong about homosexuals being inclined to child molestation. The APA, the American Psychiatric Association, and the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) categorically declared “there is no evidence of any positive correlation between homosexual orientation and child molestation.” Likewise, the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers and the American Association of University Professors told the Court that the belief that gay teachers in the classroom would recruit “students to homosexuality” because “they are more likely than heterosexual men to molest children” “is without foundation in fact.”⁴

Propelled in part by the interrelated professional associations’ contentions that fostering or adopting is a ‘right,’ that children do just as well if reared by homosexuals, and that past concerns about homosexuals’ proclivity to molest children are mistaken, social policy has been shifting away from banning placements with homosexuals. Thus, a 2003 survey of 307 adoption agencies cross the U.S. by Adam Pertman reported that 60% of those replying accepted applications from and 40% said they had placed children with homosexuals. Pertman commented: “we [homosexuals] started out at near zero, and just within the last decade we’re up to 60%” (Denver Post, 10/29/03).

History of Homosexual Foster Parenting in the U.S.

The first case of adoption to an open homosexual in the U.S. appears to have involved David Frater, 28, in 1981. While living with his mother and a male companion of 6 years in Riverside, California, Frater asked to adopt his temporary foster-boy Kevin, a 16-year-old who had lived in 14 different foster homes. When the Department of Public Social Services received an anonymous tip that Frater engaged in homosexuality it attempted to block his adoption. Judith Cummings⁵ of the New York Times, reported that Frater’s cause was championed by civil rights groups, with the APA and the NASW supporting his candidacy. The lack of cited empirical evidence about the outcomes for children fostered or adopted by homosexuals does not appear to have entered the dispute nor was it noted in any of the stories that made the press.

In 1982, the now 17-year-old, Kevin, lived with his adopted father, and Frater’s mother (the lover had departed). Frater was heralded in press reports (Associated Press 5/29/83) as providing a temporary home to kids living on the street and lauded for his desire to adopt 4 more children including Kevin’s 16-year-old brother then living in a boys’ home (Associated Press 5/29-30/83). United Press International said “the community sees him as a model parent” and quoted Frater:

“I date and go out as often as I have time to. Sometimes my friends spend the night here. Kevin doesn’t feel it is anything out of the ordinary.” (6/14/83).

In 1987, still without citing any published systematic empirical studies as to how children do when fostered or adopted by homosexuals nor offering any empirical evidence of its own, the NASW passed a resolution decrying “resistance to using single parents,… including lesbian and gay parents, as potential foster care and adoption resources.” Despite the NASW endorsement, utilizing homosexuals met resistance. Laws (e.g., Florida [1977], New Hampshire [1987], and Nebraska [1995]) and regulations (e.g., Massachusetts [1985]) were passed against homosexual foster parents or adopters. Yet, civil rights suits had also been won against the policy of excluding homosexuals from adoption (e.g., David Frater in California in 1982), and more recently the use of homosexual foster or adoptive parents has been encouraged (e.g., Toronto [1994], Massachusetts [1999], District of Columbia [2003]).

Are homosexual foster parents as apt or more apt to molest their charges? About a quarter of surveyed homosexuals reported sex with the underage.⁶ So enabling them to foster with a vulnerable child might result in molestation. Two ways to generate empirical data on whether homosexuals are more apt to molest present themselves: get foster parents or their victims to report such abuse, or examine the circumstances surrounding those who were caught. About half a million children (~0.7% of the nation’s minors) are placed in foster homes every year. If every year ~1% of these are sexually abused,⁷ we confront a rare event requiring a ~1.5 million respondent random sample of the general population to interview 100 victims. More narrowly, a random sample of ~10,000 foster children would be required to ‘catch’ the 100 or so that might have been molested.

Interviewing foster children proved impossible. When contacted, entities placing children with homosexuals declined to provide information about molestation by foster parents (e.g., including Seattle, District of Columbia, Colorado Springs, Vermont, and a number of states contacted by a politician interested in the issue; Illinois provided some information, below). Each stated that it had not done nor did it contemplate interview research with its charges or foster parents and would not allow examination of its confidential records as an alternative. Even were an interview study to be done, the children would have strong motives to conceal molestation (e.g., reporting would result in a different placement, might prove embarrassing, etc.) and might not produce useful results. Attempting to ask foster parents to admit molestation seemed worthless.

General Population Surveys

While it was not determined how many respondents had been in a foster home, nor how many of the incidents had been reported to authorities, 6 (0.02%) of a general population random sample of 3,714 adults from five metropolitan areas reported “serious sexual advances” against them by a foster parent (3 homosexually against girls; 3 heterosexually, including 1 against a boy, 2 against girls) representing 6 (0.59%) of 1,021 “serious sexual advances” reported by various caretakers. One woman also reported that the advance led to “sexual contact” with a male foster parent, representing 0.27% of 369 “sexual contacts” reported with various caretakers/relatives.⁸ Of these 6 sexual interactions, all of which would have been actionable, three were homosexual.

Information About Those Caught

The Illinois Department of Children and Family Services provided what it considered “substantiated” records of foster-parent sexual abuse for 1997-2002. 270 parents committed sexual offenses against foster- or subsidized-adoptive children. 67 (69%) of 97 mothers and 148 (86%) of 173 fathers sexually abused girls; 30 (31%) mothers and 25 (14%) of fathers sexually abused boys. That is, 34% of perpetrators homosexually abused their charges. 15 parents both physically and sexually abused charges: daughters by 8 mothers and 4 fathers, sons by 3 mothers. For both forms of substantiated abuse, homosexual perpetrators were involved in 53%.⁹

Perpetrator records

South Carolina provided access to records of convictions for child molestation, but they proved too biased and incomplete to be usable. Officials in charge of the database alerted that few perpetrators with competent counsel were convicted of child molestation (and the Attorney General’s staff opined that men accused of molesting boys were disproportionately represented by counsel) and, of course, the records of those not convicted (but often guilty) could not be inspected. Of additional concerns, due to plea bargains the charges for which a perpetrator was sentenced and classified bore modest relationship to what he had actually done, and the database was not set up to determine the circumstances of the molestation (e.g., whether the perpetrator was a foster parent who molested his charge). As the research of Able, Becker, Mittleman, Cunningham-Rathner, Rouleau, and Murphy with the non-incarcerated demonstrated,¹⁰ the kinds and numbers of sexual crimes occurring in ‘the real world’ may be quite different than those working with prisoners or clients might assume.

News Stories

A substantial correlation between a small set of newspaper stories about foster parent molestation and substantiated foster parent sexual abuse from the Illinois DCFS dataset (above) has been reported.¹¹ Unlike a compilation of convicted perpetrators, news stories usually focus on the charges — often the initial phase of a charge or arrest. So those found ‘not guilty’ as well as ‘guilty’ are represented at this level of social control (making the news as a possible molester is a form of punishment).

As long as the stories that made the news were not biased toward or against homosexuals, examining the past 24 years of the 50 largest-circulation newspapers and wire-service stories regarding foster parent molestations as an index of foster parent molestation seemed reasonable (what actually happened is only known to the perpetrators and victims). News stories are only one index of the possible indices of foster parent misbehavior — but if various indices were to generate much the same outcomes some confidence could be placed in the findings. The time span involved in the news reports also enables a sense as to whether the shift in child-placement policy regarding homosexuals noted in Pertman’s 2003 (Denver Post, 10/29/03) survey of U.S. adoption agencies is reflected in news stories of abuse.

Definition of “Homosexual”

The common meaning of homosexual is “sexual attraction toward a person of the same sex; sexual relations between persons of the same sex” (1992 New Illustrated Webster’s Dictionary). The public component is sex with the same sex, which could have an effect upon society, rather than ‘attraction’ which might not result in actions. The APA resolutions above indicate that ‘lesbian’ or ‘gay’ (terms which carry diagnostic and political meanings) are essentially synonymous with ‘those who engage in or who have engaged in homosexual activities’ (which is descriptive and potentially objective).

When ‘homosexual’ is used diagnostically rather than descriptively, many assume that a ‘homosexual’ neither could nor would have sex with the opposite sex.¹² But almost all homosexuals have had sex with the opposite sex and perhaps a third are or have been married.¹³ Some research has adopted the desire and/or behavior standard. Thus, Fergusson, Horwood, & Beautrais,¹⁴ in studying the development of homosexuality from birth reported that at age 21, 20 of their sample of 1,008 said they “were” homosexual or bisexual (but 4 of those who said they “were” homosexual had not engaged in homosexual activity) and an additional 8 reported sex with their sex since the age of 16. The researchers considered all 28 homosexual.

As with Fergusson, et al many studies report a minority of self-described ‘homosexuals’ who had not acted on their desires; some call themselves ‘homosexuals’ to make a political statement, and others who engage in same-sex sexual activity decline to use the term. So recent research has tended to ignore desire in favor of having engaged in homosexual behavior irrespective of age of partners or their sexual interactions with the opposite sex (e.g., the 1990 British national survey of 18,876 adults;¹⁵ the 1996 Centers for Disease Control national sexuality survey of 12,381 adults¹⁶).

This has not proved intellectually troubling for anyone other than those committed to a ‘diagnostic’ meaning of ‘homosexual.’ Indeed, to most researchers, the understanding of ‘a homosexual is one who engages in same-sex sex’ is evident enough that only one team has bothered to ask a sample of men convicted of sexually abusing boys what they ‘were.’ 86% “described themselves as homosexual or bisexual.”¹⁷ No one, including supporters of gay rights¹⁸ has difficulty in knowing (and arguing) about the implications of these various studies for homosexuals.

When ‘homosexual’ is used as other than a behavioral descriptor, empiricism suffers. Thus, the frequently cited “Are children at risk for sexual abuse by homosexuals?” by Jenny, Roesler & Poyer (1994), who declined to use sexual behavior to classify.¹⁹ These researchers attempted a kind of indirect ‘diagnostic’ use of ‘homosexual.’ Jenny, et al examined hospital charts about molested children from Denver Children’s hospital for one year. The researchers did not interview the victims, caretakers, or perpetrators; instead they assumed that unless a perpetrator was designated ‘homosexual’ on the hospital chart, the perpetrator was a heterosexual. Because many of the perpetrators were husbands or boyfriends of the mother (and thus presumably had sex with her), Jenny, et al naively assumed they were not ‘homosexual.’ Identifying only 2 of 269 perpetrators as “gay or lesbian” from charts, and assuming that ~1% of adults ‘are’ homosexual, they concluded,

“no evidence is available from this data that children are at greater risk to be molested by identifiable homosexuals than by other adults” (p. 44).

Yet, a perpetrator of the same sex had molested 60 (22%) of the 269 children and descriptively each of these perpetrators would qualify as ‘homosexual.’

While unfulfilled desire is not included by defining ‘homosexuals’ as those who have engaged in sex with their sex, it has the advantage of being objective in the sense that it could be visible to observers — an important component of empiricism. Since the motivations of a perpetrator are much more difficult to establish than actions, using ‘homosexual’ descriptively is widespread. Law enforcement and public health officials often use “homosexual” to describe a person who engages in same-sex sexual activity. Thus, “adult homosexuals often persuade teen-aged boys to engage in homosexual conduct by offering them money”²⁰ or “a congregation [in a gay bathhouse] of consenting homosexuals does not give immunity from the criminal statute which prohibits open, lewd, and lascivious conduct” (331 So.2d 289 ) — both of which employ “homosexual” in a descriptive rather than in a diagnostic or political sense.

Likewise, the 1975 APA resolution sought protection for all those who “engage in or have engaged in” homosexual acts — ignoring considerations of motive. In a similar vein, because so many of the men infected with HIV from sex with their sex also had sex with the opposite sex, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control abandoned “homosexual” and “heterosexual” for terms that describe the behavior on which the classification is based. The CDC’s participation in the 1996 National Household Survey of Drug Abuse, as well as many large national sex surveys,²¹ divided respondents into those who had engaged in same-sex sex (irrespective of the ages of partners or participation in opposite-sex sex) vs. those who had only engaged in opposite-sex sexual activity.

To lessen ambiguity, “homosexual” is used as a descriptor rather than a diagnosis in the following analysis of news stories. Perpetrators who raped same-sex victim(s) were designated homosexual (some were married and a few also violated opposite-sex victims, see Table 1); those who raped only opposite-sex victims were designated heterosexual.

Method

Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe, an Internet search service, scans the whole text in over 50 regional and national newspapers, largely in the U.S., but also including major papers in Australia, England, Canada, and New Zealand (e.g., the Baltimore Sun, Boston Globe, Independent [England], Ottawa Citizen [Canada]). Lexis-Nexis also scans the whole text of all wire services (e.g., Associated Press, United Press International). From 1980 through 2003, every news story in the newspapers or wire services that included “foster parent” and “sex” or “child” or “child molestation” was examined. Only news stories or first-person accounts were tallied, not editorials or opinion pieces, so stories of primarily contemporaneous events were examined.

Only a few of the stories listed the stated ‘sexual preferences’ or ‘sexual orientation’ of the perpetrators. So, as noted above, the kind of sex in which perpetrators were involved classified their sexual proclivities (e.g., perpetrators who violated same-sex victim(s) were designated homosexual; perpetrators who sexually violated only opposite-sex victims designated heterosexual). Since marital status is generally provided in stories about child molestation (the reaction of the spouse is newsworthy), where it was not reported, the perpetrator was scored as unmarried. Perpetrators were scored married if they were identified as married, widowed, or divorced at the time of the offense(s) since their married status often led to their foster status.

Perpetrators were considered foster parents if either the story or perpetrator said so (this is not as open and shut as it would appear since reporters covering a molestation often quoted representatives of placement agencies as saying that they could not be sure that paper work had been completed or the placement fully endorsed). Victims were counted as listed in the news stories, and accusations were scored as true (no retrial exonerated a perpetrator, though a few increased or decreased the number of victims). “Some,” “many,” and other terms indicating a number of victims were scored as 2 victims.

Since the same standard was applied to all alleged perpetrators in the database, as long as there was no bias in the kind of molestations (e.g., same-sex, opposite-sex) that made the press, the legal outcome is irrelevant. If a plea agreement removed a child’s molestation from the conviction, that child’s molestation was not counted in the victim totals. Molested children who were fostered or adopted were counted as victims. Instances where foster-children sexually interacted with each other or the natural children in the home were not included. Molestations in group settings (e.g., shelters, orphanages) were recorded separately. When it was unclear whether the facility was a group home (some homes foster a large number of children and reporting was often unclear), it was counted as a group home.

Results

Private homes: Of the 175 perpetrators, 154 (88%) were men (the victims’ sex for 5 men and 1 woman could not be determined) (see Table 1). Of the 149 men whose sex of victim could be determined, 76 (51%) were homosexual, and 72 (48%) were unmarried. Of the 20 women whose sex of victim(s) could be determined, 14 (70%) were homosexual. Of the 14 female homosexuals, 7 molested children along with 4 husbands (3 of these husbands scored homosexual, 1 heterosexual) and 3 cohabiting boyfriends (2 of whom scored heterosexual, 1 homosexual); no female heterosexuals molested with a male partner. Of the 76 homosexual men, 3 molested children along with wives, 1 with a girlfriend, and 1 with a homosexual partner; 1 heterosexual man molested the same girl(s) as his wife, 2 heterosexual men molested the same girl(s) as their cohabiting girlfriends.

Male homosexuals molested 198 (62%) of the 319 children victimized by men, and female homosexuals 24 (70%) of the 32 children victimized by women (i.e., 2.6/male homosexual and 1.7/female homosexual perpetrator). The 73 heterosexual males molested 121 girls and the 6 heterosexual females molested 8 boys (i.e., 1.7/heterosexual male and 1.3/heterosexual female perpetrator). Of the 351 victims whose sex could be determined, men assaulted 319 (91%), homosexuals 222 (63%), and the unmarried 164 (47%).

News stories about foster parent molestation increased over time. Numbers of classifiable perpetrators increased from 13 for 1980-84, to 69 in the 2000s (Table 1). This increase was particularly evident among unmarried homosexuals — which rose from 4 (31%) perpetrators in 1980-84 to 26 (38%) in the 2000s; unmarried homosexuals accounted for 5 (20%) of 25 victims in 1980 to 1984 and 62 (44%) of 142 in the 2000s. Homosexuals accounted for 86 (58%) of 139 victims from 1980-1994 and 136 (70%) of 194 thereafter. From 1980 through 1994, for victims whose sex was determinable, 74 (57%) of the 130 were girls; after 1994 most were boys (115 [56%] of 204).

Group homes: The findings are summarized in Table 2. 15 (71%) of the 21 events involved homosexuality, and only 5 of the 31+ male perpetrators had not molested homosexually. All but one of the perpetrators in the 21 group home stories was male (it appears that the Portuguese woman was arrested because she aided the 9 men in their homosexual victimization of the boys, not because she had sex with any of them). While there is ambiguity regarding the “dozens of perpetrators” in Wales, most perpetrators there appear to have been homosexual (at the time, news commentators in both print and on TV in England remarked on this aspect of the scandal frequently). The preponderance of boy victims (334 of 345 whose sex could be determined) is also consistent with a preponderance of homosexual perpetrators. Homosexual molestations in group settings increased over time with 1 event in 1980 to 1984, 1 for 1985 to 1989, then 2 for 1990 to 194, then 3 for 1995 to 1999, and 7 for 2000 through 2003.

Discussion

Attempting to determine the prevalence and characteristics of the sexual interactions that occur in ‘the real world’ is difficult, and no obvious ‘gold standard’ to index ‘the real world’ presents itself. Questioning foster children might prove useful, but such a survey cannot be carried out at this time. A general population sample would be prohibitively expensive. Examining those caught appears more feasible. The convicted are a biased sample, since the sophisticated or affluent are much less apt to be convicted, and their records verge on the unusable.

The numbers of disapproved sexual situations with children that occur undoubtedly exceed by far the few that are ‘caught’ (in my clinical experience, of the 5 teachers or clergy who were caught molesting their charges, their employers did a good job of making sure that the events were not known to the police or the newspapers — some perpetrators even left with glowing recommendations), and may even exceed the number reported by anonymous respondents.²² Newspaper stories are only a tiny sample of ‘the real world,’ and the information in the stories has limits, but news stories address the kinds of detail necessary and are often the only source of public information about rare sexual events that is readily available.

As noted above, the key question about the use of news stories to index molestation of foster children by homosexuals is whether these stories are systematically biased. Absent a systematic bias against or in favor of reporting that the molestation was homosexual, a sufficient number of such stories over a long enough period would appear to have a good chance of being a reasonable index of the underlying reality.

Stories Involving Homosexuality Seem No Less Likely To ‘Make News’

There is evidence from the news story database suggesting limited bias, and thus the possibility of a decent correlation between the numbers of news stories involving homosexual molestation and the underlying reality. No bias is suggested by the fact that in private homes 88% of the molesters were men who accounted for 91% of the victims. These parameters seem ‘reasonable’ in light of child molestation lore.²³ That the first homosexual to adopt, David Frater, would be charged with molesting a foster son in 1984, may have made his story more newsworthy (Associated Press 9/28/84). On the other hand, the arrest of Ronald Hewitt for molesting a foster son in 2001, mere days after the boy’s placement, would also appear newsworthy. After all, Hewitt had been recruited as part of the Massachusetts Department of Social Service “Safe Homes” project with homosexual mentors, which started in 1999 with considerable fanfare and media attention as the ‘first in the nation’ (Associated Press 8/18/01). Yet the Boston Globe, the major newspaper for New England, did not report the event while the Associated Press did.

Wire services rather than large newspapers may be more apt to report on homosexual molestation. From January through September, 2003 the 50 largest newspapers published 156 stories about child molestations. Of these, 77.5 (50%) concerned heterosexual molestation, 65.5 (42%) homosexual molestation, and 13 (8%) molestations by perpetrators whose sexual preferences could not be determined (if a man and a woman molested a girl, it was counted as 0.5 homosexual and 0.5 heterosexual). During the same period, newswires published 35 stories about child molestations, of which 10.5 (30%) concerned heterosexual molestation, 20.5 (59%) homosexual molestation, and 4 (11%) molestations by perpetrators whose sexual preferences could not be determined. The 50 newspapers did not publish a story about 14 of the homosexual stories and 7 of the heterosexual stories in the wire service accounts. Had the newspapers reported all the news service stories the number of unique heterosexual stories would have increased to 84.5 and unique homosexual stories to 80.5. The only substantial discrepancy involved one newspaper’s labeling of a perpetrator of ‘unknown preference,’ who turned out to be homosexual in the wire services account.

Some of the stories may have made the news because of a combination of ‘interesting incongruities.’ Thus, Mr. Lindsey, though unmarried, was permitted to adopt 11 foster boys starting in 1971. He was not caught abusing the boys until 1988 (Associated Press 12/5/1988). Likewise, in spite of his conviction for child molestation in 1967, starting in 1977, Mr. Schwarz, until he was arrested for possessing child pornography in 1989, was given at least 24 boys to foster parent by the state of Massachusetts (Boston Globe 5/18/1989). Mr. Coleman got out of prison after serving 7 years for sodomy against minors in 1971. Yet he was permitted to be a foster parent for 5 boys between 1974-1979 (United Press International, 1/21/1981).

The proportion of homosexuals involved in ‘newsworthy’ kinds of molestations suggests that incongruities do not account for homosexuals’ disproportionate presence among foster parent molesters. For instance, any molestation of a foster child by a man of the cloth would appear newsworthy. Ten ministers molested their foster-children: 7 engaged in homosexuality, and they raped 12 victims (the locations and dates of these stories are: LA 11/11/83; IL 5/12/89; Canada 4/24/91; England 10/5/98; FL 3/5/99; MI 9/10/02; CO 8/18/02); 3 were heterosexual, and they raped 6 victims (OH 9/1/95; MA 12/29/98; FL 11/13/01). A man who falsely presented himself as a ‘minister’ to gain foster-parent status engaged in homosexuality with a number of foster sons (TN 1/9/97).

Similarly, 7 widely heralded foster fathers — that is, men who won ‘foster parent of the year’ awards or garnered publicity because of their ‘exceptional caring,’ included 4 who engaged in homosexuality (and who raped 7 foster-children: IN 2/27/83; IL 6/19/86; FL 12/5/88; CT 3/22/97) and 3 heterosexuals (who raped 8 foster daughters: MI 5/18/85; TX 1/25/95; VT 7/30/99). Three of the 5 instances where the foster-child was raped and tortured involved men who engaged in homosexuality (England 11/16/88; MN 12/14/92; RI 6/9/93; CA 5/3/99; CA 9/24/00). Likewise, homosexual perpetrators were involved in 2 of the 4 instances where social workers or DPS officers molested foster children (Wales 2/12/95; CA 5/3/99; WA 7/7/99; GA 3/22/02; OR 5/5/04), and in 2 of the 3 stories where the foster child had been prostituted by the foster parent(s) (Taipei 8/7/94; CA 9/24/00; CO 8/18/02). So the prevalence of homosexuality was about the size in these incongruous or horrific incidents as it was in the news story database as a whole.

While examining news stories is different from a controlled comparison study (e.g., with matched pairs of foster children randomly drawn from the total set of foster children, etc.), it has some compensatory advantages. As with the study of hospital charts²⁴ or those incarcerated for child molestation,²⁵ a part of the ‘real world’ — rather than responses to questions — generated the data. With news stories, the problems associated with examining case reports (e.g., incompletion, ambiguity, handwriting) or the sampling and measurement problems inherent in the usual comparison study (e.g., refusals to participate, ambiguous responses) are largely avoided. Further, the database is available for inspection on Lexis-Nexis.

Basis For Considering Homosexuals More Apt to Molest

Court cases and convictions

Common opinion about those who engaged in homosexuality or the undesirability of homosexual parents did not come ‘out of the blue.’ Rather the belief had some basis in what were considered to be ‘facts.’ In the past, the stories people heard and told were among the most influential forces in shaping common opinion on almost any topic — including homosexuality. These stories were a kind of ’empirical reality test.’ Individuals experienced events and told others. Beliefs about the criminal portion of society (homosexual activity was illegal everywhere in the U.S. until 1962) were informed by the experiences of police, jurists, the victimized and the accused. Stories radiated from these individuals to their families, friends and beyond. For the past ~200 years, those who lived in cities were exposed to newspapers. Since newspapers often reported on criminality, their stories also influenced common opinion.

From their contact with the British criminal justice system, jurists Rees & Ushill²⁶ concluded

“the male homosexual naturally seeks the company of the male adolescent, or of the young male adult, in preference to that of the fully-grown man. [In 1947] 986 persons were convicted of homosexual and unnatural offences [in Great Britain]. Of those, 257 were indictable offences involving 402 male victims…. The great majority of [whom]… were under the age of 16. Only 11%… were over 21.”

This disproportionality (~20% of offences in 1947 involved the underage) informed their etiologic theory:

“it is vain to blind oneself to the fact that the problem of male homosexuality is in essence the problem of the corruption of youth by itself and by its elders. It is the problem of the creation by means of such corruption of new addicts ready to corrupt a still further generation of young men and boys in the future” (p. 29).

U.S. sodomy case law provides a similar ‘flavor’ of the stories that influenced common opinion regarding homosexuality. Perusing the legal dataset compiled by George Painter, a gay-rights historian (e.g., “fortunately for Washingtonians, [initially] sodomy was legal in Washington”) enables a sense of the content of sodomy prosecutions he provides. Painter has traced the history of sodomy laws in each U.S. state (sodomylaws.org/sensibilities ). Examining Painter’s accounts for 8 states from across the country (Washington, California, Illinois, Texas, Maine, Rhode Island, Florida, Maryland), and considering only those cases in which the adult or child status of the participants could be determined from Painter’s accounts, further basis for the common opinion about homosexuality and homosexual parenting can be detected.

In Washington, of prosecutions for sodomy in 12 cases, 4 involved man-man sex, 7 man-boy sex (an 11 year old boy was the youngest victim; one case involved a boy seduced by his employer; two stepsons were molested by their stepfather) and in one case a man performed oral sex on a girl. Of 29 cases in Texas: 14 (48%) concerned man-man sex; 12 (41%) concerned man-boy sex (2 cases of fathers having sex with their sons — one of whom was adopted; and a school counselor having sex with 2 boys), and 3 boys having sex with other boys. For Illinois, of 12 cases: 7 (58%) involved man-boy sex (one policeman, one music teacher with students, one man with his employee, one 67 year-old man with a 9 year-old boy [who ratted on him because he was dumped for another boy]), and 5 (42%) involved man-man contact.

For California’s 79 cases: 37 (47%) were man-man, 35 (44%) man-boy (including a public school teacher with 2 boys, a Catholic Priest with 3 boys, a father with his son), 2 boy-boy cases, a woman-woman case, and 4 cases of man-woman sodomy. For Rhode Island, the 4 cases involved men with other men at a YMCA, a man with a 14 year-old boy, a man with a 16 year-old boy, and a man performing oral sex on a woman. For Maine, the 2 cases involved a man with a woman and a grandfather with his grandson. For Maryland, of 31 cases 21 (68%) were man-boy (including a father on his 13 year-old son; the youngest boy assaulted was 4 years old), one was man-woman, and 9 (29%) were man-man. For Florida, of 7 cases, 4 were man-man, one man-boy, and 2 man-girl. Thus, for these 8 states, 74 (42%) of the 176 cases concerned man-man and 86 (49)% man-boy sex — twice the fraction for Great Britain in the 1947 Rees & Ushill compilation.

The tilt toward sexual involvement with the underage by those who enjoy homosexual activity is evident in these records. Since many of these criminal trials undoubtedly made the newspapers and otherwise generated stories that traveled considerable distances, and that 6 (7%) of the 87 man-boy cases involved fathers, stepfathers or grandfathers and another 3 (3%) teachers, they could have contributed to the common opinion that those who enjoy homosexual sex are more apt to molest their charges.

Sex Surveys

A considerable fraction of homosexuals have admitted to sex with the underage in major sex surveys. And almost all of these also report sex with adults. Bell & Weinberg (1978) asked 671 homosexual men and 288 homosexual women about the proportions of their homosexual partners who ìwere 16 or younger when you were 21 or olderî (p. 311). Of the men, 77% said ìnone,î 23% said ìhalf or less,î and none said ìmore than half;î of the women, 94% said ìnone,î 3.8% said ìhalf or less,î and none said ìmore than half.î While, 156 (23%) of the men and 11 (4%) of the women admitted to having had some sex with children, none was a ìpedophileî in the sense of only having had sex with or could only have sex with children. Indeed, every one of these admitted child molesters said that children accounted for no more than half their sexual partners.

Jay and Young (1979) analyzed 4,329 questionnaires from homosexual men and 962 women across the United States, aged 14 to 82. They asked: ìHow often do you have sex with men or boys [for the lesbians ìwomen or girlsî] of the following ages?î [ìalways, very frequently, somewhat frequently, somewhat infrequently, very infrequently, once].î 26 of their male respondents (0.6% of their male respondents) and 10 of the female respondents (1% of their female respondents) were 14-17 years old, so some of the answers might reflect sex between teens and other teens or between teens and children. Jay & Young did not provide raw numbers, only percentages: 4% of gays said they engaged in sex with boys under the age of 9; 7% said they engaged in sex with boys aged 9-12; and 23% said they engaged in sex with boys aged 13-15. Even if we subtract the 0.6% of respondents aged 14-17, we are still left with 22% of gays 18 years or older who said they had sex with boys aged 15 or younger. For lesbians: 1% said they had sex with girls under the age of 9; 2% said they engaged in sex with girls aged 9-12; and 6% said they had engaged in sex with girls aged 13-15. Even if we subtract the 1% of lesbians who were aged 14-17, we are still left with 5% of lesbians 18 years or older who reported having sex with girls aged 15 or younger.

No gays and 0.5% of lesbians reported only having sex with children (only percentages were reported). For gays, 1% said they engaged in sex with boys aged 13-15 ìvery frequently,î but none said ìalways.î None said ìalwaysî to boys aged 9-12 and boys under the age of 9, whereas 2% said they ìalwaysî had sex with those 16-19, 5% said they ìalwaysî had sex with 20-24 year-olds, and 4% said that they ìalwaysî had sex with 25-29 year-olds. For lesbians, none said they ìalwaysî engaged in sex with girls under 9 yr. (although 1% said they did ìsomewhat frequentlyî), none said that they ìalwaysî had sex with girls aged 9-12 (but 1% said ìsomewhat frequentlyî and another 1% said ìonceî). However, 0.5% said they ìalwaysî had sex with girls aged 13-15, 1% ìvery frequently,î 0.5% ìsomewhat frequently,î 2% said ìvery infrequently,î and 2% said ìonce.î Even adjusting for the 1% of lesbian respondents under the age of 17, it is clear that a fraction of adult lesbians report engaging in sex with girls.

Respondents were asked ìWhether or not you have sex with any of the following age groups, indicate how you feel about the idea of having sex with each of themî (p. 206) [ìvery positive, somewhat positive, neutral, somewhat negative, very negative, not sure].î For gays, 3% said they felt ìvery positiveî and 2% said they felt ìsomewhat positive,î 2% ìneutral,î and 7% ìnot sureî about having sex with boys under 9 yr. 4% said they felt ìvery positive, 1% ìsomewhat positive,î ì3% ìneutral,î and 7% ìnot sureî about having sex with boys 9-12 yr. And 11% said they were ìvery positive,î 8% ìsomewhat positive,î ì8% ìneutral,î and 5% ìnot sureî about having sex with boys aged 13 to 15 yr. For lesbians, 3% said they felt ìvery positiveî about having sex with girls under age 9, 0.5% were ìsomewhat positive,î and 2% were ìnot sure.î Regarding girls 9-12: 1% ìvery positive,î 1% ìsomewhat positive,î 0.5% ìneutral,’ and 4% ìunsure.î And regarding girls 13-15: 2% ìvery positive,î 4% ìsomewhat positive,î ì6% ìneutral,î and 4% ìnot sure.î

The Bell & Weinberg and Jay & Young surveys generated similar point estimates of the fraction of homosexuals who reported sexual relations with children: 23% and 22% for gays; 4% and 5% for lesbians. This consistency between the two surveys, one based on a semi-random sample and the other on a volunteer sample, lends credence to the Jay & Young findings regarding 6% of lesbians and 19% of gays reporting positive feelings toward having homosexual sex with children.

Other Caretakers: Teachers

After parents, teachers may be the most influential people in children’s lives. Studies to date report a disproportionate homosexual footprint in pupil molestations. In 1978, Hechinger & Hechinger reported that in a survey of 1,400 principals: 7% reported complaints about homosexual and 13% complaints about heterosexual contact between teachers and pupils (i.e., 35% of complaints were about homosexuals). In a ten state study of teachers who had been formally disciplined for sexual interaction with their pupils (Rubin, 1988), 122 men had abused girls and 59 (33%) men had abused boys; 14 women had abused boys and 4 (29%) women had abused girls — 32% of the molestations for which these teachers were convicted were homosexual. In a random 6-city study of 5,182 adults (Cameron & Cameron, 1996b), of the 57 sexual contacts reported with elementary or secondary teachers 13 (23%) were homosexual. Of those reporting ìserious sexual advancesî by elementary teachers, 27% were homosexual; by secondary teachers, 20% were homosexual. Wishnietsky (1991) contacted each of the 140 school systems in North Carolina and inquired about disciplinary actions against high school teachers or administratos for sexual physical contact with pupils in the ìpast three years.î Of 21 events reported by superintendents, 6 (29%) involved homosexual faculty (4 men with boys, 2 women with girls), 15 heterosexual faculty (13 men with girls, 2 women with boys). A survey of 8 of the nation’s newspaper stories of child molestation (Cameron & Cameron, 1998) found 23 teachers who were reported to have molested their pupils ñ 11 (48%) homosexually; a survey of FirstSearch and Newsbank uncovered 22 teachers who had molested their pupils ñ 10 (45%) homosexually. Whether the database dealt with the disciplined (Rubin, 1988; Wishnietsky, 1991), superintendent reports (Hechinger & Hechinger, 1978), news stories (Cameron & Cameron, 1998), or the presumably uncaught reported by respondents (Cameron & Cameron, 1996b), the fraction of molestation events involving homosexuals was disproportionate ñ depending upon the index, ranging between 20% (respondent-reported) to 48% (newspaper stories).

ëPedophilie’ Not A Useful Category

Some (e.g., Herek, 1991) argue that those who have sex with children are ëpedophiles’ rather than ëreal’ homosexuals. This complex diagnostic distinction is not very useful. The term ëpedophile’ is even more recent and ambiguous than ëhomosexual.’ Newspaper stories often treat ëpedophile’ as synonymous with ëchild molester’ as do some advocates of man-boy sex (e.g., O’Carroll, 1980). But the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV (American Psychiatric Association, 1994) specifies that the ëdisorder’ of desiring/having sex with children must last at least 6 months (p. 528). Very few of the homosexual respondents who reported sex with children in Bell & Weinberg (1978) or Jay & Young (1979) [above] would warrant a diagnosis of ëpedophile.’

Orthodox Jews permit a girl to be married at age 3, but consummation awaits her having two pubic hairs or attaining age 12. Roman and Byzantine law permitted marriage to girls at 12 and boys at 14 (Lascaratos & Poulakou-Rebelakou, 2000), old English law recognized consent to sex with the opposite sex by a girl of 10 or a boy of 13, and the 1900 U.S. Census had a ìmarried and workingî category for girls aged 10-15. Surely, all the men who lived under these laws and had sex with girls that we consider underage, did not have a ëdisorder’ of ëpedophilia.’ Those who violate their society’s age of consent laws are engaging in criminality, but the proportion of these criminals who ëhave’ a ëdisorder’ is questionable.

Linkage between men who enjoy same-sex sex and attempts to include boys in their sexual activity has a long history. The 2 nd century Didache commanded ëthou shalt not corrupt boys,’ and, by the 4 th century Roman, as well as Byzantine and English law harshly condemned homosexual sex with boys. The gay movement’s attempt to eliminate laws against boy/man sex has received attention in both Europe and the U.S. for the past four decades (Rueda, 1982). Thus Tom O’Carroll’s Paedophilia: the radical case (1980) which argues for the legalization of man/boy sex was reviewed favorably in the Advocate [the largest circulation U.S. gay magazine] and published by Alyson [at the time the largest gay themed publishing house]. Those in favor of ëintergenerational sex’ have marched under descriptive banners in many gay rights parades from San Francisco to New York to London to Berlin. The consistency between the history of pederasty, reported sex with children (Bell & Weinberg, 1978), reported positive feelings about sex with children (Jay & Young, 1979), empirical studies of teacher-pupil sexual interaction, and the public face of the gay movement is noteworthy.

There may be a growing willingness to place children with homosexuals

The increases evident in Table l are consistent with a change in the employ of more homosexual foster and adoptive parents and the growing number of unmarried homosexual male foster parents in the private and group care of foster children. Additionally consistent is the fact that girls constituted most victims in the database during 1980-1994, while from 1995-2003, boys did. In many clinical and forensic series, girls outnumber boy victims (Blanchard, et al ., 2000), although in a large non-clinical sample, boys outnumbered girls (Able, et al, 1987).

Homosexuals often account for about a third of the perpetrators in clinical and forensic series of adult child molesters (e.g., the ìbest epidemiological evidence indicates that only 2-4% of men attracted to adults prefer men; in contrast, around 25-40% of men attracted to children prefer boys…. Thus the rate of homosexual attraction is 6-20 times higher among pedophilesî [Blanchard, et al , 2000, p. 464]). Homosexuals constituted 76 (51%) of the 149 male and 14 (70%) of the 20 female foster perpetrators in the private foster home stories in the news story database and almost certainly a substantial majority of perpetrators in the group home stories.

In the Lexis-Nexis database 55% of the 169 perpetrators whose victims’ sex could be determined engaged in homosexuality with their charges, while in Illinois 34% of the 270 perpetrators did. In the population sample (Cameron, et al ., 1986), 3 (50%) of the 6 respondents who reported criminal sexual acts against them by their foster parents said it was homosexual. The agreement between these three findings from quite different sources is noteworthy. Likewise, there is good agreement between the Illinois foster care system and the Lexis-Nexis databases regarding the proportion of homosexual female perpetrators, e.g., 69% and 70% respectively (and all 3 homosexual events in the general population survey concerned female perpetrators). But there is poorer agreement between the 14% of male homosexual perpetrators from Illinois and the 55% of male homosexual perpetrators from Lexis-Nexis (and there were no gay molesters in the general population sample).

Addendum: After the above had been accepted for publication, 2004 was examined. In 2004 there were 29 molestation stories about foster parents: 19 were homosexual (18 men, 1 woman) and these foster parents abused 28 boys and 1 girl; in 10 heterosexual events, 10 foster fathers molested 16 girls. Thus 66% of foster parent perpetrators in 2004 were homosexual and they accounted for 64% of the victims. In addition, a DPS officer charged with having sex with at least one boy conspired with an openly homosexual male foster parent to have access to boys (OR 5/5/04), and 2 boys were molested in a group home, but sex of perpetrators was not provided (TX 8/16/04).

How Disproportionate Is The Homosexual Footprint?

Those who engage in homosexuality are less apt to have children, to be married or have been married (Black, et al ., 2000). They are also less apt to say they want to have children and have fewer children if they do (Cameron & Cameron, 1996; Black, et al ., 2000). So while the fraction of homosexual foster-parents is unknown, it seems unlikely that it is as large as the proportion of homosexuals in the adult population. While the precise proportion of those who are engaging in homosexuality in the adult population is unknown, it seems unlikely that it exceeds 3% (Black, et al , 2000), indeed, the June 2004 Canadian Census survey of 121,300 adults aged 18+ put it at 1.4%. The little that is known about the proportion of homosexuals in the population of foster parents suggests that it is less than 3%. Ottawa was among the first jurisdictions to actively recruit homosexual foster parents. As of October 24, 2002, homosexuals were present in 9 of 278 Ottawa’s approved foster, and two had not yet been given a foster-child ( Ottawa Citizen 10/24/2002), thus less than 3% of Ottawa’s placements were with homosexuals.

Married homosexuals might not be known as ëhomosexuals’ to agencies (or their spouses). In the 1996 National Household Survey of Drug Abuse, a well-done representative sample of noninstitutionalized adults in the US, about 0.1% of currently married men and 0.7% of currently married women reported a same-sex sexual partner in the past 12 months. This suggests that 320,000 of the approximately 84 million currently married 18-59 year-olds are homosexuals [www.icpsr.umich.edu/samhda]). After passage of its 1987 law against homosexuals adopting or foster parenting, New Hampshire polled foster and adoptive parents asking whether they engaged in homosexuality. Ninety percent of respondents said that they did not, and 10% declined to answer on the grounds that the question was an ìinvasion of privacyî ( New York Times 3/27/88). It is unknown if any who refused to answer were homosexual. Since the Ottawa survey was conducted in an environment highly accepting of homosexuals, and for most of the 24 years covered by our survey of foster parent molestations homosexuals were barred from fostering, even if married homosexuals are counted-in, the Ottawa report that 3% of approved foster placements are homosexual may be toward the high side for the proportion of the Western world’s foster parents. If the 3% expectation were applied to the 169 perpetrators uncovered in the Lexis-Nexis database, 5 homosexual perpetrators rather than the 82 actually counted would have been involved in molestation ( X 2 > 100; P < .0001), indicating a greater risk of sexual molestation if a child is placed with a homosexual.

Screening, Training, And Home Visits Have Significant Failure Rates

Agencies pursuing the new philosophy of placements with homosexuals often do the same background checks and make prospective foster parents attend the same training. These procedures, they contend, will ëweed out’ those likely to offend. The Lexis-Nexis database provides evidence that these techniques frequently fail. Screening prospective foster-parents, even for previous convictions for sexual child abuse, was inefficient. A number of cases besides those of Schwarz and Coleman detailed above involved fostering by those previously convicted of child molestation (e.g., NJ 1/21/81; WA 8/31/90; IL 8/31/90; MO 9/1/90; Scotland 7/11/94; England 5/23/97; NM 3/3/00; Fl, 2/5/03). A foster parent known to have molested was given children anyway (GA 10/27/93). Home visits of social workers have frequently failed to uncover substantial sexual abuse (e.g., CA 5/3/99; CA 2/24/03; MA 2/21/03; MD 7/8/03), and reports by foster-children of sexual abuse have been ëlost’ in the shuffle (e.g., Canada 5/14/93; England 5/19/94; NY 3/16/94; WI 12/23/98; CO 2/18/03; WA 2/21/03). The most glaring example of the inefficiency of background checks may be the fact that it took years and many molestations before a male couple in which the one who pretended to be a woman was discovered to be a man (PA 2/12/02) — how could a good ëbackground check’ miss the sex of the applicant?

In addition, in numerous situations the molested children were intimidated and silenced for years. For instance, in their adulthood two foster-sons went public about one of the four homosexual placements in Minneapolis. Even though early in the placement one of the boys was ìtied up and burned with matches, …foster-care workers violated state law by failing to report the abuse.î ì'[The gay couple] fooled everybody who came to our door,’ said one of the foster-sons. On the staircase wall was a family photograph that is ingrained in [my] memory as the symbol of hypocrisy. ëYou’d look at that picture and swear nothing was wrong with this family,’ he said. ëThe typical all-American family with everyone smiling.’î But the boys had been continuously sexually molested and tortured — one beginning at age 4 yr. Further, although the statute of limitations had not expired when all of this came to light, the perpetrators were never prosecuted. These facts led reporter Paul McEnroe to question the motivations of the protective service bureaucracy in this case ( Minneapolis Star Tribune , 12/24/92).

Conclusion

Including the addendum, an oversized homosexual footprint in the molestation of foster children has appeared in 4 different empirical databases. An Illinois bureaucracy put it at 34%, a general population survey at 50%, the news story 1980-2003 database at 63%, and the news story 2004 database at 66%. No one of these studies is definitive, indeed, just what would constitute a definitive study is obscure. But one of the studies is probably from the universe of ëthe uncaught’ and the other three from the universe of ëthe caught.’ Compared to the kinds of empirical evidence usually cited by those in social service or the social sciences as evidence for or against a policy, this finding appears pretty solid. Which one of the four studies generated a parameter closest to ëthe truth’ is uncertain, but even the lowest estimate should cause pause about changing social policy regarding homosexual adoption and foster parenting.

This disproportionate homosexual footprint is consistent with what one might expect given the history of sodomy in general, the history of sodomy in the legal systems of Great Britain and the U.S., and what we know about teacher-pupil molestation. It is also consistent with the responses of homosexuals to studies that inquired about their involvement with and desires toward children — carried out and reported by pro-gay investigators (e.g., Bell & Weinberg, 1978; Jay & Young, 1979).

The APA and the NASW have put their considerable social standing behind removing the traditional discrimination against homosexual foster or adoptive parents (e.g., the 1987 NASW resolution decrying ìresistance to using single parents, …including lesbian and gay parents, as potential foster care and adoption resourcesî and the 2004 APA resolution against ìdiscrimination against lesbian or gay parents adoption, child custody and visitation, foster care and reproductive health servicesî). Yet the evidence published to date indicates that at least a third of foster parent molestations of charges is homosexual. These associations claim to adhere to empiricism ñ to test their beliefs and recommendations against empirical findings, and a willingness to change their stances if the empirical evidence is otherwise. The results from the newspaper story surveys, in concert with the previously published evidence, makes it likely that homosexuals account for at least a third of foster-parent molestations. Yet these associations have not only ignored the empirical evidence that has been published but have cited no empirical evidence to the contrary. Taking novel positions at variance with both custom and what appears to be the ëempirical truth’ without empirical evidence that supports these novel positions are not the actions of objective, empirically-driven associations.

Cameron P, Cameron K. Homosexual parents. (1996) Adolescence 31:757-776.

Cameron, P. & Cameron, K. (1996) Do homosexual teachers pose a risk to pupils? Journal of Psychology 130, 603-613. (b)

Cameron, P. & Cameron, K. (1998) What proportion of newspaper stories about child molestation involves homosexuality? Psychological Reports 82, 863-871.

Hechinger, G., & Hechinger, F. M. (1978) Should homosexuals be allowed to teach? McCall’s , 105(6), pp. 100f.

Lascaratos, J. & Poulakou-Rebelakou, E. (2000) Child sexual abuse: historical cases in the Byzantine Empire (324-1453 A. D.) Child Abuse & Neglect 24, 1085-1090.

O’Carroll, T. (1980) Paedophilia: the radical case. Boston: Alyson.

Rubin, S. (1988) Sex education: teachers who sexually abuse students. Paper presented at 24 th International Congress of Psychology, Sydney, Australia.

Rueda, E. T. (1982) The homosexual network: private lives & public policy. Old Greenwich, CT: Devin Adair.

Wishnietsky, D. H. (1991) Reported and unreported teacher-student sexual harassment. Journal of Education Research 84, 164-169.

Abstract

Do those who engage in homosexuality disproportionately sexually abuse foster or adoptive children as reported by child protective services? Illinois child services reported sexual abuse for 1997 through 2002. 270 parents committed “substantiated” sexual offenses against foster or subsidized adoptive children: 67 (69%) of 97 mother and 148 (86%) of 173 father perpetrators sexually abused girls; 30 (31%) mother and 25 (14%) of father perpetrators sexually abused boys (i.e., 92 [34%] of the perpetrators homosexually abused their charges). 15 of these parents both physically and sexually abused charges: daughters by 8 mothers and 4 fathers, sons by 3 mothers (i.e., same-sex perpetrators were involved in 53%). Thus, homosexual practitioners were proportionately more apt to sexually abuse foster or adoptive children.

In a general population random sample of 3,714 adults from five metropolitan areas, Cameron, Proctor, Coburn, Larson, Forde, & Cameron (1986) listed 6 (0.2%) reported “serious sexual advances” (p., 329) against them by a foster parent [3 homosexual against girls; 3 heterosexual: 1 against a boy, 2 against girls] – that is, 6 (0.59%) of 1,021 “serious sexual advances” reported by various caretakers. One woman also reported that his advance led to “sexual contact” with a male foster parent – that is, 0.27% of 369 “sexual contacts” reported with various caretakers/relatives. Of these 6 sexual interactions, all of which would presumably have been actionable, 3 were homosexual. On their face, t hese results seem to validate traditional concerns about sexual recruitment of children by homosexuals (Levitt & Klassen, 1974). In 1987, the National Association of Social Workers [NASW] ignored this finding and without proffering any evidence to the contrary, passed a resolution decrying “resistance to using single parents, …including lesbian and gay parents, as potential foster care and adoption resources.”

In what appears to be the second empirical study bearing on the issue, 14 years of news stories about foster parent molestation of charges in the 50 largest circulation newspapers in the English-speaking world was reviewed (Cameron, 2003). 12 (57%) of the 21 male and 3 of the 4 female perpetrators (e.g., 15 [60%] of the 25 perpetrators) in these stories homosexually molested their charges.

Two studies – one from a sample of victims, the other from a sample of stories about victims and perpetrators — indicated that perhaps half of foster parent molestations were upon members of the same sex. Would about the same fraction of homosexual molestations obtain if the data was collected and reported by child protective services?

Method

Responding to a Freedom of Information Act Request, the Illinois Department of Children & Family Services provided a complete list of “substantiated physical or sexual abuse” by perpetrator’s sex as well as the sex of victim(s) for 1997 through 2002. Marital status of parent perpetrators is not recorded in Illinois and number of children abused per perpetrator or whether multiple perpetrators violated the same child was not available. Behavior is potentially observable, thus ‘objective’ unlike an individual’s feelings or subject to dispute as a psychiatrist’s diagnosis. As Ross, Essien, Williams, & Fenandez-Esquer (2003) noted “sexual behavior is not always adequately represented by self-labeling of sexual identity” (p. 113), and because of this most recent population surveys have indexed behavior rather than reported ‘identity’ (e.g., Spira, Bajos & the ACSF group, 1994; Wellings, Field, Johnson, Wadsworth, 1994; Anderson, Wilson, Barker, Doll, Jones, & Holtgrave, 1999). Since the meaning of a homosexual is “sexual relations between persons of the same sex” (1992 New Illustrated Webster’s Dictionary ), and in the 1996 Centers for Disease Control [CDC] national sexuality survey ‘homosexual’ was defined as someone who had sex with their sex irrespective of age of partner (Anderson, et al., 1999), it seemed sensible to use “ homosexual” behaviorally and descriptively – referring to those who have sex with their sex — irrespective of age of partner.

Considering those who sexually interact with the underage as ‘pedophiles’ is not particularly useful. Bell & Weinberg (1978) asked 671 homosexual men and 288 homosexual women from a quasi-random sample in San Francisco about the proportions of their homosexual partners who “were 16 or younger when you were 21 or older” (p. 311). Of the men, 77% said “none,” 23% said “half or less,” and none said “more than half;” of the women, 94% said “none,” 3.8% said “half or less,” and none said “more than half.” While, 156 (23%) of the men and 11 (4%) of the women admitted to having had some sex with children, none was a “pedophile” in the sense of only having had sex with or could only have sex with children.

Results

There were 963 offenders whose kind of abuse and sex of victim(s) were known (2 mothers physically abused children of unspecified sex, an offender of unknown sex abused child[ren] of unknown sex in an unspecified way). Substantiated sexual abuse was reported for 270 parents: 67 (69%) of 97 mothers and 148 (86%) of 173 fathers sexually abused girls; 30 mothers and 25 fathers sexually abused boys (i.e., 92 [34%] homosexually abused their charges). Substantiated physical abuse was found for 708 parents: 268 (49%) of 544 mothers and 68 (41%) of 164 fathers physically abused daughters; 276 mothers and 96 fathers physically abused sons (i.e., 52%of perpetrators abused boys). 15 parents both physically and sexually abused charges: daughters by 8 mothers and 4 fathers, and sons by 3 mothers (i.e., when both forms of abuse were substantiated, same-sex perpetrators were involved in 53%).

On average, yearly there were 60,093 children in 4,300 foster- or adoption-subsidized homes in Illinois. For the 6-year period, 966 parents engaged in “substantiated” abuse after an investigation was conducted. Assuming one perpetrator per home, per year, children were sexually abused in about 1% (45/4,300) and physically abused in about 3% (118/4,300). Physical abuse occurred in 6% of the homes where sexual abuse occurred, sexual abuse occurred in 2% of homes where physical abuse occurred.

Discussion

Illinois is the sixth largest state with about 12 million inhabitants and is slightly more urban than the U.S. as a whole. The Illinois rates, which do not include neglect, appear similar to the national average of 6.1% for “child abuse and neglect” reported by the U.S. Health and Human Services (Branigin, 2003).

Estimates of the proportion of adults who have engaged in homosexual sex in the past 12 months vary. The 1996 National Household Survey of Drug Abuse/CDC study (www.icpsr.umich.edu/samhda) estimated that 1.2% of those aged 18 to 59 reported sex with a member of their sex [no age specified] in the past 12 months, other estimates put the number at around 2-3% (Laumann, Gagnon, Michael, & Michaels, 1994).

Ottawa, Canada was among the first jurisdictions to aggressively recruit homosexual foster parents. As of October 24, 2002, 9 of 278 Ottawa’s approved foster homes included known homosexuals, and two of these homes had not yet been given a foster-child (Brooks, 2002), i.e., less than 3% of Ottawa’s placements were homosexual. Thus, those who engage in sex with their own sex appear to be employed as foster- and adoptive-parents in proportions at or below their presence in the general population.

The proportion of molestations of foster children that were homosexual in the general population survey by Cameron, et al . (1986) was 50%, while the proportion of molestations of foster children that were homosexual in 14 years of newspaper stories about foster parent molestations was 60% (Cameron, 2003). The Illinois material collected and reported by that state’s child protective services — 34% homosexual — was lower than either of the two published estimates. The prior 2 estimates were based upon small numbers of data points – 6 in Cameron, et al ., 1986 and 25 in Cameron, 2003. It is therefore tempting to believe that the 270 data points reported from Illinois results in an estimate closer to the ‘real, underlying proportion’ – but further studies will be required to be more certain as to which estimate is closest. Nonetheless, the disproportionality of the homosexual footprint was evident in each dataset. These three methods, though differing in their estimates of homosexual molestation, tend to cross-validate each other. As such, support for abandoning the tradition of excluding homosexuals as foster parents as recommended by the NASW was not found.

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Laumann, E. O., Gagnon, J. H., Michael, R. T., Michaels, S. (1994) The social organization of sexuality: sexual practices in the United States . Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press.

Levitt, E.E., & Klassen, A.D., Jr. (1974). Public Attitudes toward homosexuality: part of the 1970 national survey by the Institute for Sex Research. Journal of Homosexuality , 1, 29-43.

Ross, M. W., Essien, E. J., Williams, M. L., & Fernandez-Esquer, M. E. (2003) Concordance between sexual behavior and sexual identity in street outreach samples of four racial/ethnic groups. Sexually Transmitted Disease 30,110-113.

Spira, A., Bajos, N. & the ACSF group. (1994) Sexual behaviour and AIDS . Aldershot: Avebury.

Wellings, K., Field, .J, Johnson, A. M., Wadsworth, J. (1994) Sexual behaviour in Britain: the national survey of sexual attitudes and lifestyles. London: Penguin.

Note: IllinoisLeader.com filed the freedom of information act (FOIA) request.

A rebuttal to the accusation that Dr. Cameron was dropped from the American Psychological Association (APA)

-A reprint of an article in the Family Research Report, Nov-Dec, 1994.A number of attacks against Dr. Paul Cameron and Family Research Institute have appeared lately. While such attacks are not new, their volume and intensity is increasing even as the reach and importance of FRI grows.

The New Republic, a left-wing magazine with a circulation of 100,000 and a newly installed homosexual editor, Andrew Sullivan, attacked Dr. Paul Cameron with a two page article October 3,1994 (click here to view this article and resulting correspondence…). His reply and facsimiles of the key documents that were sent to The New Republic are included in this online rebuttal.

* Dr. Cameron was not “dropped” from the APA. The first document, dated November 7, 1982 is a copy of the letter sent by Dr. Cameron announcing his resignation from the APA. By this point, all previous disputes between him and the APA had been settled, and there were no other charges or inquiries into possible ethical violations pending against him. The last previous correspondence from the APA was dated October 18, 1982, reminding Cameron that it had closed his dispute with 6 U. Nebraska psychologists.

November 29, 1982 marked the APA President’s acceptance of Cameron’s resignation. In March 1983, the APA Monitor (the official internal organ of the APA) published Cameron’s letter detailing his reasons for resigning. As per the APA President’s request, this letter had been sent January 12, 1983.

A commentary on the March letter was published in June 1983 (click here…). Although Pietrzyk asserts that one cannot resign from the APA while under an ethics probe, this rings hollow considering that the APA President and APA Monitor did nothing to challenge Cameron’s decision to resign. Only after the accepted resignation did the ethics committee “drop” Cameron for non-cooperation (see December 2, 1983 letter). Most of this and considerably more was covered in exchanges between Dr. Cameron and various adversaries from the U. Nebraska between October 1985 and March 1986 in the Nebraska Medical Journal.

* On October 12, letters editor Amy Sheffer said that editor Sullivan had just told her to delete Cameron’s observation that “Scientists besides myself have noted the addiction to falsehood and deception that is characteristic of homosexuals. Why didn’t The New Republic reveal that your author is a member of a gay rights group?”

She said that since they had noted that Pietrzyk wrote for the Log Cabin Republicans, such a designation was unnecessary. FRI replied that this was deceptive since few knew that the Log Cabin Republicans was a gay rights group. The sentence was retained.

There are a number of criticisms raised in The New Republic article. Some appear plausible, and some have been picked up and repeated as gospel truth by nonhomosexual newspapers.

Addressing some of these:

* “he is the architect of unreliable ‘surveys’ that purport to show strains of violence and depravity in gay life.”

Response: Gays create myths for their political and psychological comfort. They want to be seen as “shocked by any claim that we are other than kind, gentle people.” One homosexual contends that “gays are an experiment by nature in an attempt to create a human nature more compatible with the requirements of civil society.”1

But the gay life is a life of violence and depravity:

– FRI has published2 estimates from its national sex survey that suggest that 80% of gays have engaged in oral-anal contact at least once in their life. Such unhealthy and unsanitary practice is commonplace among homosexuals.

– 40% of 4,808 Canadian gays in 1991-1992 admitted to oral-anal sex in the last 3 months, according to a governmentfunded study run by gays representing the largest survey of homosexuals in Canada.3

– In the largest-ever study of homosexuals, completed just this year by The Advocate, the national weekly gay magazine, 13,000 readers responded to the questionnaire. The Advocate said that 45% of respondents “loved” anal/oral sex. Additionally, 20% said that they had engaged in bondage and discipline and 10% in sadomasochism in the past 5 years. And, most tellingly, among those who knew that they had the AIDS virus, “11% have said or implied that they were HIV-negative in order to have sex.” (8/23, p. 23)

FRI 2 found that about 13% of gays said that they had been raped, and a third had participated in sadomasochism.5

A study of 930 English gays asked whether they had ever been “sexually molested or raped?” 28% answered “yes.” In half (47%) of these cases the victim was either forcibly anally penetrated or an attempt to do so was made. Of men over 21 years of age, 52 cases (66% of the total reported) “were assaulted by regular or casual sexual partners.”

The authors of the English study (who appear to be homosexuals themselves) note that “Fantasies of the sexually forceful man, the pleasure of ‘being taken;’ and the excitement of power-driven sex are very common in gay culture and pornography. All these collective sexual fantasies normalize sexual abuse and rape of gay men by gay men, providing motivation, justification, and normalization for the assault. It is difficult to see how a climate of intolerance towards sexual aggression can be achieved when sexual aggression is one of the mainstays of collective sexual fantasies.” (p. 293)

* “Although thousands of heterosexuals allegedly responded to his survey, Cameron could get only 41 gay men and 24 lesbians to respond. The extremely small sample size should have invalidated any conclusions about the sexual behavior of the gay population.”

Response: There are two problems with this criticism: 1) Pietrzyk didn’t accurately report how many gays and lesbians were in our sample; 2) he fails to understand modern statistical sampling theory.2

We reported all our comparisons between those who were exclusively heterosexual v the combined group of bisexuals and homosexuals. We had approximately 85 gays and 70 lesbians for each comparison though, as in all such studies, not every respondent answered each question. Combining bisexuals and homosexuals has become rather typical because their distinguishing characteristic is having same-sex relations. The new U. Chicago sex survey also combined bisexuals and homosexuals. It captured only 43 bi/homosexual men and 27 bi/homosexual women in its sample.6

The reason for these seemingly low numbers is that FRI, unlike Kinsey and the bulk of studies in the sexological literature, utilized random area cluster sampling techniques. Because homosexuals make up only a tiny fraction of the population, they show up in small numbers in any survey that randomly draws from the places people live. However, it is possible to have a fair degree of confidence in the generalizability of our results to “urban homosexuals-in-general,” at least for the time we did the survey.

Kinsey had 2,000 volunteer homosexuals. But our findings, based on a random sample a twelfth the size of his, are far more apt to be representative of homosexuals-in-general. With more money and time, we would have drawn a larger sample and our results would be more certain still. Having said that, however, as the studies about gays accumulate, the parameters we published look “solid.”

For instance, we reported that 4% of men and 16% of women claimed that they had been “raped.” The U. Chicago survey did not ask about rape, per se. Instead it reported that 22% of women and 2% of men were “forced to do something sexually at some time.” (p. 223)4
9 In his counter reply, Pietrzyk says he’d “sure like to know the source for Cameron’s claim that ‘one third of American men have served in the Armed Forces.”‘

Response: On p. 343 of the Statistical Abstract of the United States 1990, we find that over 27,000,000 men have served. Since there were under 79,000,000 men over the age of 18 in 1990, the math is straightforward.

We can only report what our respondents tell us. It is noteworthy that Pietrzyk considers “preposterous” that ” 13 percent have served time in prison.” Since FRI actually asked “Have you ever been jailed or imprisoned for a crime?” Pietrzyk demonstrates his inability to get the facts straight. By comparison, the U. Chicago sex survey6 reports that “about 13%” of its respondents (both men and women) had “ever spent the night in jail.” (p. 219) It actually asked if respondents had ever “spent one night or more” “in (a military jail), jail, prison, reform school or detention center.” (p. 612)

*Pietrzyk rails about our utilizing obituaries from gay journals and calls it “a methodology that would not pass an undergraduate statistics course.”

Response: Our methodology was good enough for the Eastern Psychological Assn convention in 1993. Dr. Charles Smith of SUNY at Buffalo, chair of the session, publicly commended our novel approach and said he was going to warn the gays at his institution about the hazards of their ways. Further, it was good enough for the refereed scientific journal Omega in 1994, a journal specifically devoted to studies of death and dying.

The U. Chicago study provides grist for FRI’s mill as well. Note p. 305:

age	% men gay	% women lesbian
18-29	2.9	1.6
30-39	4.2	1.8
40-49	2.2	1.3
50-59	0.5	0.4

These results should have given the authors a clear warning that homosexuals were much less apt to be old, yet they chose not to comment. Our lifespan study offers a plausible reason for the paucity of older homosexuals in the U. Chicago study: they die young. Other explanations for these findings require much more convoluted logic. For example, note that the proportions of homosexuals do not top out in the youngest age group. Therefore, it would be difficult to attribute the distribution of findings solely to the growth of the gay movement. Another plausible explanation would be that older homosexuals simply drop out of the lifestyle (if they don’t die first). However, if proved true, this would simultaneously argue that gays can and do change, as well as suggest that the gay lifestyle offers scant long-term satisfaction.

*Pietrzyk repeatedly questions Dr. Cameron’s scholarly credentials and “conveniently” avoids using his professional title of “Dr.”

Response: Pietrzyk is a political science graduate student at George Washington University. He has failed numerous times to get his facts straight in this brief article in the New Republic. Dr. Cameron has published over 60 articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals and has written several books. How does being a member of a gay club qualify Pietrzyk to engage in scholarly critique?

*Pietrzyk complains that we have analyzed only “sexual mass murder” and found homosexuals responsible for about half of these sprees.

Response: He doesn’t deny the facts about sexually- motivated murders, he merely tries to divert attention toward serial and other non-sexual mass murders.

*Pietrzyk claims that we have “distorted” the evidence for disproportionate child molestation by gays.

Response: He cites our 1987 pamphlet on child molestation. It was updated in 1993. With new information our estimate of the proportion of homosexuals has dropped from 4% to between “1% to 3%” and our estimate of the proportion of homosexual molestations to “between a fifth and a third.” Thus the relative proportion of homosexual molestation has remained about the same (“the risk of a homosexual molesting a child is 10 to 20 times greater than that of a heterosexual”).

*Pietrzyk claims that Cameron advocated the “extermination of male homosexuals.”

Response: The Forum interviewer remarked that many societies have considered homosexuality a capital crime. Noting that it would be cheaper to kill homosexuals in primitive societies than jail or quarantine them is hardly an endorsement. In fact, Cameron is quoted in the same article as saying that such an idea is “not politically, ethically or socially acceptable” today. Where former Surgeon General Koop got his information is mystifying. He never asked Dr. Cameron whether he advocated such a policy.

*Pietrzyk calls “extreme” and “absurdly high” FRI’s estimate that lesbians are “nineteen times more apt to have syphilis than straight women and four times more apt to have had scabies.”

Response: Pietrzyk finally has it right. That’s just what we reported in the Nebraska Medical Journal in 1985.7 We also p. 6 reported that lesbians were three times as apt to have had a genital discharge, and twice as apt to have sores on their genitals.

The new U. Chicago6 survey does not report its sexually transmitted disease findings for lesbians. However, it reports that lesbians had about 4 times as many sexual partners as heterosexual women, were considerably more apt to engage in 11 unusual sexual practices,” and that a larger number of partners was associated with higher STD rates. It is probable that it found essentially what we found but was reluctant to publish the findings. [see ‘New Sex Survey: Dishonest Science’ in this issue of Family Research Report]

*Pietrzyk calls our 1983 national sex survey “discredited.”

Response: Since results from the FRI survey have been published in a number of scientific journals (e.g., Nebraska Medical Journal, Psychological Reports, Lancet, and Science), and have formed the basis for a number of scientific papers presented to the Eastern Psychological Assn, it would appear that it is “discredited” by gay activists, not by scientists.

FRI’s sex survey was one of the first national sex surveys to be drawn on a random sample. Random samples are supposed to give representative samples. Theory aside, however, proof is always in whether the technique “works;” that is, whether FRI’s results stack-up against other well-done surveys. For instance, how do FRI’s results compare to the recent U. Chicago effort?

FRI, in attempting to interview people from age 18 through the end of adulthood, ran into a buzzsaw of high rejection rates in people aged 50 or above. Overall, almost half of our potential respondents refused to fill out our questionnaire. But the median age of those who rejected was 55, meaning we got high rates of compliance for those in their 20s and 30s and miserable rates of compliance for those in their 60s, 70s, and 80s.

The lore that has developed from doing Gallup polls and similar surveys is “those who don’t respond are generally much like those who do.” So FRI reported its rejection-rate and then ignored the nonresponders when reporting results – just as the U. Chicago study did. We assumed that a person who initially rejected the survey would not be worth the effort and cost of a follow-up appeal. So we put our limited resources (about $100,000) toward fattening the size of the sample rather than re-visiting rejecters. All told, we got usable responses from almost 5,200 adults.

U. Chicago paid its respondents $25 to $35 apiece and apparently repeatedly called-back its rejecters, offering them more money to get them to cooperate. It got almost 3,200 adults for $2,400,000. Still, 20% of their respondents refused to take the survey though offered considerable sums of money. So their findings, like ours, could be way off if those who rejected were quite different from those who cooperated. No one will ever know. But since they found “no relation between respondent fee [up to $100] and quality of the information provided” (p. 56), it fits the model that such pursuit is probably unwarranted.

Beside detail about sampling theories, what proof emerges from the empirical pudding? How do the results of these two surveys, one greased with high levels of effort on the part of a few highly-trained and closely supervised interviewers while essentially ignoring refusals, the other with over 200 interviewers and the willingness to expend significant time and money to reduce the rejection rate, compare? They were very close. 6,7

Where both surveys asked similar questions, similar point estimates were generated. Comparing the two samples:

– ever syphilis in life?
FRI men – 2.4%, women – 0.9%
U C men – 0.9%, women – 0.7%.

– ever gonorrhea in life?
FRI men – 11.2%, women – 3.7%
U C men – 9%, women – 4.7%

– ever genital warts in life?
FRI men 5.0%, women – 4.3%
U C men 3.3%, women – 5.9%

– ever hepatitis in life?
FRI men – 3.6%, women – 2.4%
U C men – 1.3%, women – 0.9%

The lower figures on hepatitis for the U. Chicago study may be related to their claim that “hepatitis A is not sexually transmitted but hepatitis B is.” Subsequently they “eliminated the cases that were evidently type A from the counts.” (p. 380) More generally, the FRI study was only done in urban areas compared to the broader geographic coverage of the U. Chicago study. Still, examination of the unweighted comparisons above suggests that all the differences were within one or two percentage points.

Furthermore, about 21% of FRI females reported having “obtained an abortion” while 19% of the U. Chicago women said that they had ever “had an abortion.” (p. 457)

9% of gays and 5% of lesbians in the U. Chicago effort reported that they were heterosexual virgins. (p. 311) 8% of FRI’s gays and 5% of our lesbians reported that they were heterosexual virgins. Since few homosexuals in either survey were over age 50, where rejecters became a significant problem, we could expect high levels of agreement between both methodologies.

*Associated Press: The AP article (click here to view…) was carried by the Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph on 9/16/94. FRI called AP on 10/12 about the falsehoods that Cameron: 1), “is barred from practicing psychology in Nebraska” and 2) had falsified data about homosexuals. AP was faxed a copy of Cameron’s license and a copy of the Bangor Daily News correction (see above). The Gazette Telegraph published the AP correction on 10/26/94 after FRI informed it of its existence.

* The Advocate wrote on 11/1/94 that “Cameron, who contends that gays and lesbians are sexual deviants, was expelled from the American Psychological Association in 1983 for falsifying research data about gays. He was also barred from practicing in Nebraska, the only state in which he had been licensed.” (p. 16)

* The Bangor Daily News, 10/10/90, had the following as part of its story of a Cameron visit to Maine: “The APA, however, said that Cameron was dropped from the membership because of a violation of the APA’s code of ethics involving the misuse of colleagues’ research.” It published the correction. Maine has a constitution which permits suits for libel irrespective of their proven economic impact. Newspapers in Maine publish corrections with dispatch.

References: 1. Harry J. (1982) Gay children grown up. NY: Praeger, p. 168. 2. Cameron P, Cameron K., & Proctor, K. (1989) Effect of homosexuality upon public health and social order. Psychological Reports, 64, 1167-1179. 3. Doing it in the 90s. Canadian AIDS Society, May 1993.4. Michael, RT, Gagnon, JH, Laumann, EO, & Kolata G. (1994) NY:Little, Brown. 5. Hickson, F.C.I., et al. (1994) Gay men as victims of nonconsensual sex. Archives Sexual Behavior, 23, 281-294. 6. Laurnarm, EO, Gagnon JH, Michael, RT, Michaels, S. (1994) The social organization of sexuality: sexual practices in the United States. Chicago: U. Chicago Press. 7. Cameron, P, et al. (1985) Sexual orientation and sexually transmitted disease. Nebraska Medical Journal, 70, 292-299.