Homosexualities

Homosexualities: A Study of Diversity Among Men and Women (1978) is a book by the psychologist Alan P. Bell and the sociologist Martin S. Weinberg in which the authors argue that homosexuality is not necessarily related to pathology and divide homosexuals into five types. Together with Homosexuality: An Annotated Bibliography (1972), it is part of a series of books that culminated in the publication of Sexual Preference in 1981. The work was a publication of the Institute for Sex Research.

The book received much attention and mixed reviews. It received praise for its authors' attempts to discredit stereotypes about homosexuals, became influential, and has been seen as a classic work. However, it was criticized for its authors' sampling methods and their typology of homosexuals, which has been seen as arbitrary and misleading. Commentators also questioned Bell and Weinberg's presentation of the work as a definitive study of homosexuality. Some commentators suggested that some of Bell and Weinberg's findings were obvious and that their study was not needed to establish them, and critics charged that they drew conclusions not justified by their data. Some of Bell and Weinberg's findings, such as those about gay men's sexual behavior, have become dated due to social changes since the 1970s, such as those brought about by the AIDS epidemic and the progress of the gay rights movement.

Discussing the background to Homosexualities, Bell and Weinberg write that the sex researcher Alfred Kinsey had intended to publish a study of homosexuality to complement the two volumes of the Kinsey Reports, but died before being able to produce such a volume. Following Kinsey's death, the Institute for Sex Research became involved in other projects and did not focus its attention on homosexuality again until the late 1960s. Stanley Yolles of the National Institute of Mental Health established the National Institute of Mental Health Task Force on Homosexuality, which held its first meeting in 1967, and decided that further research into homosexuality was needed. The NIMH Task Force invited the Institute for Sex Research to submit a proposal for a comprehensive study of the development of homosexuality. The institute's proposal, based upon many of the NIMH Task Force's recommendations, was modified after consultation with NIMH officials. The book's direct predecessor was Patterns of Adjustment in Deviant Populations, a 1967 survey of white gay men in Chicago designed by Bell and Gebhard and funded by NIMH. This pilot study contained many questions identical to those used in Homosexualities.

Bell and Weinberg, during the initial stages of their work, consulted with numerous experts on homosexuality who often held views quite different from theirs. Those listed as contributors to the study include the ethologist Frank A. Beach, the psychoanalyst Irving Bieber, Wainwright Churchill, the psychologist Albert Ellis, the anthropologist Paul Gebhard, the psychologist Evelyn Hooker, the sociologist Laud Humphreys, the psychiatrist Judd Marmor, the sexologist Wardell Pomeroy, the sociologist Edward Sagarin, the psychiatrist Robert Stoller, the psychologist Clarence Arthur Tripp, and the sociologist Colin J. Williams. Bell and Weinberg comment that, "Our correspondence and personal meetings with these individuals were of great help to us in constructing a viable interview schedule. While the final instrument, devised over many meetings of various Institute personnel, did not entirely please or represent the views of any one person associated with it, the interview schedule in its final form was the result of endless discussions and sometimes painful compromise on the part of many highly committed people."

Bell and Weinberg write that their study has several purposes, including describing homosexual sexual behavior, examining stereotypes about homosexuals, and exploring "the relationship between homosexuals' sexual life-styles and their social and psychological adjustment". They note that their work is based on a nonrepresentative sample, and argue that a representative sample is unnecessary for their purposes. They also argue that several different types of homosexual should be distinguished. They write that Homosexualities is part of a series of books that resulted from what Bell and Weinberg called the San Francisco Study.

Homosexualities was first published by Simon & Schuster in 1978. The book was also published by the Macmillan Company of Australia Pty Ltd in 1978.A new edition was published in paperback by Touchstone on September 19, 1979.

Homosexualities was influential and has been praised as an important study. The philosopher Lee C. Rice credited its authors with discrediting "myths about the gay personality". The psychologist William Paul and the sex researcher James D. Weinrich maintained that Homosexualities documented social diversity well and was the largest study conducted specifically on homosexuality, but that it was limited by the problems of trying to obtain a representative sample. The philosopher Timothy F. Murphy considered it useful despite its limitations, provided that it, like other studies, is regarded as part of a scientific process of "measuring the adequacy of hypotheses and evidence". Some of Bell and Weinberg's findings have been described as outdated. Paul and Weinrich suggested that because their data was collected in 1969, they may have missed "growing cultural developments in the gay younger generation of the late 1960s and early 1970s." The philosopher Michael Ruse suggested that the AIDS epidemic has probably made their findings about gay sexual behavior obsolete. Murphy observed that Bell and Weinberg studied people who came of age before gay liberation, and that probably a much smaller proportion of gays would now be dissatisfied with their sexual orientation or interested in attempting to change it through therapy. The philosopher John Corvino wrote that Homosexualities is the study most commonly cited to prove that gay men are sexually promiscuous, but that it was not based on a broad sample and that a more extensive 1994 study by the sociologist Edward Laumann produced different results. Laumann et al. argued that while Bell and Weinberg covered a wide range of sexual behaviors, their failure to use probability samples meant that their study "could not be used to estimate population rates." They nevertheless found Homosexualities valuable in planning their own study.

The historian Martin Duberman observed that in 1976 he heard a rumor that the study "would give renewed respectability to the long dominant but recently challenged psychoanalytic view (associated primarily with the work of Charles Socarides and Irving Bieber), that the parental configuration of absent/hostile/remote father and binding/suffocating/domineering mother was what produced gay sons." He related that when he met Bell that year and asked him whether this was true, Bell "squirmed uncomfortably" and gave "a long-winded, evasive reply." According to Duberman, "I finally got him [Bell] to say that he had tentatively concluded that "estrangement from the father (irrespective of the mother's "binding" love or lack of it) was likely to produce a homosexual son; and that estrangement from the mother could be directly correlated with a heterosexual outcome for the son." He wrote that Bell was "not amused" by his criticism of this conclusion. He added that Homosexualities surprised him because it "avoided the question of etiology" and "was a work of considerable substance." In 2002, Duberman was quoted as saying that the work resulted from "the most ambitious study of male homosexuality ever attempted", and that together with Sexual Preference (1981), it "refuted a large number of previous studies that gay men were social misfits". Bell and Weinberg, writing with the sociologist Sue Kiefer Hammersmith, described Sexual Preference as the culmination of a series of books that began with Homosexuality: An Annotated Bibliography in 1972 and included Homosexualities.