307 - Homosexualities: A Study of Diversity Among Men and Women

Homosexualities: A Study of Diversity Among Men and Women
By Alan P. Bell and Martin S. Weinberg
New York, Simon and Schuster, 1978.505 pp. $12.95.

This report from the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University is in the tradition of the famous early reports by Alfred C. Kinsey, especially because its data come from direct anonymous interviews. Detailed information was supplied by nearly a thousand homosexual persons in conversations lasting as long as five hours. A control group of heterosexual persons was given the same questions when those were relevant. Great care was taken in compiling and analyzing the data, using many devices that were not available to Kinsey. The reporting is admirable and thorough, although the heterosexual data are used only for comparative purposes and not in their own right. Most of the interviewing was done by graduate students in the San Francisco Bay area, the study locus, but further testing showed high reliability.

The authors had two basic purposes first, to discover the relationship between "sexual life-styles" and "social and psychological adjustment", second, as demonstrated in the plural title, to expose the "stereotyped thinking" about persons of homosexual orientation. Their contribution in illuminating the first is outstanding. In relation to the second, their success depends on what content is taken to be stereotype.

The job histories of the men, who were very seldom hair-dressers and the like, turned out generally to be "fully as stable" as those of the heterosexual controls, even though a minority believed work opportunities had been limited by their homosexuality. For the women, the work situation was less clear. They had made more job changes than their counterparts.

Both men and women were found to have more close friends than their heterosexual counterparts, and most of those friends (but by no means all) were homosexual. Against this finding we must note that most of the controls were married and thus often operating from a different basis so far as friendships are concerned.

Twenty percent of the men and 25 percent of the women had been married. The marriages of more than half the men who had married had lasted at least three years.

308 - Homosexualities: A Study of Diversity Among Men and Women

During the year preceding the interview, the "majority" of the men had engaged in "cruising" several times a month, an activity that was markedly less among the women. Half the white men, and a third of the black men, had had at least 500 sexual partners. In contrast, most of the women had had less than ten partners.

Very few of the homosexual persons, especially men, were natives of the Bay area. Many must have been drawn there because of the relatively greater social acceptance. Even so, the majority of the persons were "relatively covert" about their homosexual orientation. The persons with less education or social status tended to be more open about their condition.

On the Kinsey seven-point scale of heterosexuality/homosexuality all but a small proportion rated themselves behaviorally as completely or almost completely homosexual. In terms of their feelings, however, the percentage dropped. For the women, it was down to almost 60 percent. More women than men, proportionately, had tried to arrest their homosexual activity.

An important contribution of the report is a typology of five categories attempting to get at the basic way in which persons deal with their orientation. The "close-coupled" are self-explanatory. They constituted only 14 percent of the men in the study, but 38 percent of the women. At the time of the interview , it may be noted that about half the men were having an "affair" with some one. Unless this lasted a while, however, it was not enough to put them in the "close-coupled" category The "open-coupled" (men and women both 25 percent) generally live with some one but have other sexual contacts as well. The "functional" (more men, 21 percent, than women) are close to the notion of "swinging singles." The last two categories are surprising the "dysfunctional" nearly 20 percent of the men and 7 percent of the women, and the "asexual" 23 percent of the men and 16 percent of the women. The "dysfunctional" in practice often means trouble in finding or pleasing partners. The "asexual" simply do not do much about sex. There is some suggestion that aging tends to make things especially difficult for homosexuals.

On a large number of the topics examined, no significant differences were found between whites and blacks. Some of the differences actually found were partly due to the whites, as a group, being a bit lower on the educational and class ladder than the blacks. But a bit more dissatisfaction with their condition among blacks may indeed be due to social attitudes toward blacks.

To what extent do the findings of the study, refute "stereotyped thinking" about homosexual people? Clearly, the crude stereotypes are exposed not only by this study but also by many previous ones, less thorough though they may have been. But on many more subtle matters, many impressions of generally well-informed people appear to be supported rather than negated.

The differences between men and women are an illustration. Males

309 - Homosexualities: A Study of Diversity Among Men and Women

(half the group) with 500 sexual partners, and women with less than ten, confirm an impression that most (certainly not all) homosexual men take sex segmentally and promiscuously, whereas the women tend not to do so. A majority of the men cruise often, most women do not. Far more women are "close-coupled" than men.

Another point concerns the relatively instability or laxness of homosexual alliances or couplings. While clearly greater among men than women, nearly all the figures question the ability of most homosexual persons to enter stable and long-term alliances. Without adducing evidence, the authors try to counteract this point by saying, "The fact that homosexual liaisons... are not encouraged or legally sanctioned by society probably accounts for their relative instability." Unlike most of the excellent reporting and interpreting in the book, this seems an instance of ideological special pleading.

It was not a part of this study to explore anything about the causes of homosexual orientations, but the view of the authors about this matter is revealed at one point (p. 196). The Kinsey researchers, they write, concluded that homosexuality is "simply a natural variation of sexual expression." To understand that even the most normal human sexual development includes some periods of homosexual feeling and even behavior is one thing. To believe that one has found sufficient cause for fixed adult homosexual orientation through a general taxonomy of behavior appears to be something quite different. What could be most deadly about the latter could be giving up the scientific search for the factors that produce a fixed homosexual orientation. Fortunately, this philosophic view of the authors does not mar the reporting and interpreting of their findings for this study.

Seward Hiltner
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, New Jersey