Sexual Preference (book)

Sexual Preference: Its Development in Men and Women

File:Sexual Preference.jpg Cover of the first edition
Authors	Alan P. Bell, Martin S. Weinberg, Sue Kiefer Hammersmith
Country	United States
Language	English
Subject	Sexual orientation
Published	1981 (Indiana University Press)
Media type	Print (hardcover)
Pages	242
ISBN	978-0253166739

Sexual Preference: Statistical Appendix

File:Sexual Preference, Statistical Appendix.jpg Cover of the first edition
Authors	Alan P. Bell, Martin S. Weinberg, Sue Kiefer Hammersmith
Country	United States
Language	English
Subject	Sexual orientation
Published	1981 (Mitchell Beazley International Limited)
Media type	Print (hardcover)
Pages	321
ISBN	0-253-16674-8

Sexual Preference: Its Development in Men and Women is a 1981 book about the development of sexual orientation by psychologist Alan P. Bell and sociologists Martin S. Weinberg and Sue Kiefer Hammersmith. It was a publication of the Institute for Sex Research, and, together with its separately published Statistical Appendix, the culmination of a series of books including Homosexuality: An Annotated Bibliography (1972) and Homosexualities: A Study of Diversity Among Men and Women (1978), both authored jointly by Bell and Weinberg. Based on interviews with subjects in the San Francisco Bay Area, Bell et al. found almost no correlation between early family experience and adult sexual orientation and therefore concluded that heterosexuality and homosexuality have a biological basis. Though Sexual Preference is one of the most frequently cited retrospective studies relating to sexual orientation and considered a classic work, its authors′ conclusions and methodology have been criticized on numerous grounds. Critics questioned Bell et al.′s reliance upon path analysis, and pointed out the difficulty and potential unreliability of adult recall of childhood feeling, as well as the vague and general nature of the questions Bell et al. asked their research subjects.

Background

Together with its separately published Statistical Appendix, Sexual Preference was the culmination of a series of books including Homosexuality: An Annotated Bibliography (1972) and Homosexualities: A Study of Diversity Among Men and Women (1978), both authored jointly by Bell and Weinberg. The study was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health, Indiana University, and the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. Its data were based upon interviews conducted in 1969 and 1970 with "979 homosexual and 477 heterosexual men and women living in the San Francisco Bay Area." Homosexual respondents were recruited from locations such as gay bars, gay bathhouses, "certain street locations", public parks, beaches, and toilets. Heterosexual respondents were obtained through "random sampling among the Bay Area population". The interviewers used a schedule that included approximately 200 questions and took three to five hours to complete. Most questions were "closed-ended", meaning that respondents had to choose from a limited number of possible answers, while a smaller number were "open-ended", allowing respondents to answer as they wished. The following criteria for homosexuality and heterosexuality were used: "Respondents were asked to rate their sexual feelings and behaviors on the seven-point Kinsey Scale, which ranges from 'exclusively heterosexual' (a score of 0) to 'exclusively homosexual' (a score of 6). Respondents' sexual feelings scores were then averaged with their sexual behaviors scores. Those with a combined score of 2 or more were classified as homosexual; those with a combined score of less than 2, heterosexual." Bell et al. argued that this represented "a natural division" between respondents.

Summary

Overview of the study

Bell et al.′s objective was to test the many proposed explanations of how people become heterosexual or homosexual, to provide a firm scientific basis to thinking about sexual development and definitively refute mistaken theories. According to them, the most notable proposed explanations of homosexuality were psychoanalytic theories attributing it to an unresolved Oedipal conflict. In their view, psychoanalytic explanations had usually not been rigorously tested prior to their study for several reasons, including the fact that there are inherent difficulties in testing psychoanalytic concepts. The authors anticipated that psychologists and psychoanalysts might object to their work on methodological grounds, such as that no attempt was made to access unconscious material, or that the interviews, which lasted only a few hours and were much shorter than an analysis, could never reveal what truly occurred in someone′s childhood. Bell et al. argued, however, that the fact that their data were not obtained from clinical sources was a strength, that attempting to access unconscious material risks selective interpretation of the data, and that "if the differences between homosexual and heterosexual patterns of development are really as great as psychoanalytic theory claims" then such differences would be reflected to at least some extent "in what respondents report about their own and others′ behaviors, attitudes, and feelings during the course of their development."

Aware that some scholars might reject any view of the development of homosexuality resembling psychoanalytic theory and object to studies that appear to take it seriously, Bell et al. noted that while they gave psychoanalytic theory considerable attention, many of the variables used in their statistical analyses pertained to "developmental experiences occurring outside our respondents′ original households", such as relationships with peers, labeling by others, dating experiences, and sexual experiences. They added that it was not easy to answer objections to the use of retrospective data, given the unresolved issue of how accurate their respondents′ recollections of childhood were, and that even a longitudinal study would have been open to question. Bell et al. observed that some gay activists might "object to any study of the origins of sexual preference", and suspect them of wanting to find a way to prevent homosexuality and reduce its incidence, while other critics might regret their involvement in a tradition of inquiry that has so far supported the majority view that homosexuality is a perversion or deviation, and be concerned that their study would be used to reinforce social prejudice. In response to these potential criticisms, Bell et al. argued that ideas about the development of homosexuality contribute to "antihomosexual prejudices", and that so long as "the heterosexual majority" accepted "virtually untested" theories that see homosexuality as the result of a bad upbringing, then their negative attitudes toward homosexuals would never change.

Bell et al. considered their sample of homosexual adults more representative than those used in previous studies, and argued that the fact that they examined blacks separately from whites and men separately from women helped them to determine the extent to which patterns of homosexual and heterosexual development depend on race and sex. They wrote that Bell, a psychologist and therapist, was "relatively supportive of psychodynamic theory", while Weinberg and Hammersmith were sociologists with a "different theoretical perspective." They argued that this counteracted any bias due to their respective backgrounds. Bell et al. did not believe that completing their study earlier would have altered their findings. They used path analysis to try to establish which factors were most important: this required dividing "the independent variables into sequential stages, according to the time when their influences are most likely to occur." The dependent variable the authors wanted to explain, adult sexual preference, went at the final stage.

Findings on men

Bell et al. found that homosexual men were more likely than heterosexual men to have felt especially close to their mothers. Respondents who were unusually close to their mothers were more likely to describe themselves as having been "feminine" children, but while some boys with this kind of background became homosexual, most did not. Bell et al. concluded that male homosexuality is not the "result of an unusually strong maternal identification", and that mothers have only a small influence on their sons′ psychosexual development. They cautioned that this does not mean that "no male ever becomes homosexual as a result of something about his mother or his relationship with her". Homosexual men were less likely to give positive descriptions of their fathers. They identified less with their fathers; they were more likely to feel "very little" or "not at all" like their fathers, and less likely to want to grow up to be like their fathers, or to have their mothers want them to grow up to be like their fathers. Homosexual men were more likely to have negative feelings toward their fathers, to dislike, hate, or fail to feel close to them, to consider them hostile or detached, to see them as "relatively submissive persons" or to describe them using a negative word. They were also more likely to feel more similar to their mothers than to their fathers, or to prefer to be like their mothers. Bell et al. concluded that, "Unfavorable relationships with fathers" are "connected with gender nonconformity and early homosexual experiences", although not strongly.

Few male respondents had engaged in childhood sex play, and it did not seem to be important in the development of homosexuality. Homosexual men were less likely to report having "very much" enjoyed boys' activities such as baseball or football, but more likely to enjoy stereotypical girls' activities. Three variables (dislike of typical boys' activities, enjoying typical girls' activities, and feelings of masculinity or femininity) were combined into a composite measure called "Childhood Gender Nonconformity", which proved to be a very strong predictor of adult sexual preference. It was the most important developmental variable and appeared to influence several "explicitly sexual variables", making male respondents less likely to feel attraction to the opposite sex during childhood, more likely to feel sexually different from other boys and experience homosexual arousal and activities, and more likely to become homosexual as adults. Bell et al. found that homosexual men were less likely to see themselves as having been very masculine: a majority of the heterosexuals reported this, but only a minority of the homosexuals. Respondents' feelings about how masculine they were proved important: the variable "Childhood Masculinity" was part of the "Childhood Gender Nonconformity" measure, which was more strongly correlated to adult homosexuality than any other variable.

Homosexual men were more likely to recall having felt "very much or somewhat different" from other boys their age, or to say that they felt different because they did not like sport, or because they were not interested in girls or were sexually interested in other boys. They were also more likely to report feeling different because they had stereotypical feminine traits or interests. Respondents feeling different during childhood appeared to be irrelevant, but their feeling different for gender reasons during adolescence had modest effects. Boys who felt sexually different were more likely to become homosexual as adults, whether they began to feel that way during childhood or adolescence. While homosexual men were more likely to have been labelled sexually different or homosexual before the age of 19, Bell et al. concluded that such labeling played no significant role in the development of sexual orientation. Homosexual men were more likely to rate their sexual feelings as having been predominantly homosexual during childhood and adolescence, though not all of them did so; they were also more likely to have been sexually aroused by another male before turning 19, to have enjoyed whatever homosexual encounters they had before that age, to have been mainly homosexual in their pre-adult sexual behavior, to have had at least one encounter with another male that they considered sexual, and to be more experienced with homosexual sexual acts. They were less likely to have a first pre-adult homosexual encounter without physical contact.

Homosexual men tended to have had their first homosexual encounter at a younger age, and were more likely to have their first encounters with friends or acquaintances rather than strangers. The data did not support the idea that homosexual males are likely to have been seduced by older men. Homosexual activity involving genital contact in childhood was connected to adult homosexuality, though only weakly; homosexual arousal during childhood or adolescence was a stronger predictor of adult homosexuality. Heterosexual arousal during childhood was a moderate predictor of adult heterosexuality. Phenomena associated with sexual maturation, for example the age of first ejaculation, did not seem to be important in the development of homosexuality or heterosexuality, and neither did parental attitudes toward sex. Overall, Bell et al. concluded that their data supported the conclusion that sexual preference is likely to be established early in life, and that childhood and adolescent sexual expressions by and large reflect rather than determine a person′s underlying sexual preference." Respondents' opportunities to engage in sex with persons of the opposite or the same sex "did not seem to be important with respect to their adult sexual preference", and sexual experiences with persons of both the same and the opposite sex were common among both homosexuals and heterosexuals. Bell et al. wrote that, "what appears to be more important in signaling eventual sexual preference is the way respondents felt sexually, not what they did sexually."

Findings on women

Bell et al. found that homosexual women were more likely than heterosexual women to describe their relationships with their mothers as negative, and to describe their mothers as having been hostile or rejecting, but less likely to report that they could talk more easily with their mothers than their fathers. Inability to communicate easily with the mother proved insignificant in the development of sexual preference. The measures concerning negative relationships with and hostility of mothers were combined into a single measure, "Hostile-Rejecting Mother", which did appear in the final path model, but appeared to have only minimal influence on the development of sexual preference. Homosexual women were more likely to describe their mothers using a negative word, and less likely to describe their mothers as having been warm and pleasant, or as having been very happy about being women. They also recalled less desire to be like their mothers, and were more likely not to have felt at all similar to their mothers during childhood and adolescence. Fewer homosexual women reported that their fathers wanted them to be like their mothers in most ways. Bell et al. concluded that while the homosexual women in their study "tended to report relatively negative relationships with their mothers, to describe their mothers more unfavorably, and to have identified with them less than did the heterosexual women", these variables did not appear to have had much effect on the development of their female respondents′ sexual orientation. While homosexual women reported somewhat less favorable views of their fathers and their relationships with them, this also did not have much connection with the development of sexual preference.

Conclusions

Bell et al. wrote that their findings led them to question "whether psychoanalytic theory can be considered very useful in understanding male homosexuality even among men in clinical samples." They cited several studies suggesting that homosexuality may have a biological basis, and evidence suggesting that homosexuality is linked to "the levels of male and female hormones in a person's system." Bell et al. argued that demonstrating that homosexuality is biologically innate would force people who regard it as unnatural to reconsider their views since "something that is biologically innate must certainly be natural for a particular person, regardless of how unusual it may be", help to relieve parents of gay people of guilt, as well as making "the moral condemnation of homosexuality even more indefensible" and greater social tolerance of homosexuality desirable. They granted that showing that homosexuality has a biological basis might also lead to new attempts to eradicate it.

Reception

1981

In August 1981, prior to the publication of Sexual Preference, Jane E. Brody wrote in The New York Times that the study was "likely to arouse controversy not only because of its findings, which the authors expect to anger both the psychoanalytic and the homosexual communities, but also because it relies on the memories of those interviewed and on a statistical technique called path analysis that is subject to misuse and can only explore existing notions, not create new ones." According to Brody, Bell said that he expected the study "to be condemned from both sides - by the radical gays for even looking into the subject and by the analysts who may say we're trying to paint a glowing picture of homosexuality." Brody quoted psychologist John DeCecco as calling Sexual Preference "very dubious on a theoretical basis and on the basis of how reliable and valid is asking people about their childhood", and psychoanalyst Irving Bieber as saying that Bell et al.′s findings were "totally disparate" with his experience from psychiatric consultation.

In December 1981, historian Paul Robinson wrote in Psychology Today that Sexual Preference was a "superb" work that answer the question of how people become heterosexual or homosexual better than any previous, disqualified "most of the answers that have been offered in the past", exhibited "all the empirical conscientiousness of Kinsey at his best", and had a "massive empirical foundation and fine-tuned statistical procedure" that gives its findings "unprecedented trustworthiness". Robinson credited Bell et al. with documenting the "intellectual poverty" of psychoanalytic hypotheses about homosexuality. He lamented that unlike the Kinsey Reports, which gained popular attention, Sexual Preference "seems destined for academic oblivion." He granted that a study of homosexuals requires a representative sample and that Bell et al.′s conclusions were open to criticism on the grounds that their study was located in San Francisco, but in his view they convincingly argued that the city offered the best available "cross-section of American homosexuals". However, he suggested that they may have misidentified gender nonconformity as a cause of homosexuality, rather than as one of its expressions.

In December 1981, sociologist John Gagnon wrote in The New York Times that Sexual Preference was a politically motivated study and would inevitably be received as a political and moral statement. He noted that Bell et al.′s conclusion that there is "almost no correlation between sexual preference and early family experience" and that adult sexual preference must therefore be biologically innate was controversial. He argued that while the number of respondents in Bell et al.′s study was greater than in previous studies their sample was not representative, that Bell et al. operated with "the unsupported notion that the respondents' observations relating to certain behaviors and attitudes should be grouped together", that their exclusive use of path analysis emphasized differences rather than similarities between heterosexual and homosexual patterns of development, and their reliance upon adult recall of early childhood feelings was inconsistent with all recent research on memory. He noted that the answers respondents gave to Bell et al.′s very general questions might reflect a subsequent reconstruction of events rather than an accurate recall of what occurred in childhood, that Bell et al. relied upon disconfirmed biological data, and that their conclusion that sexual preference has a biological basis is inconsistent with the idea that homosexuality and heterosexuality are "preferences".

1982

In the March 1982 issue of the London Review of Books, author Michael Ignatieff accused Bell et al. of writing in "the jargon of pseudo-biology." He suggested that Bell et al.′s conclusion that family upbringing and other factors such as labeling have little measurable effect on adult sexual orientation may only prove that questionnaires cannot uncover the roots of sexual orientation, adding that even if their conclusion was correct it would not justify their additional claim that homosexuality is biologically innate. He noted that Bell et al. provided no new biological evidence. Ignatieff criticized them for assuming "that a theory of the biological determination of sexuality simply does away with the question of the limit of our responsibility as agents for our sexual orientation", writing that their "biological theories of conduct" were "too primitive" to be able to usefully address this issue.

In the March 1982 issue of Science, sociologist John DeLamater wrote that Sexual Preference attracted considerable media attention in the last half of 1981. In his view the work benefited from Bell et al.′s "eclectic theoretical basis", which drew from the psychodynamic model, social learning theory, "sociological models that emphasize the importance of peer relationships", and labeling theory. However, he observed that respondents had been asked questions about "events that occurred 20 to 30 years earlier", that evidence shows that "underreporting of behavior" will occur under such circumstances, that Bell et al. did not discuss the possible effects of forgetting on their data, and that the representativeness of their sample was unknown. He accepted Bell et al.′s contention that their work was methodologically superior to prior work on homosexuals, but hesitated to endorse their conclusions because of problems such as "the arbitrary classification and sequencing of variables in the path analyses." He saw their reliance on path analysis as problematic. He noted that Bell et al.′s conclusion that homosexuality is biologically innate is controversial, and that they had conducted no biological research of their own.

In the May 1982 issue of The Journal of Sex Research, psychologist Clarence Arthur Tripp wrote that Sexual Preference would likely be seen as "a shock and a disappointment", since its authors abandoned many of Alfred Kinsey's methods and conclusions and in some cases even misrepresented them. Tripp criticized Bell et al. for ignoring Kinsey's "warning to avoid theory and to try to make careful first-hand observations" and for attempting to test the validity of psychoanalytic theories, observing that the ideas they sought to test had already "long since lost credibility among professionals". While Tripp nevertheless believed that Bell et al. had rendered a valuable service by showing that such theories are unsupported, he rejected their argument that since psychoanalytic ideas are incorrect the origins of sexual orientation must be genetic and hormonal, noting that in order to reason that way they had to ignore the work of sex researchers such as Frank Beach. Tripp also accused them of citing low quality and unreplicated hormone studies, ignoring evidence relating homosexuality to early puberty, and substituting "inductive for deductive methods". In the same issue, Bell et al. replied to Tripp′s review, accusing him of "factual errors and misrepresentations", including "totally false statements about our data analysis, misrepresentations of our conclusions, and ridiculous criticisms of the scientific method itself." Tripp responded in the November 1982 issue, accusing Bell et al. of making personal attacks, and attempting to refute them on specific points.

In the July 1982 issue of Contemporary Sociology, sociologist Ira Reiss noted the flaws of Bell et al.′s study, which included the sample, which was broader than many samples used in similar studies but still not representative of any larger population, the use of "vague open-ended questions", the reliance on adult recall of early childhood feeling, and the limits of path analysis. Reiss concluded that their study "has value for suggesting directions and the likely worth of ideas", but that given its shortcomings there was no way in which its authors could definitively resolve the issues they explored, despite their claim to "once and for all" discredit some theoretical ideas about homosexuality. Reiss wrote that Bell et al. had an "arbitrary and rigid conception" of what could be done with their data, lacked "theoretical development" in its handling, and deliberately minimized the importance of the predictor variables they used to test psychoanalytic and other theories. He described their conclusion that sexual orientation has a biological basis as unpersuasive.

In the August 1982 issue of The Journal of Sex Research, psychologist DeCecco dismissed both Sexual Preference and Bell and Weinberg's previous study Homosexualities, writing that while their authors presented them as "definitive studies of homosexuality", they were hurried retreats "behind computer statistics" and suffered from the "theoretical blindness" that has dominated research on homosexuality in the United States since the early 1970s. He contrasted Sexual Preference and Homosexualities unfavorably with the work of European thinkers such as philosopher Michel Foucault and historian and sociologist Jeffrey Weeks, whom he credited with "provocative theoretical speculations".

In the November 1982 issue of Siecus Report, published by the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States, Bell wrote that his finding that "parent-child relationships" are less influential in the development of sexual orientation than "many people have supposed" left him astonished. Bell added that while in Sexual Preference he and his co-authors decided to present their data in "a straightforward manner bereft of speculation, venturing hardly at all beyond whatever statistical 'truths' emerged", he now felt free to engage in "theoretical supposition." Bell argued that in order to understand adult sexual behavior it is necessary to "first understand the emergence of homosexual or heterosexual feelings during childhood and adolescence", but that in Sexual Preference he and his colleagues failed to explore what their respondents "meant by the feelings they reported." In his view, they involve phenomena such as "romantic attachments", and men who do not see themselves as "typically masculine" are more likely to experience them toward other men. Bell wrote that falling in love is a more important criterion of sexual orientation than sexual behavior, and that it can be understood as "the anticipation of self-completion through merger with the love object" and a "quest for androgyny" through the "integration of the masculine and feminine components of ourselves through the psychological incorporation of the greater preponderance of masculine or feminine characteristics one supposes are possessed by the object of our romantic feelings." Bell suggested that "persons perceived as essentially different from ourselves become the chief candidates" for our early romantic and subsequent erotic attachments.

Gay activist Dennis Altman wrote that Bell et al.′s conclusion that there is a powerful link between gender nonconformity and the development of homosexuality depended on the memories of their respondents, who were likely to have been influenced by social expectations about how homosexuals should conform to gender roles. Altman observed that et al.′s data was collected in 1969 and 1970, prior to the "growth of the modern gay movement and the development of the macho style among gay men". Altman criticized Bell et al. for confusing "social roles with what is inborn", thereby underestimating the extent to which masculinity and femininity are social constructs.

Psychologist William Paul and sex researcher James D. Weinrich wrote that Sexual Preference documents social diversity extremely well and is the largest study conducted specifically on homosexuality, but found it to be limited by the problems Bell et al. encountered in trying to obtain a representative sample. Paul and Weinrich suggested that because Bell et al. collected their data in 1969, they may have missed "growing cultural developments in the gay younger generation of the late 1960s and early 1970s."

1983–1987

Sociologist Thomas Ford Hoult wrote that Bell et al.′s conclusion that childhood gender nonconformity and adult sexual orientation have a biological basis is a "legitimate hypothetical assertion", but one that it is not confirmed by their failure to find a direct connection between sexual orientation and parent-child interaction.

Psychologists Paul H. Van Wyk and Chrisann S. Geist wrote that Bell et al. question a scientific consensus, established by the work of researchers such as the psychologists Heino Meyer-Bahlburg and John Money, that biological factors "exert at most a predisposing rather than a determining influence" on the development of sexual orientation. Using their subject pool, which was obtained from the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University and consisted of people interviewed between 1938 and 1963, Van Wyk and Geist produced results that they described as generally very similar to those of Bell et al.: "In each case, sexual experience variables accounted for the most variance, followed by gender-related variables and family-related variables, in that order." However, Van Wyk and Geist observed that there were some significant differences, which could have been partly a result of the different methodology employed. In their view, the most important of five methodological differences was that their outcome variable was "based solely on overt behavor" whereas that of Bell et al. "is an average of subjective preference and overt behavior." They noted that Bell et al. "excluded from their model variables that did not apply to everyone in their sample", which made it impossible to judge the effects of "idiosyncratic and unique sexual and nonsexual experiences".

Gynecologist William Masters, sexologist Virginia E. Johnson and author Robert C. Kolodny described Sexual Preference as an important study of homosexuality, "probably the most extensive one done to date." They wrote that it provided no support for psychoanalyst Bieber's theory of homosexuality. Weeks called Sexual Preference "the Kinsey Institute's final publication on homosexuality" and suggested that like sociobiologists and others who have attempted to find a biological explanation for social behavior Bell et al. had an "urge to fill a conceptual gap" that is stronger than their "adherence to theoretical consistency and political judgment". Weeks wrote that Bell et al. "carefully explore the evidence (or lack of it) for the aetiology of homosexuality", but added that unlike Kinsey they failed to consider the possibility "that homosexuality might not be a unitary phenomenon with a single causative explanation". Weeks criticized Bell et al. for concluding that if a social or psychological explanation of homosexuality cannot be found then a biological explanation must exist, describing the argument as "a rhetorical device" that results in "an intellectual closure which obstructs further questioning."

Sociologists Frederick L. Whitam and Robin Mathy wrote in Male Homosexuality in Four Societies (1985) that while Bell et al. did not completely reject the idea that there is no relationship between family dynamics and the development of homosexuality, they nevertheless wrote that "the role of parents in the development of their sons′ homosexuality" had been "grossly exaggerated." Whitam and Mathy found it strange that Bell et al. mostly reported on their white subjects, generally ignoring the blacks.

Sexologist Richard Green wrote that Sexual Preference is one of several studies, including Bieber et al.′s Homosexuality: A Psychoanalytic Study of Male Homosexuals (1962), to have found strained relationships between fathers and homosexual sons. He added that a "gnawing question" in these studies is what percent of heterosexuals give answers more typical of homosexuals and what percent of homosexuals give answers more typical of heterosexuals, and that such "contradictory" outcomes require explanation.

1988–1989

Psychoanalyst Richard C. Friedman wrote that Bell et al. had a "radically different point of view" from that of Bieber and the other authors of Homosexuality: A Psychoanalytic Study of Male Homosexuals (1962), adding that it was thus "especially striking that the findings of both studies were in basic agreement with regard to childhood gender identity / gender role abnormalities in pre-homosexual children." Friedman noted that Bell et al.′s "interpretations of psychohistorical information" have been criticized by Gerard J. M. van den Aardweg. He called their claim that path analysis allowed them to discriminate among influences on homosexuality and to give each a particular weight at a particular time of childhood development "unlikely", since no "approach to data interpretation can convert retrospective methods to prospective methods". Friedman wrote that "the meaning of data depends on the models one uses to interpret them", and the models used by Bell et al. differ from models "accepted by most psychodynamically oriented investigators."

Sociologist Miriam M. Johnson wrote that Bell et al.′s study was the "largest, best-designed, and one of the least heterosexist investigations" of the development of sexual preference. In her view, the study′s "only possible bias" is that because of its nature and San Francisco location "activist" homosexuals were over-represented. Johnson argued that "this bias would probably work against finding support for any hypotheses concerning parental influences, because activist homosexuals have ordinarily been opposed to psychoanalytic speculations about parental involvements." Johnson concluded, however, that the study′s credibility was enhanced by the fact that Bell et al. took into account whether their respondents had been exposed to books or articles about the etiology of homosexuality, and disregarded results when they could be explained by such exposure. Johnson credited Bell et al. with showing that "almost all the alleged causes of adult sexual orientation are either nonexistent or highly exaggerated", and wrote that their finding that their respondents′ relationships with their fathers were more important than their relationships with their mothers supported her own conclusions. Johnson wrote that Bell et al.′s claim that they had refuted psychoanalytic theories that attribute homosexuality to an unresolved Oedipus complex was only "half true", given the father findings.

Philosopher Michael Ruse wrote in Homosexuality: A Philosophical Inquiry (1988) that Bell et al.′s findings about the parental backgrounds of heterosexuals and homosexuals were "slanted in the way a Freudian would expect", adding that many other studies have pointed to very similar conclusions. Ruse argued that there is much to support Bell et al.′s conclusion that Freudian explanations of homosexuality confuse the direction of cause and effect and that the cold and distant relationships gay men report having with their fathers are a result of parental reactions to effeminate or sensitive sons. However, he noted that the accuracy of Bell et al.′s findings is open to doubt for many reasons: their subjects could have been unwittingly giving them the answers they wanted to hear, failed to remember accurately, or suppressed painful childhood memories.

Psychologist Seymour Fisher called Sexual Preference a high quality and large scale study. Fisher writes that despite their "highly skeptical" attitude toward Freudian theory, Bell et al.′s findings match certain of Sigmund Freud′s predictions about how homosexual men view their parents. According to Fisher, Bell et al.′s data clearly indicate that "negative father" had a detectable impact on "gender nonconformity and early homosexual experience" for men, despite their claim that there is no strong connection. In Fisher's view, Bell et al., like other investigators, "do not provide the information to evaluate Freud′s rather vague statements concerning how the homosexual woman would perceive mother." However, he stated that their data does support Freud′s expectation that homosexual women perceive their fathers in "negative, frustrating terms", and that among the studies he evaluated theirs was "one of the most supportive". He viewed Bell et al.′s findings about lesbianism as especially significant since their study was published in 1981 and had one of the "largest diverse samples." He wrote that while Bell et al. deliberately minimized the overall importance of the father factor in the development of female homosexuality, "a clear significant effect does emerge from their data." Fisher noted that Bell et al. found that recalled patterns of relationships with mother and father did not predict the likelihood of being primarily homosexual as an adult, but that they did predict homosexual preferences during adolescence. He argued that this finding can be explained by the fact that only a limited proportion of those willing to engage in "homosexual intimacy" during their earlier years can find satisfactory opportunities to do so as they leave adolescence. He observed that if this explanation is correct it would make it more difficult to find correlations between early parent-child relationships and "later overt homosexuality."

Authors Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen called Sexual Preference a "pathbreaking study" which shows that parents are not "to blame for their 'sexually messed up' children."

1990–1995

Philosopher Edward Stein wrote that Bell et al.′s data refutes at least naïve versions of the "first encounter" hypothesis, according to which a person's sexual orientation is determined by the sex of the first person he or she has sex with. Psychologist John C. Gonsiorek and sex researcher Weinrich wrote that Bell et al., like Richard Green, Money, and most other experts, believe that sexual orientation is set by early childhood. Gonsiorek and Weinrich identified Bell et al. as "essentialists", who maintain that "homosexual desire, identity, and persons exist as real in some form, in different cultures and historical eras"; they contrast essentialism with social constructionism, which denies such claims. Psychologists Gonsiorek and Douglas C. Haldeman both credited Bell et al. with disproving psychoanalytic theories about the development of homosexuality.

Philosopher Frederick Suppe called Sexual Preference a very important study, writing that Bell et al. failed to duplicate the findings of Bieber et al. or the predictions of symbolic interactionism, labeling theory, and societal reaction theory approaches. He wrote that while highly biased, their sample of homosexuals was nevertheless "the most diverse and representative" ever made. He argued that biased samples can be adequate for the purposes of refuting theories propounded in other studies "so long as the types of subjects used in those other studies constitute a subsample of the replicative study′s sample and the latter's population does not go beyond the claimed scope of the replicated studies." He maintained that Bell et al.′s study meets these requirements, that their use of path analysis was "thoroughly appropriate", and that their procedures for developing a composite etiology model, which contained "virtually all paths advanced in the literature", are legitimate. He argued that the only plausible basis for disputing that the study definitively refutes "social learning theories of homosexual etiology" is to challenge the adequacy of Bell et al.′s models and the questions they used. He wrote that while Bell et al. did not use the same specific questions that Bieber et al. employed, they did use "a large number of questions directed at the same concerns." He noted that Bell et al.′s data regarding subjects′ negative feelings toward and relationships with their fathers were based on open-ended interview questions, adding that it would have been preferable had they employed the same "structured-answer questions" used in Bieber et al.′s earlier study. He argued that since Bell et al. were attempting to test not only Bieber et al.′s views but most social learning theories of sexual orientation, including questions from every study would have made their interview schedule too long. He rejected Bell et al.′s claim that their study supports a biological explanation of sexual orientation. He wrote that since Bell et al.′s study, research into the "social causes of homosexuality" has become "moribund."

Psychologist Kenneth Zucker and psychiatrist Susan Bradley called Sexual Preference a "classic study", writing that its data are consistent with those of previous clinical research, including Bieber et al.′s Homosexuality: A Psychoanalytic Study of Male Homosexuals (1962). They maintained that Bell et al.′s finding that "detached-hostile father" is relatively characteristic of 52% of the white homosexual men in their study and 37% of white heterosexual men is quite similar to what was reported by Bieber et al.. Zucker and Bradley wrote that the way in which Bell et al. conducted aspects of their inquiry was heavily influenced by the psychoanalytic perspective that sees homosexuality as a mental disorder and explains it in terms of family dynamics, which was dominant in the late 1960s when Bell et al.′s study was being planned. Zucker and Bradley wrote that the study must be understood in the context of sexual politics. They suggested that because homosexuality had been delisted as a mental disorder for eight years by the time Bell et al.′s study was published, Bell et al. "were in a quandary" if aspects of their data "showed a departure from an ideal of optimal functioning in homosexual men". Zucker and Bradley argued that, because of their concern for homosexuals, and also influenced by political correctness, Bell et al. deliberately minimized the "observed significant effects" shown by their study, though they believe that this was also in part an objective interpretation of weak effects. Zucker and Bradley wrote that prior to Bell et al.′s study, researchers had become aware that phenomena usually interpreted as parents influencing their children could be interpreted instead as children influencing their parents, and that Bell et al. recognized that "the direction of effects" was a "problematic aspect of their research design". In Zucker and Bradley′s view, resolving the "direction-of-effects issue" raised by Bell et al. through retrospective studies comparing homosexual with heterosexual men will be difficult, and that until then the issue will remain "a matter of theoretical taste."

1996–1999

Social psychologist Daryl Bem wrote in Psychological Review that Bell et al. provide the most important data concerning "experience-based theories" of the development of sexual orientation, including "the classical psychoanalytic account", as well as views that attribute the origins of sexual orientation to learning, conditioning, seduction, or labeling. According to Bem, Bell et al.′s findings yield such theories "virtually no support", and their finding that "no family variables" are "strongly implicated in the development of sexual orientation for either men or women" is "consistent with accumulating evidence that family variables account for much less of the environmental variance in personality than previously thought". Bem proposed a hypothesis that he refers to as "Exotic becomes erotic": children feel different from either their same-sex peers or opposite-sex peers and therefore eroticize them, leading to homosexuality and heterosexuality respectively. Bem refers to Bell et al.′s finding that "71% of gay men and 70% of lesbian women recalled having felt different from same-sex children during the grade-school years", and to other studies that drew similar conclusions. Bem maintained that Bell′s view, published in Siecus Report, that people become erotically attracted to those who are different from them out of a "quest for androgyny" does not accurately characterize the data and that "even if it did, it would constitute only a description of them, not an explanation". Bem rejected Bell et al.′s conclusion that sexual orientation is biologically innate.

Philosopher Timothy F. Murphy wrote that Sexual Preference is an important study of homosexuality, which like other studies should be regarded as part of a scientific process of "measuring the adequacy of hypotheses and evidence" rather than as a "window opening on veridical truth". Author John Heidenry suggested that it was the most important book on sexuality published in the early 1980s, writing that Bell et al. "analyzed every known hypothesis, idea, or suggestion about the origins of homosexuality and found most of them were wrong." Heidenry credited Bell et al. with avoiding the biases of many previous studies, which had drawn their samples from unrepresentative sources such as psychotherapy patients or prison populations. He observed that their conclusion that homosexuality may have a biological basis placed them in opposition to Kinsey's views, and that they ignored research that correlated the origins of same-sex preference with factors such as time of puberty, the amount of early sex, and masturbatory patterns.

Letitia Anne Peplau et al. wrote in a critique of Bem's "exotic becomes erotic" hypothesis published in Psychological Review that Bell et al. recruited heterosexuals and homosexuals through non-comparable methods, and that while it is unknown how this and the retrospective nature of the data affected Bell et al.′s findings, "they may have exaggerated the extent of true differences between heterosexual and homosexual respondents." Peplau et al. argued that Bell et al.′s data does not support Bem′s hypothesis. Bem, in a defense of his hypothesis published in the same issue of Psychological Review, wrote that in their path analysis Bell et al. engaged in "an unfortunate dichotomization of the dependent variable, sexual orientation...grouping the bisexual and homosexual respondents into the same category." In his view, while this procedure "might have seemed reasonable on a priori grounds...it should have been abandoned as soon as the researchers saw the results of their own subanalyses, which made it clear that the bisexual respondents were not only very different from their exclusively homosexual counterparts but actually were more like the heterosexual respondents in theoretically critical ways." Bem argued that by grouping together the bisexuals and homosexuals Bell et al. "reduced many of the correlations and increased the likelihood that important antecedent variables would be erroneously eliminated during the recursive process of discarding the weaker correlates from successive iterations of the path model."

Anthropologist Gilbert Herdt wrote that Sexual Preference, like the Kinsey scale, places "too much emphasis upon discreet acts of sex and not enough stress upon the cultural context and total developmental outcomes to which those acts are related." Herdt called the study a "quantitative sociological" survey of homosexuality that decontextualizes "the culture and lives at issue". Herdt argued, following anthropologist Ruth Benedict, that all developmental changes need to be viewed in the context of social structure.

Research scientist Neil Whitehead and author Briar Whitehead wrote that Sexual Preference has been interpreted by authors such as Whitam and Mathy as showing that homosexuality has no "social or familial basis". The Whiteheads wrote that Van Wyk and Geist′s study produced results similar to those of Bell et al.′s, and that both studies encouraged researchers who preferred biological to environmental explanations of homosexuality. They maintained that Bell et al. discovered "a number of paths to male homosexuality", the three most common of which support psychological theories that relate male homosexuality to variables such as "cold father, negative relationship with father, negative identification with father, childhood gender non-conformity, homosexual arousal in childhood or first homosexual experience in adolescence, adult homosexuality)." They wrote that the results for women were similar, with the most common path relating lesbianism to such variables as "unpleasant mother, hostile rejecting mother, childhood gender non-conformity, adolescent homosexual involvement, and adult homosexuality." Childhood gender non-conformity was among the strongest predictors of both male homosexuality and lesbianism. The Whiteheads argued that Bell et al. were for unknown reasons reluctant to admit that these results were significant: Bell et al. gave their paths a value of "between 30 and 40 percent" and dismissed this as insignificant, even though they also wrote that these values are commonly considered significant. The Whiteheads also argued that Bell et al. "did not ask the right questions" or give their respondents the opportunity to offer their own opinions about why they became homosexual, which might have strengthened existing paths or identified new paths. In their view a limitation of path analysis is that it cannot take into account idiosyncratic and unique experiences.

Philosopher Stein wrote in The Mismeasure of Desire (1999) that Sexual Preference is one of the most detailed and frequently cited retrospective studies relating to sexual orientation. In Stein's view, while the study has been criticized on various grounds, including that all of its subjects were living in San Francisco, arguably an atypical place with respect to the sexual orientation of its inhabitants, Bell et al.′s conclusions about "experiential theories seem to have been confirmed and accepted." He wrote that the study "suggests that early sexual experience does not play an important role in the development of sexual orientation", fails to support theories relating homosexuality to family dynamics, shows no difference between gay and straight men in the strength of their attachment to their mothers, and finds only a weak connection between unfavorable relationships with the father and male homosexuality and gender non-conformity, with similar findings for women. The study also does not support the "parental manipulation theory" according to which "children with no siblings would almost never be lesbian or gay and...children with a large number of siblings would be likely to be so." Stein observed that many other retrospective studies have been conducted on childhood gender non-conformity partly because of Bell et al.′s finding that it is related to homosexuality.

Peplau et al. wrote that Bell et al. "speculated that biological factors may have a stronger influence on exclusive homosexuality than bisexuality". In their view, while Bell et al.′s suggestion may seem plausible "it has not been tested explicitly and seems at odds with available evidence", such as that concerning prenatal hormone exposure.

2000–present

Psychologists Stanton L. Jones and Mark Yarhouse called Sexual Preference a famous study, writing that Bell et al.′s data suggest that mothers have only a weak influence on the development of homosexuality, and that their work is therefore "sometimes thought of as the study that discredited the psychoanalytic theory." Jones and Yarhouse observed that in Bell et al.′s sample "considerably more homosexual males reported fathers who were detached or not affectionate than did heterosexual men". They concluded that, "While clearly not providing definitive support for the psychoanalytic hypothesis, this study is surely not the refutation of that hypothesis that it is sometimes supposed to be."

In 2002, The New York Times quoted historian and gay activist Martin Duberman as saying that Sexual Preference resulted from "the most ambitious study of male homosexuality ever attempted", and that together with Homosexualities: A Study of Diversity Among Men and Women the book "refuted a large number of previous studies that gay men were social misfits". Historian Laurie Guy observed that Sexual Preference is a study that relied on adult recollection of childhood, a type of evidence that had been criticized by Gagnon and Simon as long ago as 1973. Guy argued that gay rights organizations in New Zealand over-relied upon the work in the debate that preceded the passage of the Homosexual Law Reform Act 1986, writing that while important, it was only one study, and as such did not support gay activist claims that "all evidence" shows that sexual orientation is fixed early in life. Psychologist Bruce Rind credited Bell et al. with disproving psychoanalytic theories about the development of homosexuality, along with the idea that childhood seduction causes homosexuality. Psychologist Yarhouse wrote that while the Bell et al. study is cited by proponents of a biological explanation, it relies on retrospective memory recall, which can be unreliable. Together with psychologist Jones, Yarhouse consulted Bell et al.′s interview protocols when developing a questionnaire for his own study of ex-gays. The American Psychological Association, in "Appropriate Therapeutic Responses to Sexual Orientation", a document released in 2009, credited Bell et al. and other authors with discrediting theories claiming that sexual orientation is caused by family environment. Neuroscientist Simon LeVay wrote in Gay, Straight, and the Reason Why (2010) that statistical studies of large numbers of subjects support Freud′s view that on average gay men are more likely than straight men to describe their relationships with their mothers as close and their relationships with their fathers as distant or hostile; he cited Sexual Preference in support of this claim.

Neil Whitehead wrote in 2011 that Bell et al. are usually interpreted as "as proving there are no social/upbringing effects on development of adult SSA (same-sex attraction)", but actually state that "varying social factors leading to SSA occur in different ways in various classes, such as bisexuals, blacks, and effeminate homosexuals." In his view Bell et al. correctly concluded that "individual factors contribute to SSA for the whole population in small and diverse ways and that any single cause will result in SSA only in small percentages of a population." However, he wrote that their view that "adolescent SSA" is "biologically preprogrammed" and shows no change after childhood is contradicted by a 2002 study of "teenage twins with SSA". He argued that because their sample was insufficiently random it is questionable whether their results can be "validly extrapolated" to all homosexuals, particularly those living outside urban areas. He contended that path analysis is not an "ideal tool for the study of homosexuality" because it "works best when there are a relatively small number of causes", whereas their diagrams show many causes. He suggested that their sample size may not have been large enough to "firmly establish the large number of paths displayed", and their conclusions were contradicted by a 1984 study by Van Wyk and Geist, who found sexual experiences rather than sexual feelings to be the primary cause of homosexuality. According to Whitehead, Bell et al.′s finding that the "psychiatric/psychological factors popular in 1981 were shown in the study to have almost zero direct or indirect effects on adult homosexuality" discredited such theories for many academics, while clinicians "ignored the statistical findings." He wrote that Bell et al.′s study was important, but has been "misinterpreted ever since its publication, probably because its specialized statistical techniques are not familiar to the average reader nor even the psychotherapeutic community, who felt unqualified to challenge them." He believes there are "no subsequent reviews" with "informed statistical commentary".

See also

• Biology and sexual orientation
• Environment and sexual orientation
• Gender variance
• Sigmund Freud's views on homosexuality

References

Bibliography

Books

Journals

Online articles

External links

• Clarence Tripp's review of Sexual Preference