Homosexuality, gender and disorderly assumptions

There is a belief often brought up by people convinced that homosexuality is an aberration. This belief is that there is some sort of sexual trauma experienced by gay people in their youth that supposedly creates the "aberrant" same-sex desires. Strangely, the way this is presumed to works changes according to the gender of the purported victim. For a gay male, it is claimed that early sexual contact with another male results in the "victim" then wanting to have more sex with more men. But for lesbians, it's claimed that unwanted sexual contact with a male results in her wanting to not have sex with men anymore. This seems contradictory: why do men get "turned to men" by sex with a man, but women get "turned to women" by....sex with a man, as well?

I've long suspected that antipathy towards homosexuality tracks extremely well with misogyny. I wonder if this difference in belief about how sexual contact "creates" homosexuals illustrates a more fundamental distinction between anti-gay beliefs about how sexuality is supposed to work amongst different genders?

The distinction at issue doesn't just hinge on gender. There's also the matter of whether or not the alleged sexual contact is seen as desirable or undesirable. However, this latter distinction is cleaved completely along gender lines: gay men are always presented as finding the sexual contact with a man that supposedly "turned" them as desirable, while lesbians are always presented as find the sexual contact with a man that supposedly "turned" them as undesirable?

What does this say about anti-gay assumptions of how male and female sexuality "innately" function?

Are men - all men - expected to never turn down sex, or to never find sex undesirable? My own informal research has found two contradictory ideas about male on male sexual advances: first, men tend to think that a man examining another man in a sexual way is not as morally problematic as a man examining a woman in the same way; but second, men tend to think that a man sexually examining their own self in a sexual way can be a justification for reacting aggressively or even violently. The difference between the expectation and the personal reality of how men ought to react to sexual advances when the advance is coming from a man seems to create a certain amount of internal tension.

As for women, lesbianism in this case could be taken as a problematic adjustment to the Victorian-era assumption that women find sex unpleasant. However, in terms of "turning" a woman gay, there also seems to be fault laid at the feet of men. The problematic attitude towards which gender is to "blame" for lesbianism can be seen in the contradictory ways of "fixing" it. There's the disturbing concept of "corrective rape", and then there's the concept that women just need a relationship with a man who doesn't hurt them. Obviously the preferred method of "correction" indicates certain attitudes about the proper sexual role of women (although it should be noted that in both cases it is assumed that it is the man's responsibility to provide the "correction").

I don't think condemnation of homosexuality can be properly addressed until it's understood as a symptom of a much deeper social issue: that of crisis and uncertainty about contemporary gender roles. Even if much of the above turns out to be totally wrong (and it very easily could be), I would hope that it at least indicates that there are a lot of underlying issues around gender and sex that need to be addressed if the lives and welfare of LGBT people are to effectively protected.

Homosexuality and Tolerance in the Netherlands: The Real Story

Significantly, the study sampled residents of the Netherlands, where social acceptance of same-sex behavior is high. This would call into question the assumption that the high rate of psychiatric problems is primarily due to social or internalized homophobia.

This is what the "pro-treatment of homosexuality" group NARTH recently said about the study "Same-Sex Sexual Behavior and Psychiatric Disorders: Findings from the Netherlands Mental Health Survey and Incidence Study (NEMESIS)" published in Archives of General Psychiatry 2001, vol 58(1), pp 85-91. While NARTH may chauvinistically choose to view the entirety of a Western European country like the Netherlands as some sort of gay mecca where no anti-gay sentiment ever exists in any form at all, the truth is that anti-gay sentiment does exist there, and it causes serious problems for gay people. Perhaps NARTH should engage in an honest assessment of the Dutch attitudes towards homosexuality instead of misleadingly trying to handwave past it.

The Dutch study itself actually references three works that assess attitudes towards homosexuality in the Netherlands. I have traced one of them: a study called "Attitudes towards nonmarital sex in 24 countries" by E D WIlmer, J Treas, and R Newcomb, published in Journal of Sex Research 1998, vol 35, pp349-358. Its measurement of sexual attitudes in the 24 countries included a question on whether respondents believed that homosexual sex was wrong. With 65% of Dutch respondents saying that it was "not wrong at all", it is true that tolerance in the Netherlands for homosexual sex is relatively high, especially compared to the USA where fully 70%said it was "always wrong". But the fact remains that 19% of Dutch respondents believed that homosexual sex was "always wrong". Intolerance for homosexuality still exists in the Netherlands, and it is reasonable to believe that this will be reflected in an increased toll on the mental health of people who engage in homosexual behaviour. (To round out the percentages, 4% of Dutch respondents believed that homosexual sex was wrong "almost always", while a further 12% believed it was wrong "only sometimes". I will not speculate at this time on why those people answered the question like that.)

And the attitudes of people who do find fault with homosexuality would seem to be especially virulent. A study on anti-gay violence by the University of Amsterdam called "As long as they keep away from me" (an English translation of the summary is available at the bottom of the page) noted that "gays fall victim to violence in Amsterdam on a regular basis. In 2007, 201 cases were recorded, of which 67 were of physical violence", 17 of robbery and 38 of serious threat". Yet anti-gay groups like NARTH would have you believe that gay people in the Netherlands experience no kind of discrimination that would tax their mental health whatsoever.

Further, and disturbingly, a person who might claim homosexual sex is not wrong can still be a gaybasher. As the Dutch study on anti-gay violence discovered, the "tolerance" expressed towards homosexuality among some Dutch youth can be highly conditional:

The major cause of the aversion to homosexuality felt by perpetrators of anti-gay violence lies in their views and emotions regarding masculinity and sexuality. Four aspects of homosexuality that particularly appear to arouse annoyance, disapproval and loathing are anal sex, feminine behaviour, the visibility of homosexuality, and the fear of being hit on by a gay.
It is remarkable that the perpetrators do not reject homosexuality on all fronts. Indeed, in many cases the perpetrators declare not to hate gays at all and realise that homosexuality is a part of Dutch society. They reject homosexuality, however, on express conditions: gays should not openly show the four aspects of the behaviour mentioned above. The perpetrators tend to copy the prevailing gay-tolerant rhetoric of Dutch society, but do not refrain from all sorts of violence as soon as homosexuality comes close to them or if gay men do not fulfil their supposed obligations[emphasis added].

It may be premature for me to accuse NARTH on capitalising on the anti-European bigotry prevalent among their usual audience of Christianist fanatics, who tend to inaccurately view Amsterdam as a modern-day Sodom where homosexuality is not just tolerated, but glorified. But I would hope that this examination of the actual evidence will help to correct the misinformation propagated by anti-gay activists that increased mental health problems among homosexual men and women in the Netherlands cannot be the result of discrimination against gay people. Overt anti-gay bigotry does exist in the Netherlands, and even some Dutch youth who might call themselves "tolerant" of homosexuality can show an especially violent side if the conditions put on providing that "tolerance" aren't perceived as being met.

21 Reasons why Gender Matters: shonky referencing and the mental health of gay people

I found a second serious referencing error in the anti-gay pamphlet 21 Reasons why Gender Matters. Like the earlier one, it falsely claims that a study includes text which it doesn't actually include. Unlike the earlier one, I can actually see how they got it wrong.

On page 14 of the pamphlet, the following text appears:

One study revealed that “the lifetime prevalence for two or more psychiatric disorders for men who engaged in homosexual behaviors was 37.85 per cent versus 14.4 per cent for men who did not engage in homosexual behaviors. For women engaging in homosexual behaviours, the rate for two or more psychiatric disorders was 39.5 per cent versus 21.3 per cent for women not engaging in homosexual behaviours. Society’s oppression of homosexual people is a hypothesis unlikely to find support in this study, concluded the Netherlands [sic], which is perhaps one of the most homosexual-affirming and tolerant countries in the world.”110

Footnote 110 refers to a study that is very popular among anti-gay activists trying to "prove" that homosexual behaviour itself directly causes the person engaging in it to become mentally disturbed: "Same-sex Behavior and Psychiatric Disorders", by TGM Sandfort et al, published in volume 58(1) of the Archives of General Psychiatry in 2001.

I have now read the complete study, and the text quoted above as appearing in the study itself does not appear anywhere within in. Given the actual sentiments expressed by the authors in the study, particularly their fairly clear statement in the "Comment" section that "because of the study's cross-sectional design, it is not possible to adequately address the question of the causes of the observed differences" in mental health, it is highly misleading to claim that they made any statement of fact as clear-cut as the one that the pamphlet falsely attributed to them.

The actual source of the quoted text is this article from the so-called "research and therapy" group NARTH, a little way in to "Section D:Mental Health, Physical Health, Stability of Homosexual Men and Women and Longevity of Homosexual Relationships". The shoddy use of HTML, in which a separate font is used when quoting a study, but that font accidentally spills out of the closing blockquote, could, if you're not reading carefully, give the misleading impression that the paragraph after the quote from the study is also a quote from the study. Apparently the Fatherhood Foundation didn't notice the problem.

The study itself that they're misquoting is interesting, and probably deserves a more thorugh consideration given the multiple lies that a great deal of anti-gay organisations tell about it, not just NARTH and the Fatherhood Foundation. For now I'll just point to a news article about a much more recent study about the issue of homosexuality and mental health, one which should give pause to any anti-gay activist trying to encourage negative attitudes to homosexuality: Parents' response key to health of gay youth:

Kids with parents who reacted negatively 8 times more likely to try suicide
by Lisa Leff
Associated Press
SAN FRANCISCO - Young gay people whose parents or guardians responded negatively when they revealed their sexual orientation were more likely to attempt suicide, experience severe depression and use drugs than those whose families accepted the news, according to a new study.

Follow the link for the full article.