Sexual Preference (book)

Sexual Preference: Its Development in Men and Women

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

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,^[1] a publication of the Institute for Sex Research.^[2] 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.^[3][4][5] Based on interviews with subjects in the San Francisco Bay Area, Bell, Weinberg and Hammersmith 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, its authors' conclusions and methodology have been criticized on numerous grounds, including their reliance upon path analysis and the difficulty and potential unreliability of adult recall of childhood feeling.

Summary

Bell et al. wrote that they aimed to explain the development of both heterosexuality and homosexuality. According to Bell et al., of the many ideas put forward to explain how people became heterosexual or homosexual, the most notable have been psychoanalytic theories attributing homosexuality to an unresolved Oedipal conflict. Bell et al. wrote that "rigorous testing of these explanations has remained the exception rather than the rule", something they attributed to several factors, including the fact that, "The concepts used in many of the theories (especially psychoanalytic) are exceedingly difficult to pin down and operationalize."^[6]

While Bell et al. acknowledged that their objective of reviewing and testing the many proposed explanations of sexual orientation "may seem most ambitious", it reflected their "conviction that such a study is needed to put current thinking about sexual development on a firm scientific footing and to lay to rest, once and for all, those theoretical notions that fail to stand up under more careful scrutiny." Bell et al. anticipated that their work would be criticized for numerous reasons, and that some "psychologists and psychoanalysts" would object to the methodology employed: "Stressing the importance in human affairs of utterly unconscious motivation, such persons would be expected to reject evidence from any source that does not tap this dimension." In Bell et al.'s view, psychoanalysts would be likely to object that interviews lasting only a few hours, as opposed to the hundreds of hours involved in analysis, could never reveal "the true nature of what occurred in an individual's childhood and adolescence". Bell et al. argued, however, that while they did not access unconscious material or "conduct a series of lengthy clinical interviews" with their respondents, their data would "be useful in their own right." Bell et al. maintained that the fact that their data were not obtained from clinical sources was a strength, that accessing unconscious material involves difficulties such as "the potential for 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 it is hard to believe that such differences would not be reflected, at least to some extent, in what respondents report about their own and others' behaviors, attitudes, and feelings during the course of their development."^[7]

Another potential criticism Bell et al. considered was that many scholars might entirely reject any view about the development of homosexuality "that even smacks of psychoanalytic theory" and "object to any study that appears to take it at all seriously", and might therefore have an aversion to studies that "appear to take early parental experiences too seriously or attempt to make empirical use of theoretical ideas that seem irrelevant in any case." Bell et al. replied that while they gave psychoanalytic theory "considerable attention", their statistical analyses also involved "developmental experiences occurring outside our respondents' original households", such as relationships with peers, labeling by others, dating experiences, and sexual experiences.^[8]

Addressing the issue of how accurate their respondents' recollections of childhood were, Bell et al. wrote that, "Objections to the use of retrospective data cannot be answered easily." They also observed that "some gay activists may object to any study of the origins of sexual preference", and might see their motive as being to find a way to prevent homosexuality and reduce its incidence. They added that other critics "may regret our involvement in a tradition of a inquiry that has so far seemed to support the majority's view that homosexuality is either a strange perversion or at least a deviation from the norm and requires a special accounting", and suspect their work of reinforcing social prejudice. They argued that ideas about how homosexuality develops contribute to "antihomosexual prejudices", and that so long as "the heterosexual majority" accepted "virtually untested notions of psychosexual development" that see homosexuality as the result of a bad upbringing, their attitudes toward homosexuals would never change.^[9]

Bell et al. criticized past studies on sexual orientation for examining differences between homosexuals and heterosexuals "one by one and considered as isolated effects on psychosexual development." They argued that only by viewing differences "in their entirety" and "by using more sophisticated statistical techniques" was it possible to "evaluate the different factors that may influence the development of sexual preference." They saw the use of such procedures as a key feature of their study. Bell et al. wrote that they "considered the possibility that different kinds of homosexual men and women might show somewhat different developmental patterns" and thus "examined separately the developmental patterns that characterize various types of homosexuals." Bell et al. wrote that while it had not been possible for them to "obtain a truly representative sample of homosexual adults", they considered their sample more representative of homosexuals in general than those used in previous studies, while "the fact that blacks and whites were examined separately" made it possible for them to "determine more precisely" the extent to which patterns of homosexual and heterosexual development depend on race. Bell et al. wrote that "Bell, as a psychologist and therapist, is relatively supportive of psychodynamic theory", while Weinberg and Hammersmith were sociologists with a "different theoretical perspective." They argued that this was a strength of their study and prevented them from finding "what our respective backgrounds would have led us to expect." Bell et al. wrote that while they wished that their study had been completed earlier, "there is no reason to believe that the passage of ten years would seriously alter our findings."^[10]

Describing how the data their study was based upon were obtained, Bell et al. wrote that between 1969 and 1970 they conducted interviews 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, public parks, beaches, and toilets. Heterosexual respondents were obtained through "random sampling among the Bay Area population". Bell et al. used an interview schedule that included about 200 questions and took three to five hours to complete. Some questions were "closed-ended", meaning that respondents had to choose from a limited number of possible answers, while others were "open-ended", allowing respondents to answer however 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 their respondents.^[11]

Bell et al. discovered that boys who grow up with dominant mothers and weak fathers have nearly the same chance of becoming homosexual as boys who grow up in "ideal" family settings.^[12] There was no difference between heterosexual men and gay men in the strength of attachment to their mothers, and while Bell et al. found that unfavorable relationships with fathers seem to be connected with gender non-conformity and early homosexual experience, the connection to adult sexual orientation was not strong. The results for women were similar: parental relationships, traits, and identification were not critical factors in the development of female homosexuality.^[13]

Lack of friends in childhood was not a significant factor (the small extent to which homosexual men and women were less involved with peers while growing up was more a result of feeling different than a cause), and that there was no evidence that men who were labelled effeminate became homosexual for that reason. They also concluded that traumatic experiences with the opposite sex, rape, punishment by parents for sex play, and seduction by a person of the same sex played no role in the development of sexual orientation, and that most people's sexual identities are determined by the time they reach adolescence.^[12]

Their data suggested that early sexual experience does not play a significant role, though it might have some secondary role: "childhood and adolescent sexual expression by and large reflect rather than determine a person's underlying sexual [orientation]...Sexual experiences with members of the same sex were common among both the homosexual and the heterosexual respondents; so were experiences with members of the opposite sex. What differs markedly between the homosexual and heterosexual respondents, and what appears to be more important in signaling eventual sexual [orientation]...is the way respondents felt sexually, not what they did."^[14] "Recruitment" played little if any role.^[12]

The data did support gender nonconformity theories: boys who became homosexual had been less stereotypically masculine than boys who became heterosexual. Fewer of the homosexual men remembered themselves as having been very masculine while growing up, and more homosexual than heterosexual respondents recalled dislike for typical boys' activities and enjoyment of those they thought were "for girls." These kinds of gender non-conformity were directly related to experiencing both homosexual activities and homosexual arousal before age 19, a sense of an explicitly sexual difference from other boys, and a delay of feelings of sexual attraction to girls, as well as adult homosexuality. Similarly, among females, childhood gender non-conformity appears to have been related to homosexual feelings and behaviors, both while growing up and in adulthood.^[15]

Bell 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; they also cited Günter Dörner's Hormones and Brain Differentiation (1976) as evidence 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.^[16]

Reception

1981

In August 1981, prior to the publication of Sexual Preference, Jane E. Brody wrote in The New York Times that it 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.^[17] In Psychology Today, historian Paul Robinson wrote that Sexual Preference was a "superb" work whose authors answer the question of how people become heterosexual or homosexual better than previous authors, disqualify "most of the answers that have been offered in the past", exhibit "all the empirical conscientiousness of Kinsey at his best", and have a "massive empirical foundation and fine-tuned statistical procedure" that gives their findings "unprecedented trustworthiness". He lamented that unlike the Kinsey Reports, which gained popular attention, the book "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.^[18]

Sociologist John Gagnon wrote in The New York Times that Sexual Preference was a politically motivated study and one that 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 is controversial. He criticized their methodology, arguing that while the number of respondents was greater than in previous studies their sample was not representative, that they 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 that 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 their very general questions might reflect a subsequent reconstruction of events rather than an accurate recall of what actually occurred in childhood, that instead of presenting any new biological evidence they relied upon largely disconfirmed studies (as well as the "dubious work of a researcher who argues for early hormonal intervention" to prevent the development of homosexuality), and that their conclusion that sexual preference has a biological basis is inconsistent with the idea that homosexuality and heterosexuality are "preferences".^[19]

1982

In 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 has little measurable effect on adult sexual orientation may only prove that questionnaires cannot uncover the roots of sexual orientation, adding that even if Bell et al.'s 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.^[20]

In 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"; he noted that they 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.^[21]

Psychologist Clarence Arthur Tripp commented in the May 1982 issue of the Journal of Sex Research that Sexual Preference would likely be seen as "a shock and a disappointment", writing that 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 they 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".^[22] In the same issue, Bell et al. objected 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."^[23] Tripp replied in the November 1982 issue, accusing Bell et al. of personal attacks and attempting to refute them on specific points.^[24]

In 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 Sexual Preference "has value for suggesting directions and the likely worth of ideas", but that given its shortcomings there was no way in which Bell et al. 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 "a rather 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 Bell et al.'s conclusion that sexual orientation has a biological basis as unpersuasive.^[25]

Psychologist DeCecco dismissed both Sexual Preference and Bell and Weinberg's previous study Homosexualities, writing in the Journal of Sex Research that while their authors presented them as "definitive studies of homosexuality", they were hurried retreats "behind computer statistics" and showed "theoretical nakedness". DeCecco found both books to be examples of the "theoretical blindness" that has dominated research on homosexuality in the United States since the early 1970s. He contrasted them 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".^[2]

Bell wrote in the Siecus Report, published by the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States, that his finding in Sexual Preference 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 that work 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.^[26]

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 depends on the memories of their respondents, "who are likely to have been influenced by social expectations of how far homosexuals should conform to gender roles". Altman observed that Bell 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.^[27] Psychologist William Paul and sex researcher James D. Weinrich wrote that Sexual Preference is the largest study conducted specifically on homosexuality and that it helps to document social diversity, but found it to be limited by the problems Bell et al. encountered in "trying to assemble the most representative group of respondents." Paul and Weinrich also noted that Bell et al. collected their data in 1969, and therefore may have missed "growing cultural developments in the gay younger generation of the late 1960s and early 1970s."^[28]

1983-1989

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 Bell et al.'s failure to find a direct connection between sexual orientation and parent-child interaction.^[29]

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 noted that there were some significant differences, which could have been partly a result of the different methodology employed. Van Wyk and Geist believe that 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 observe 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".^[30]

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.^[31] Weeks called Sexual Preference "the Kinsey Institute's final publication on homosexuality" and suggests that like the work of sociobiologists and others who have attempted to find a biological explanation for social behavior it reveals an "urge to fill a conceptual gap" that is "stronger than an 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 adds 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 their argument as "a rhetorical device" that results in "an intellectual closure which obstructs further questioning."^[32]

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, Bell et al. 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.^[33]

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 Bell et al.'s 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.^[34]

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: Bell et al.'s subjects could have been unwittingly giving them the answers they wanted to hear, failed to remember accurately, or suppressed painful childhood memories.^[35]

Psychologist Seymour Fisher called Sexual Preference a "high quality study", one of the "largest scale" in the literature. Fisher writes that despite their "highly skeptical attitude" toward Freudian theory, Bell et al.'s findings match certain of 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 Bell et al.'s claim that there is no strong connection. Regarding lesbianism, Fisher wrote that, like other investigators, Bell et al. "do not provide the information to evaluate Freud's rather vague statements concerning how the homosexual woman would perceive mother." However, he considered it reasonable to evaluate "how well the findings match the concept of the homosexual woman as perceiving her father in negative, frustrating terms", and stated that Bell et al.'s data does support "Freud's expectations in this respect" 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 minimize 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."^[36]

Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen called Sexual Preference a "pathbreaking study" that refutes the myth that parents "are to blame for their 'sexually messed up' children."^[37]

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.^[38] 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. They 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.^[39] Psychologists Gonsiorek and Douglas C. Haldeman both credited Bell et al. with disproving psychoanalytic theories about the development of homosexuality.^[40][41]

Philosopher Frederick Suppe called Sexual Preference a very important study, writing that Bell et al. failed to duplicate Bieber et al.'s findings in Homosexuality: A Psychoanalytic Study of Male Homosexuals (1962) or the predictions of symbolic interactionism, labeling theory, and societal reaction theory approaches. Suppe wrote that while highly biased, their sample of homosexuals was nevertheless "the most diverse and representative" ever made. Suppe 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." Suppe 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. Suppe argued that the only plausible basis for disputing that the study definitively refutes "the various 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 excessively long. He rejected Bell et al.'s claim that their study supports a biological explanation of sexual orientation.^[42]

Psychologist Kenneth Zucker and psychiatrist Susan Bradley called Sexual Preference a "classic study", and write 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 believed 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."^[43]

1996-1999

Social psychologist Daryl Bem wrote in Psychological Review that Bell et al. provide the most "telling data" about "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 cites the work of psychologist Judith Rich Harris, who proposes that "a significant portion of the variance in personality development is accounted for by peer-related variables". Bem proposed a hypothesis that he calls "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 does not accept Bell et al.'s conclusion that sexual orientation is biologically innate.^[44]

Philosopher Timothy F. Murphy called Sexual Preference an important study of homosexuality, commenting that despite its limitations, flaws, and incompleteness, it is useful, provided that it, like other studies, is regarded as part of a scientific process of "measuring the adequacy of hypotheses and evidence" rather than as a "window opening on veridical truth".^[45] Author John Heidenry considered it perhaps 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 Bell et al.'s conclusion that homosexuality may have a biological basis placed them in fundamental opposition to Kinsey's views, and that in attempting to find a universal explanation of homosexuality 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.^[46]

Anthropologist Gilbert Herdt wrote that "Kinsey's scale of measurement placed 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 believed that Sexual Preference suffers from the same problem; he considers it an example of "enormous quantitative sociological surveys of homosexuality that decontextualize the culture and lives at issue".^[47]

Research scientist Neil Whitehead and journalist 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.^[48]

Philosopher Stein, in his The Mismeasure of Desire (1999), wrote that Sexual Preference is one of the most detailed and frequently cited retrospective studies relating to sexual orientation. He added that while the study has been criticized on various grounds, including that all of its subjects were living in such an atypical location as San Francisco, Bell et al.'s "conclusions with respect to experiential theories seem to have been confirmed and accepted." He noted that the study "suggests that early sexual experience does not play an important role in the development of sexual orientation", and that it also fails to support theories relating homosexuality to family dynamics. He summarized the data as showing no difference between gay men and straight men in the strength of their attachment to their mothers, and only a weak connection between unfavorable relationships with the father and male homosexuality and gender non-conformity, with similar findings for women. He wrote that the study 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." He 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.^[49]

2000-

Psychologists Stanton L. Jones and Mark Yarhouse called Sexual Preference a famous study, noting 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."^[50]

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".^[51] 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 Bell et al.'s 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.^[52] 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.^[53] 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.^[54] Together with psychologist Jones, Yarhouse consulted Bell et al.'s interview protocols when developing a questionnaire for his own study of ex-gays.^[55] 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.^[56] 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 cites Sexual Preference in support of this claim.^[57]

Neil Whitehead wrote in 2011 that while Bell et al. are usually interpreted as "as proving there are no social/upbringing effects on development of adult SSA (same-sex attraction)", they actually state that "varying social factors leading to SSA occur in different ways in various classes, such as bisexuals, blacks, and effeminate homosexuals." He writes that they correctly conclude 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 rejects their view that "adolescent SSA" is "biologically preprogrammed" and as such fixed in childhood, writing that it is contradicted by a 2002 study of "teenage twins with SSA". He argues that because their sample was "not rigorously random in today’s terms" it is questionable whether their results can be "validly extrapolated to all homosexual people, particularly those not living in urban areas." He also argues 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 "a multitude of causes or paths". According to him, their 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...seemed to remove most such theories from further consideration in the eyes of many academics", while clinicians, due to their clinical experience, "ignored the statistical findings." He writes that the 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".^[58]

See also

• Biology and sexual orientation
• Environment and sexual orientation
• Gender variance

References

Footnotes

Bibliography

Books

Journals

Online articles