Ducking the Evidence About Gay People

To the Editor:

Charles Watkins’s letter to the editor (“Keep Numbers Straight About Gay People,” October 30), while professing to correct a canard, itself “ducks” the evidence about the prevalence and nature of homosexuality in human populations.

Figures on the prevalence of homosexuality vary widely depending on a variety of factors, including sampling techniques and the sensitivity of field interviewers to the special problems associated with asking subjects about a sexual orientation to which considerable stigma is still attached. One review of such studies from Kinsey et. al. (1948) to the Billy survey (1993) shows results ranging from a high of 40 per cent to Mr. Watkins’s citation of 1 per cent (the 1993 Batelle Human Affairs Research Center study of H.I.V. risk in men aged 20 to 39, which has been criticized in peer reviews for its lack of professional sex researchers and lack of extensive interviews). An average of studies which include females in the research (many do not) yields a figure of approximately 9.9 per cent for both males and females who identify as exclusively homosexual in their orientation.

No such figures exist for the success of so-called reparative therapies, about which several mental-health professional organizations have issued warnings, nor does Mr. Watkins cite anything more concrete than the anecdotal experience of “many.” In fact, studies of “ex-gays” report short- or intermediate-term changes in behavior but little or no alteration in other significant aspects of sexuality such as attraction, fantasy, and emotional preference. “Reparative therapists” themselves admit that their subjects must be unusually motivated in order to achieve this minimal “success.” This is “dramatic testimony,” certainly, but it is to the persistence of sexual orientation, not its malleability.

As for the importance of “immutability” in assessing the political rights of minorities, advanced biology and genetics have proven neither race nor gender to be as unchangeable as previously held. “Race” is now held by many anthropologists and biologists to be a social, cultural, and political construct based on superficial physical appearances and rooted in 19th-century racialist dogma. Likewise, rigid gender classifications of male and female according to gross anatomy ignore the witness of developmental embryology and the existence of intersexual states.

Mr. Watkins would also do well to remember that one of the first and most important groups to be protected by the Constitution is one with no common or immutable genetic characteristics of any kind, a group defined entirely by the freely chosen behavior of its members: those who engage in the practice of religious faith.

The Rev. Jan Nunley
Rector
St. Peter’s and St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
Providence, R.I.