|
WHM |
BHM |
WHF |
BHF |
|
(N=572) |
(N=111) |
(N=225) |
(N=64) |
|
|
|
|
|
None |
1 |
4 |
38 |
41 |
Half or less |
29 |
59 |
51 |
55 |
More than half |
70 |
38 |
12 |
5 |
Now let me put that into perspective. Of the white male homosexuals who responded to the survey, 91% had 25 or more lifetime sexual partners, 75% had 100 or more, and 28% had 1000 or more; 70% said that more than half of their sexual partners were one-night stands; 79% said that more than half of their sexual partners were complete strangers; and 73% said that they had some affection for less than half of their sexual partners. The figures for black homosexual males weren't very different. By anyone's standards, that is extremely promiscuous behavior. It supports a universal diagnosis of pathology, at least among homosexual males. Regarding your allegation that the Bell & Weinberg sample wasn't representative, you quoted from the book's introduction (p.22) but just before the portion you quoted, Bell & Weinberg said the following concerning a comparison between work by Gebhard & Johnson, using the Kinsey data, and the work by Bell & Weinberg: "Such comparisons allow the reader to determine how similar our respondents are to homosexuals investigated elsewhere and also to get some idea of what homosexual adults, at least those willing to be interviewed in studies of this kind, typically report about various features of their homosexuality." (p. 22.) And after the portion you quoted came the following: "Rather, what we want to demonstrate is the relationship between homosexuals sexual life-styles and their sociological and psychological adjustment."(p. 22.) It's clear that the portion you quoted was chopped out of context in an effort to discredit Bell & Weinberg's very valuable research. There is a substantial section devoted to an explanation of how Bell & Weinberg recruited their survey pool (pp 30-35). You claimed they only looked for survey respondents in gay bars and bathhouses. The overwhelming majority of their respondents were recruited from gay rights organizations and from gay mailing lists. The large pool of potential respondents from each type of source (gay bar, gay rights organization, etc.) was then narrowed down by random selection to roughly one-third of its original number. "In an attempt to obtain as much diversity as possible, we spent a great deal of time and expense in accumulating as many potential respondents as we could ... In the effort to minimize sample error, we hoped to recruit many more prospective respondents than we would interview ... and then to select our respondents on a random basis." (p.33.) It appears to me that Bell & Weinberg went to great lengths to "minimize sample error" and that to a very great extent, those efforts were successful. |