Are There No Pre-Publication Referees? Are There No Copy Editors?

I'm kinda circling around Nicholas C. Edsall's Toward Stonewall: Homosexuality and Society in the Modern Western World (University of Virginia, 2003).  I've been meaning to read it for some time, and I hadn't realized how long that was until I typed in the publication date just now.  It's intended as an overview taking recent scholarship into account, and it might be that Edsall would have a different take on the essentialist vs. social constructionist controversy with which he opens the book if he were writing it now.  As so often, Edsall seemed to be addressing that controversy dutifully rather than from a conviction that it's all that important, and as so often, he's not very clear on its import.  I intend to return to that issue in another post, to update my own views, but for now I'll look at another topic that trips up scholars: Alfred Kinsey's research on human sexuality.

Edsall devotes several pages to Kinsey, and this passage jumped out at me:

Kinsey's statistics were based on questionnaires gathered from a large, random sample of ordinary people.  (Unfortunately, his report on women, published five years later, was based on a far smaller sample and was not accorded the same authority or fame) [265].

That's a lot of errors to put into just two sentences.  First, "questionnaires" suggests that Kinsey handed out paper forms for people to fill in.  The problems with that method were well-known when he began his research, and Kinsey opted for in-person, face-to-face interviews based on a complex and flexible protocol that the interviewers memorized.  You could call that a questionnaire, but it's really not the correct word.

Second, Kinsey's sample was large but it wasn't random.  He used a method called stratified sampling instead.  There was a lot of public debate about this when the Male volume was published in 1948, and it's hard to understand how Edsall could have missed it.  (I recommend Peter Hegarty's chapter on the controversy over Kinsey's statistical methods in Gentleman's Disagreement [Chicago, 2013], but anything you read about Kinsey will deal with it.)

Third, the Female volume, published as Edsall says in 1953, wasn't based on a smaller sample than the Male.  If anything, the sample was somewhat larger: six thousand women versus the Male volume's 5300.  (In both cases, Kinsey didn't use all of the eighteen thousand histories he and his team had taken.)

Finally, the claim that the Female volume wasn't "accorded the same authority or fame" as the Male volume is pretty obviously false.  The "authority" of both volumes was fiercely contested, but the Female volume outsold the Male, which had moved 200,000 copies in hardcover from a medical publisher; Sexual Behavior in the Human Female sold 270,000 hardcover copies in the first month, and unlike its predecessor was later issued by Pocket Books as a mass-market paperback.  "Infamy" might be a better word than "fame," because Kinsey's claims about the number of American women who had pre- and extra-marital sexual experience outraged "decent" people; the furor led to the Institute for Sex Research losing its funding from the Rockefeller Foundation.  (Ironically, women still were a lot less sexually active than men according to Kinsey, but still too active for the sensibilities of American moralists.)

I've often noticed that writers on human sexuality seem to feel no need to check their facts when they write about Kinsey.  Some of this reflects confusion about "sexual orientation" and its relationship to sexual behavior, and can be put down to differences of interpretation, but much of it is a failure of factual accuracy, as with Edsall.  I suspect it's partly because Kinsey, like Noam Chomsky, is a safe target, and nobody cares about facts; but even Kinsey's (and Chomsky's) fans get him wrong.  And the errors I've found in Edsall's book should have been pretty easy to avoid.  Academic publishers in particular are supposed to care about factual accuracy, but in at least certain instances they don't.

Leave Kinsey Alone!

Jeez.  I finally got off my butt and after nearly a year I'm again reading William Benemann's Male-Male Intimacy in Early America (Harrington Park Press, 2006).  I'm moving along pretty smoothly, just past page 70, and there's some interesting stuff in it.  I've been making notes for a longer post, maybe more than one, because this is a subject I've been procrastinating on for a long time.  But occasionally Benemann puts his foot in it, and I'm going to write about that too.

At the end of the introductory material that bogged me down before, Benemann rejects the "bifurcated" view of people as either homosexual or heterosexual.  That's a good thing, though it occurs to me that just about everybody -- certainly every scholarly writer -- who addresses this subject pays lip service to Rejecting the Binary.  What counts is whether you can actually apply that concept to the material you're discussing; so far Benemann is trying to.  And, as most such writers do, he cites Alfred Kinsey:

A more useful model is the one presented by Alfred Kinsey in 1948.  Kinsey described sexual orientation as a continuum, a scale from one to six with one being entirely heterosexual and six being entirely homosexual.  Most human beings fall somewhere between the two extremes of the scale [xvii].

So, first: the scale doesn't run from one to six; it runs from zero to six, with zero (not one) being entirely heterosexual.  In an endnote Benemann cites Kinsey, Pomeroy, and Martin's 1948 Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, page 638, so he could have seen for himself.  On that page is a diagram like this one:

Zero to six, right?  But that's minor.  Second, Kinsey didn't "describe sexual orientation as a continuum" -- he didn't describe sexual orientation at all.  The continuum is a map of data points based on individuals' sexual histories.

Third, most human beings do not fall between the two extremes of the scale.  The interval from zero to one includes half (50 percent) of Kinsey's male histories.  The interval from five to six includes one twenty-fifth (4 percent) of his male histories.  Those who fall between the two extremes are the remaining 46 percent.  I don't know who originated the belief that the histories are distributed in a bell curve, but it has no basis in Kinsey's data.

All Along the Kinsey Continuum

This weekend I reread Conversations about Psychology and Sexual Orientation (NYU Press, 1999), by Janis S. Bohan, Glenda M. Russell, and several other contributors.  The book is an attempt to sketch out a social-constructionist approach to sexual orientation in clinical practice and in public policy; I first read it soon after it was published, and remembered that some of it was interesting and useful.  I decided to reread it to see how it looked to me now, especially after having read a lot more on the subject in the past fifteen years.  I'll probably have more to say about it later, but for now I want to lament that the authors have made the same error about Alfred Kinsey's work that so many other writers on sexual orientation have made.

Bohan and Russell write:

Perhaps more striking is the persistent plausibility of this dichotomous portrayal given that, even within this culture, its inadequacy was established more than forty years ago, when Kinsey and his colleagues demonstrated that this binary depiction of sexual orientation is flawed.  Their work revealed, instead, a range of self-reported sexual orientation described not by discrete categories but by a seven-point continuum, ranging from exclusive homosexuality (six on Kinsey's scale), through varying degrees of bi- or ambisexuality (scores of five to one), to exclusive heterosexuality (zero on the scale)...

Kinsey's work also suggested that sexual orientation is not entirely defined by sexuality per se; an individual's placement along the continuum reflected both overt and "psychic" reactions.  In addition, Kinsey's findings indicated that people's self-defined positions along this continuum may change over time and that many subjects identified periods in their lives when their sexual orientation was quite different from how they later identify themselves.  Thus, sexual orientation is portrayed by Kinsey's work is composed not of discrete categories, whatever the number, but of vague, permeable, and potentially shifting "locations" along a continuum [86-87].

Kinsey's work does not "portray" sexual orientation, self-reported or otherwise.  The Kinsey continuum represents sexual experience or "outlet" (to use Kinsey's term), overt behavior or "psychic" response.  I remember that his colleague Wardell Pomeroy wrote later about someone (who may have been his client rather than someone whose sexual history he took for Kinsey in the 1930s and 1940s) who thought of himself as homosexual until Pomeroy pointed out that he had more heterosexual experience than homosexual, but I don't recall Kinsey addressing this sort of thing in his big books.  He did, as I've mentioned before, refer once to "orientation" in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, when he referred to "younger males" who "may even have all of their overt experience in the homosexual" because they "have not ventured to have actual intercourse with girls, while their orientation is definitely heterosexual" (641).  But that's the only time he uses the word in the book, and in context it's clear that by "orientation" he means something like "predominant interest."  The Kinsey continuum refers only to sexual experiences, not to sexual orientation as it's talked about today.

I have no idea where Bohan and Russell got that bit about "many subjects [who] identified periods in their lives when their sexual orientation was quite different from how they later identify themselves."  I suspect it's because of the way Kinsey and his colleagues organized their data, for example, that 10 percent of the male subjects' experience (again: not "orientation") was more or less exclusively homosexual for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55.  That's not the subjects talking, it's the researchers.  And since the data refer to experience, whether overt expression or conscious attraction and desire, it doesn't necessarily indicate a change in "sexual orientation": it may indicate a change in circumstances, opportunity, environment, or something else.

For example, a friend was shocked to find that while his father was stationed near San Francisco in the military before he married, he had some sexual experience with other men.  Being 1) young, 2) in uniform, 3) unattached and 4) located near a gay mecca made him accessible to gay men who are attracted to military trade and cultivate them, often generously.  When he was discharged and moved back to the rural Midwest, such opportunities dwindled.  He could have begun seeking out male partners -- they can certainly be found here -- but apparently he didn't.  It appears that he viewed his experiences with men in the Bay area as something that didn't count, since he was far from home and the military was a temporary gig; think of him as a sexual tourist.  He married heterosexually and raised two sons, one of whom turned out to be gay.  So my friend's father could have been a 4 or 5 on the Kinsey continuum based on his youthful experiences -- it's compatible with having a lot of homosexual experience for three years, followed by decades of exclusively heterosexual outlet -- though without getting his full sexual history it's impossible to know.  Did his "orientation" change?  There's no way to tell, because we have no way to measure sexual orientation.

True, the kind of experience a person has over time may tell us something about his or her "sexual orientation," but only a part of it.  Maybe it's like a student's grade point average as a sign of "intelligence" (another murky concept): chances are an intelligent student will have a high GPA, and a less intelligent student a lower one.  But the actual number will depend on various factors: which school he or she attends, for example.  A highly intelligent student may do badly in school because of stress, the inability to focus because of the distracting diversions of campus life, having chosen the wrong major, and many other factors.  A less intelligent student can still have a high GPA through working hard and consistently, choosing one's courses strategically, and so on.  And -- rather like the Kinsey continuum -- a student's GPA can move up or down the scale, but it's not likely to move from a 1 to a 4 GPA in four years, just as one's position on the Kinsey scale is not likely to move from 6 to 0 or vice versa.  One's declared identity can change that drastically (for equally diverse reasons), but one's sexual history is cumulative, and not directly a measure of one's inner nature any more than average grades are.

Perhaps some reader will ask me how I can claim I'm right about this, when all these other smart, credentialed people get it wrong.  I read the damn book, that's how.  I do wish I understood how so many smart, well-trained people can get Kinsey's work so wrong.

We Are in America, Darling, We Have to Make Do

This will be short, because I'm swamped again today, reading half-a-dozen books at the same time.  One of them I've just begun, Peter Hegarty's Gentlemen's Disagreement: Alfred Kinsey, Lewis Terman, and the Sexual Politics of Smart Men (Chicago, 2013), but it looks promising.  I'll probably have more to say about it, but for now I just want to quote a sentence that reflects back on my recent posts on sexual orientation.  Early on, Hegarty refers to one of Kinsey's first public presentations of his research into human sexuality:

His AAAS paper (1941)  showed variability in men’s histories that would bedevil any attempt to divide men into two clear species of “homosexuals” and “heterosexuals” [5]. 

There's nothing new here, but two things to notice.  First, Kinsey resisted and critiqued what is commonly called the “modern” or “Euro-American” homo/hetero binary; Hegarty is, I believe, alluding to Michel Foucault's claim that "the homosexual", unlike "the sodomite," was regarded as a "species."  Kinsey's focus on behavior, as opposed to personality types, supports the notion of sexual "fluidity" to which so many people today pay lip service and then forget. Which makes it all the stranger that he is misunderstood and attacked by academics and others who think they are also engaged in that critique.

Second, within the inversion model (which Kinsey rejected, remember), those two “species” are interdependent – inverts need (or think they need) “normal” men or women as sexual partners, since for two inverts to copulate together is taboo.  "Normal" men don't need inverts, except as they need people who are "bad," polluted, as extramarital sexual partners.  In some ways the invert is preferable to the whore, because the invert reverses the usual practice, and may pay the man to penetrate him.  (Not always, though: one of Martin F. Manalansan's New York-based bakla informants told him gleefully that in America in contrast to the Philippines, the man pays the bakla!  [Global Divas, Duke UP, 2003, 110]).  I hadn't thought of this interdependence before.

When You've Got a Ph.D., Everything Looks Like an Intervention

I'm now well into Heterosexual Africa?: The History of an Idea from the Age of Exploration to the Age of AIDS (Ohio, 2008).  The author, Marc Epprecht, also wrote Hungochani, a highly-praised book on homosexuality in Southern Africa which I have on my shelves but haven't read yet.  In Heterosexual Africa? Epprecht takes on the doctrine, spread by Africans and non-Africans alike, that homosexuality is unknown in Africa, with an emphasis on the impact it has had on responses to the HIV/AIDS pandemic.  In many ways it's a valuable book, and I suspect I'll be writing more about the book in the next few days, but one sentence on page 117 brought me up short, and I want to discuss it now.

In his chapter focusing on HIV/AIDS in Africa, Epprecht surveys the quasi-scientific literature on modes of transmission, which he says ignored male-to-male sexuality almost entirely; at best, this literature mentioned the possibility merely to dismiss it.  What research did mention (usually male) homosex was itself ignored, as though it had never been published.

In an article on African AIDS patients in Europe, from 1981 through 1985, for example, Jean Sonnet and H.Taelman ... noted that one out of forty-two patients in their study admitted to not being heterosexual. The WHO study noted above found even more. Out of 117 African African patients in Europe who were tested in the first nine months of 1986, 5 percent were found to have contracted HIV through homosexual or bisexual transmission, and a further 1 percent either that way or though intravenous drug injection ... 

So far, so bad.  Epprecht repeatedly stresses the inadequacy of terminology like "heterosexual" and "homosexual" for traditional cultures in Africa, invoking the authority of queer and post-colonial theory; he even has wit enough to recognize that "sex" is problematic, since most societies, including the "West," tend to recognize only penis-in-vagina penetration as "sex."  Even that doesn't work outside English-speaking parts of the world, and researchers working in other languages with informants whose first language is not a European one, are often unclear about the languages they use to elicit information.  In this case I have the added difficulty that Epprecht is paraphrasing his sources, though since they were in European languages "homosexual" or its cognates were probably used.

Even among white Americans and Europeans, however, there's considerable ambiguity about a phrase like "not being heterosexual."  Does it mean that the subject is exclusively homosexual in his or her desires and behavior, or simply not exclusively heterosexual?  Considering the number of Americans who don't consider themselves homosexual because they've never been penetrated although they have penetrated many other males, or who have been penetrated but it doesn't count because they "avidly" penetrate females, some more care, if not precision, with terms is desirable here.

"Homosexual or bisexual transmission" is even worse.  Bisexual transmission would require a rather exotic sex life, even for the decadent West: it would mean that both a male and a female partner were involved (simultaneously?) in transmitting the virus to the recipient.  If he got it from a male, it doesn't matter whether he or his partner were "bisexual," which I suppose is what was meant by "bisexual transmission."  As Kinsey wrote in 1948, the word bisexual "should, however, be used with the understanding that it is patterned on the words heterosexual and homosexual, and, like them, refers to the sex of the partner, and proves nothing about the constitution of the person who is labeled bisexual [657]."

Which brings me, in more ways than one, to the sentence by Epprecht that made me see red, emboldened below:

These figures are very low compared to the epidemic in Europe and America.  But they can more usefully be compared to what Alfred Kinsey found in American men in the days before gay rights (that is, 4 percent admitting to homosexuality as a predominant orientation).

I had been wondering why Epprecht hadn't mentioned Kinsey before in this book, aside from a passing allusion seven pages earlier.  Kinsey understood the problems of studying human sexuality better than every researcher Epprecht discusses in this book (including, I fear, himself).  Long before AIDS, Kinsey rejected Western notions of sexual essence that ignored the widely differing experiences and practices of men who have sex with men and women who have sex with women.  He didn't, as far as I know, ask any of his interviewees whether they were homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual. (If he had, most of the heterosexuals would have had no idea what he meant, and would probably have said no.)  He didn't ask them if they'd had homosexual (or heterosexual) experiences.  He asked them what they had done, and with whom.  He was, if I recall correctly what his colleague Wardell Pomeroy wrote, ready to use non-clinical vernacular terms for sexual acts when the interviewee didn't understand clinical terms.  (Asking a farmer or a convict how many times he'd received fellatio, for example, would probably have drawn a blank most of the time.  I kinda wonder if some of the later sex surveys dodged this little problem by not interviewing lower-class or uneducated subjects.)  In short, Kinsey grappled with the very problems that stymied researchers during the AIDS epidemic four decades later, in large part because they'd ignored Kinsey as outdated and irrelevant.  He recognized that many people had a lot of same-sex experience without thinking of themselves as homosexual or bisexual, and he recognized that this counted against the notion of homosexual or bisexual persons, not against their experience, which he rightly considered primary.

But what bothered me about the sentence I quoted above is that Epprecht -- who, you'll recall, has spent over a hundred pages denying the validity of homosexuality as an identity for purposes of studying sexuality in Africa -- is still trying to impose homosexual and bisexual identity on Westerners.  His reference to Kinsey (without a citation in the text or endnote) is incorrect.  It is false that 4 percent of males admitted "to homosexuality as a predominant orientation."  Kinsey didn't use the word "orientation" (to be scrupulous, he used it once in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, in a different sense) in connection with homosexual or heterosexual experience.  What he found was that 4 percent of his male sample had exclusively homosexual outlet throughout their adult lives.  If he asked them how they "identified" (also a word that would have made no sense in that context in the 1930s and 1940s), it wasn't a factor in his numbers or in his homosexual-heterosexual scale.  Additionally, he found that another 6 percent of his male sample had at least as much homosexual as heterosexual outlet for at least three years of their adult lives.  This meant that 10 percent had predominantly homosexual experience for at least three years of their lives; it's the source of the popular claim that Kinsey found that ten percent of the population was gay or lesbian.  Thirty-seven percent of males had at least one homosexual experience to orgasm during their adult lives; I guess they were "not heterosexual." (This includes the 4 percent and the 10 percent, which I mention because I've encountered people who tried to add all the percentages together: 4 percent plus 10 percent plus 37 percent and so on.)

The point I want to make here is that if you're writing about the diversity and fluidity of human sexuality, Kinsey is fundamental.  True, his work was flawed in certain respects, most of which he knew full well (the absence of people of color in the sample, for one).  But he mapped out the understanding and approach that would be vital during the AIDS pandemic, and had to be largely reinvented from scratch because the researchers had ignored him.  Even thirty years into the pandemic, research professionals keep rediscovering that OMFG, there are totally men who have sex with other men and they aren't gay!  Anyone who treats this as a new revelation has just informed you that they don't know what they're talking about, and need to go back to sex-research kindergarten for remedial study of the basics.  Until they do, they are wasting money and time and human lives.

Attacking a Straw Kinsey

The book I was reading yesterday continues to frustrate and annoy me.  The author repeats his erroneous characterization of Kinsey's research -- "Kinsey's traditional behavioral scale for measuring sexual orientation" -- though I concede that this time he may be referring to later researchers' tendency to use the Kinsey continuum to measure sexual orientation, a use which Kinsey didn't intend in the first place and for which it doesn't really work.  But I don't think he understands this, because he clearly hasn't read Kinsey recently enough to have any idea what he wrote, or else has thoroughly misunderstood what Kinsey wrote.

The author spends some time explaining the limits of "a strictly behavioral approach to sexual orientation," and he's more or less right about them.  But then, Kinsey didn't purport to be studying "sexual orientation."  I stress that because so many writers on human sexuality falsely claim that he did.  Kinsey was studying sexual behavior, as the titles of his two big books make explicit.  Even that limited task was probably impossible, because most of his data came from interviews which sought to reconstruct people's sexual histories.  People who've had only one or a handful of sexual partners can probably remember all of them, though if they're over the age of about thirty, they probably can't remember accurately everything they ever did.  And that's assuming that the informant hasn't done anything he or she feels shouldn't have been done, and has either managed to forget it or chooses not to remember it for the interviewer.  It was Masters and Johnson who did some in-depth research into human sexual behavior in a laboratory setting, which more or less eliminated memory malfunctions for the behavior they observed, but couldn't reconstruct the subjects' histories.  Richard Lewontin's critique of another large-scale survey of human sexual behavior (only partially available online, alas, but you can see an exchange between Lewontin and the survey's principal author here) showed that people either can't or won't (or both) remember their sexual histories accurately, let alone report them accurately.

There are other factors, of course.  In an essay called "Aversion / Perversion / Diversion" Samuel Delany tells about a young man he met in a New York porn theater where men would go to have sex with other men.

As we began to touch each other, he leaned toward me to whisper, in a light, working-class accent, "You know, I've never done anything like this before.  All the other sex I've ever had has been with women.  But somebody told me about this place, so I thought ..."*

But Delany met the same young man at least twice more in the same theater over the next few months, and even though the youth greeted him with recognition, each time they began to touch each other, he would repeat the same formula.  Delany comments, "What troubles me in the memory of these encounters is, of course, how much of myself I can see in this fellow.  His litany, like some glorious stutter, recalls Freud's dictum: repetition is desire" (121).  What, I wonder, would the young man have told a researcher who was taking his sexual history?

It was a common criticism of Kinsey in his day that he didn't pay attention to the emotional side of sex.  Usually this complaint came either from religious figures, who weren't all that wild about the behavioral side of sex anyhow, or from psychoanalysts and psychiatrists whose claim to a more scientific account of sex was open to serious question.  The psychologist Abraham Maslow published a paper which purported to show that Kinsey's sample was skewed because it was made up of people who were willing to talk about their sex lives, which apparently proved them to be perverts.  I'll have to track down Maslow's paper, because I'd like to know how he or anyone else could claim to know anything about the sexual practices of the people who wouldn't talk about their sex lives.  From what I've seen, people who deploy this argument are usually quite sure they know what people really do, but they can never explain how they know.  The answer I usually get is along the lines of Nice people don't do things like that, because people who do things like that aren't Nice.  I wouldn't take for granted that people who don't want to talk about their sexual histories have necessarily had fewer partners or a narrower range of practices; it could be the opposite, that they have more to hide.  But again, who knows?

Kinsey focused on behavior, not because he was under any illusion that behavior was the whole story, but because it was what could (however inadequately) be measured and counted.  And that was important, because the real fury over his work came from its indication that far greater numbers of people did what they weren't supposed to be doing than the critics wanted to believe.  This was true not only of homosexuality but of premarital and extramarital intercourse, especially among women: Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, published in 1953, was widely seen as an insult to the virtue of the American Woman, and there's general agreement that Kinsey lost the crucial support of the Rockefeller Foundation because of that controversy.

But the author I'm quoting is unaware of all this.  I mentioned in the previous post a remark by Kinsey about younger men whose overt experience is exclusively homosexual (because, for whatever reason, it was more available to them) although they know they are primarily interested in women.  A reading of what Kinsey wrote would have shown him that Kinsey was aware of these problems.  But there's no way short of a direct memory tap (which, luckily, is beyond reach of our technology for the foreseeable future) to know what people have actually done, or what their true "deep-seated" desires really are.  Researchers who've attempted to study what Kinsey didn't have come up against the same barriers: people don't remember accurately, they can't reconstruct their emotional history in any detail, and there's no way for the interviewer to tell whether they're telling the truth.  As Richard Lewontin wrote about this problem,

Even though the world is material and all its phenomena, including human consciousness, are products of material forces, we should not confuse the way the world is with our ability to know about it. Like it or not, there are a lot of questions that cannot be answered, and even more that cannot be answered exactly. There is nothing shameful in that admission.

Unfortunately, too many researchers are unaware of this, or prefer to ignore it because they believe there is something shameful in that admission.  They dismiss Kinsey -- or rather, their fantasy version of Kinsey -- and blunder ahead without learning from his achievements or from his failures.  That's not necessarily a bad thing, considering how much of science is trial and error.  What is bad is when their (willed?) ignorance leads to the publication of misinformation about their work and its predecessors.  For myself, I'm willing to simply throw out Kinsey's research, but only with the understanding that no one after him has produced any more reliable knowledge about human sexual behavior.

*As reprinted in Delany, Longer Views: Extended Essays (Wesleyan University Press, 1996), pp. 120-1.

Our Precious Sexuality Fluids

In this week's column, Dan Savage answers questions he received in written form at a college appearance.  I thought this one was interesting:

I’ve always considered myself a lesbian, but a few weeks ago, I got really drunk and slept with one of my male best friends. Am I not a lesbian?

Female sexuality is a lot more fluid, as they say, and many lesbian-identified women have slept with men. Your sexuality identity—the label you choose to apply to yourself—should communicate the essential truth about your sexual interests and partner preferences. So you’re free to identify as a lesbian even if you slip and fall on the occasional dick.

His answer is thoroughly inadequate, but that's not entirely his fault, because there are no clear boundaries in this area.  As Savage says, many lesbian-identified women have slept with men, and (he might have mentioned) more than incidentally.  But I think he's wrong that "female sexuality is a lot more fluid" than (presumably) male sexuality.  Many gay-identified men have slept with women, and many straight-identified men have slept with men.  We have no idea how many, of course.  I considered invoking Alfred Kinsey here, but his research is really no help because he didn't study identities.  A lot of people say he found that 10% of the male population was gay, but they're wrong.  Kinsey found that 10% of the (white, incidentally) male population had mostly same-sex outlet to the point of orgasm for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55; he didn't report how they identified themselves.  We don't even know how the 4% of white males who had only same-sex outlet throughout their lives identified themselves.

I'm almost done reading Barbara Deming's A Humming Under My Feet, which I mentioned yesterday, and I'm struck, not just with how many times she records having let men have sex with her (read the book and you'll see why I put it that way) despite her knowledge that she only really desired and fell in love with women, but with how often she seriously considered marrying a man because that's what you're supposed to do: get married to a man, have his children, be a serious mature adult.  From Martin Duberman's account of Deming and her younger contemporary, the gay socialist David McReynolds in A Saving Remnant, it's clear that McReynolds's experience was similar.  Even more depressing, Deming abandoned her lover Nell to the courtship of her brother Ben, with the same rationale: a woman could only offer another woman a second-best kind of love.

But back to Dan Savage.  Just before the question from the lesbian, he answered this one:

I’m a guy who does not find guys physically attractive. Even so, I like to give and receive blowjobs with men. Does this mean anything about my sexual orientation?

Yes.

The question here, I suppose, is how many times you can have sex with someone who isn't covered by your sexual identity before it means anything about your sexual orientation.  Since part of the definition of "sexual orientation" is that you find people of that sex attractive, or as the American Psychological Association defines it:

Sexual orientation is an enduring emotional, romantic, sexual, or affectional attraction toward others. It is easily distinguished from other components of sexuality including biological sex, gender identity (the psychological sense of being male or female), and the social gender role (adherence to cultural norms for feminine and masculine behavior).

(Except that sexual orientation isn't really "easily distinguished" from those other components: most people, including professionals, tend to confuse them.)  "Sexual identity," as I've noticed before, is a confused and confusing label.  It ought to mean which biological sex (male or female) one identifies as, but it's commonly used to refer to which sexual orientation one answers to.  "Sexual identity" is often confused with "sexual orientation," whose meaning is itself unclear due to the ambiguity of the word "sex."  (It's often used to refer to any erotic preference, which has led to pedophilia being called a sexual orientation even though children are not a sex.)  Even among professional sex researchers and other putative experts, the terminology for human sexuality is a mess.  Among us laypeople, it's totally incoherent.

It's tempting to say that labels are useless, and we should just get rid of them and be people.  Many people give in to that temptation, but I haven't noticed that they really get rid of labels.  Instead they just shift them around a little.  If I choose not to label myself, other people will be happy to take up the slack, so I think I had better be prepared to deal with that.  If I do label myself, they will misunderstand the labels, and sometimes I suspect that misunderstanding is deliberate.  Or maybe it's just the old "Don't stereotype me, but I'll stereotype you all I want" approach.

A disturbing aspect of Deming's experiences with males as she describes them in A Humming Under My Feet is that the men who tried to pressure her into copulation (and too often succeeded) just assumed that if they wanted her, she must want them back, or at any rate be willing and available -- especially since she was a single woman traveling alone; this made her fair game.  They wouldn't take a direct "no" for an answer, and she had to be quite insistent that she wasn't available to them.  One notable swine, a Greek sailor whose roaming hands she had to fend off for hours, finally sneered at her, "So you don't like men?"

I believe in love, I told him.  I added that I was sorry if he'd misunderstood me.  He gave a contemptuous shrug and strode off [218].

Even if her "sexual identity" had been straight or bi, she might simply not have wanted him.  To say so might have been dangerous for her, of course: male pride is touchy, and is often defended with violence.  That too is one of the inequities feminism rejects: that women must always be careful of men's feelings, though men needn't reciprocate. 

This refusal to take "no" for an answer is not limited to straights, of course.  Many people figure that if you're the right sex for them, they're the right sex for you, and if your "sexual identity" confirms that, then you are not allowed to turn them down.  They're allowed to turn others down, of course, because that's different. These issues are really prior to questions of identities and labels.  There's no real need to explain why you're turning down -- or, for that matter accepting -- someone's sexual overtures in terms of orientations or identities; simply saying "No, thanks" or "Yes, thanks" ought to be enough.  People with inadequate erotic manners won't be stopped by a mere identity: they'll be sure that they can be the exception to your orientation.

Identities aren't just individual phenomena, though, they're social, and ideally they help us to interact considerately with one another.    They're also used for solidarity and control, which has a downside too.  If someone asked me the same question that young lesbian asked Dan Savage, I think I'd turn it around: What would you say if another lesbian you knew asked you the same question?  Your answer to her would be my answer to you.

No True Neurotic

There's another attempt to define authenticity that has been on my mind, but I'm giving it a separate post.  I just read Martin Duberman's A Saving Remnant (The New Press, 2011), his dual biography of the gay/lesbian left pacifist activists Barbara Deming (1917-1984) and David McReynolds (1929- ), which is fascinating both because the subjects are such inspiring people and for its account of the social history in which they lived their lives and built their careers.

Martin Duberman was born in 1930, which makes him and McReynolds almost exact contemporaries.  I was born in 1951, which means I came of age along with a sea change in attitudes toward homosexuality, as well as about race and sex.  Sometimes I forget how much difference it would have made if I'd been born even ten years earlier.  Duberman mentions several times that gay people of the generation he shares with McReynolds found it difficult or impossible to get rid of the guilt and shame with which they'd been indoctrinated by their upbringing.  He misses, however, what looks like a coping mechanism that I think is more common among people of his age than it is among younger ones.  It hasn't completely faded away, of course, because there's still a strong antihomosexual (and antisexual) streak in American culture.

I'm referring to Duberman's repeated assertion that McReynolds

strongly believed – and in this he was way ahead of his time – that the real issue was exclusivity, that the rigid categories of “gay” and “straight” served to mask the reality that everyone felt erotic attraction to both men and women (“any man who is not potentially able … to have relations with another man is fully as neurotic as the homosexual who cannot relate to women”) [119].

In support of this claim, Duberman cites the research of Alfred Kinsey, with a boost from William Masters and Virginia Johnson.

Their in-depth studies of groups of gay and straight people – some of the latter overtly homophobic – both insistent on their exclusive orientation, were nonetheless found to have pronounced fantasies about having sex with people whose gender contradicted their conscious, stated preference [ibid.]

It has been a while since I read Masters and Johnson's Homosexuality in Perspective (Little, Brown, 1979).  Among the things I remember most strongly about it was their concern that women's superior sensitivity and sexual technique with other women should not be used as "recruiting" propaganda for lesbians.  Why not? I thought.  Certainly if you believe that people can be persuaded to become homosexual, they should be acquainted with what Masters and Johnson thought were scientific facts -- in this case, that men have very little staying power and pay little attention to the response of their sexual partners, compared to women.

Masters and Johnson also claimed to have converted (or "recruited," to borrow their terminology) homosexuals to heterosexuality in a two-week program with a 71% success rate.  When I read the book, I noticed that they had the same problems most conversion-therapy programs have: understandably, their "successful" patients were not eager to keep in touch with them after the program was over, so they had no way of knowing whether the change had been permanent.  Where follow-up was managed in other studies, reversion was common, and "success" limited to a few months.

In recent years, Masters and Johnson's program has come under suspicion.  Masters refused to show the raw data to his associate Robert Kolodny, who eventually concluded that the cases described in the book were dubious, and in later years Virginia Johnson herself declined to stand behind Homosexuality in Perspective, calling it a "bad book." 

Of course it could be that Masters and Johnson's other claims were valid, even if their conversion program was bogus.  One notable aspect of Homosexuality in Perspective was that it used a heterosexual control group, which is unusual.  I recall their finding that among the most common erotic fantasies they found in their subjects, regardless of sexual orientation, was that of copulating with someone other than one of their usually preferred sex.  The other most common fantasy was copulating with someone other than their partner.  What I don't recall, and maybe I should just go over the book again, is whether either of these fantasies was universal in their subjects, or merely most common.  I doubt very much that every single subject had these fantasies, but even if they did, Masters and Johnson were not doing a sex survey like Kinsey's: they did not even try to study a representative sample of the population.  They selected their subjects carefully, after interviews and medical workups.  It's ironic that the criticism often (and largely inaccurately) leveled at Kinsey -- that his sample was unrepresentative of the population at large -- is actually much more true of Masters and Johnson.  That doesn't by itself mean that their conclusions were invalid, because they were doing a very different kind of research than Kinsey.  But it does mean that you cannot generalize from their subjects to everyone else.  Their work does not prove that everybody is fundamentally bisexual (whatever that would mean), any more than Kinsey's did.

Kinsey may well have believed that everyone is basically bisexual, but his research found no such thing.  Fifty-four percent of his male sample turned out to be monosexual -- that is, either exclusively homosexual or exclusively heterosexual in their sexual outlet -- throughout their lives.  Duberman, who wrote a long and intelligent review of two recent biographies of Kinsey, knows better.  That so many people who do know better nevertheless distort Kinsey's work is interesting, and somewhat disturbing, given their usual disdain for the irrationality and ignorance of sexual conservatives, but they are still wrong.

Besides, this is all irrelevant.  According to Duberman, both Deming and McReynolds had some slight heterosexual experience (as most gay people seem to do, thanks to relentless social pressure to be heterosexual), and in his later life, after years of psychotherapy, McReynolds summoned up a few weak heterosexual impulses in himself, and then dropped the matter.  The notion that exclusive heterosexuality and exclusive homosexuality are both 'equally neurotic', while technically true (zero equals zero) often turns up among people of this era: Margaret Mead has been reported to have said the same thing, as has the maverick psychotherapist Albert Ellis, and quite a few people have quoted it around me over the past several decades.  When I was younger I took it more seriously myself, before I figured out what was wrong with it.

Most blatantly, this claim is an attempt to moralize sexual orientation -- to claim that one sexual orientation is healthier or morally superior to another.  That would have to be argued, not simply asserted ex cathedra, and I'm not aware of any evidence to support it.  It sounds especially odd from the lips and pens of people who accept a medical model of sexual orientation, holding that it's not chosen (and is therefore morally neutral). And I can grasp the notion that someone who shuts himself or herself off from a whole sub-range of sexual experience might validly be classified as "neurotic," though I don't agree.  For one thing, how far do we extend the range of experience that we are required to explore?  A bit of s/m, maybe?  Water sports?  Or does this requirement extend only to sexual orientation?  If so, how much heterosexual experience am I required to have before I'm allowed to say No to having any more?

Try this analogy.  I'm left-handed, though somewhat bi-manual: I write and eat with my left hand, but I play guitar right-handed, and so on.  Some people are more strictly handed, other less so.  Now imagine someone telling me that I'm neurotic if I won't try to be more ambidextrous.  I would demand some evidence for the claim in the first place, but more forcefully I'd ask what business it is of theirs anyway.  If this seems an outlandish comparison, remember that left-handedness has been demonized in many cultures, and well into the twentieth century American southpaws were often forced by their teachers to use their right hands in the classroom.  Testing the limits of one's comfort zone is all very well, but it's for me to decide when, how, and how far I'm going to push mine.

Who gets to prescribe what sexual experience someone else must have, anyway?  I've argued before that (as far as I can tell) regardless of our sexual orientation, most individuals of our preferred sex are erotically unattractive to us, let alone the other sex.  Should someone be able to nag me to have sex with him just because I like males and he's male?  Some have tried, Cthulhu knows why.  I don't think anyone has the right to guilt-trip anyone else into putting out, for any reason.  No one should be made to feel inadequate because he or she is unattracted to any person, or any class of persons.  I may feel regret when I turn someone down, but I wouldn't want anyone I was interested in to have sex with me simply because I asked, regardless of whether he wanted to.

And this leaves aside other questions about sexual availability.  Some people have promised monogamy to their partners.  Monogamy is arguably unnatural, and it's after all only a lifestyle choice, but that doesn't entitle someone to claim that a partnered person is uptight for refusing to have sex with them.  They may well be uptight, but they are entitled to their uptightness.  Quite apart from sexual orientation, not everybody wants or chooses to pursue a wide range of partners.  That variation of human sexuality also needs to be respected, I believe.  We have the right to our irrational little quirks as long as they harm nobody -- and not having sex with someone is not harming them.  Literally dozens of people haven't had sex with me, and so far I've survived.

So I'm bothered by Duberman's question-begging reference to "the reality that everyone felt erotic attraction to both men and women," not least because it evidently wasn't even true for the guy who declared it a reality: he had to undergo therapy for years to persuade himself that he was even weakly attracted to a woman.  So first, you need to prove that it's a "reality," and then you need to give good reasons why I should pursue attractions, let alone copulation, with people I'm not conscious of being attracted to in the first place.  This does seem to be mainly a hobbyhorse of the generation of gay people just before mine; but Duberman chose to trot it out in a book published just last year.

The Bisexual Zone

I'm slowly reading J. Neil C. Garcia's Philippine Gay Culture (2nd edition, University of the Philippines Press, 2008) -- slowly, because it's long and dense, but also because Garcia grapples seriously with questions of local institutions and expressions of same-sex eroticism without making the mistakes many post-colonial scholars do.  He has some good ideas, but he doesn't always go deeply enough; the benefit I'm getting is a better understanding of the assumptions that lie underneath a lot of discourse about sexuality.  I keep stopping to think over what he says, so it's going to take me a while to read all 500 pages.

For example, on page 44 he summarizes Alfred Kinsey's numbers on homosexual behavior among (American) males: 37 percent had at least one homosexual experience to orgasm with another male between the ages of 16 and 55; 25 percent had "more than incidental" homosexual experience for at least three years between 16 and 55; and 4 percent had exclusively homosexual experience throughout their adult lives.  He then draws on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's schema of "minoritizing" versus "universalizing" perspectives on sexual orientation, trying to apply it to Kinsey's work:

And so, Kinsey universalizes the question of homosexuality to include even the mainstream, so-called homosexual majority.  It is acts, not people, that may accurately be called homo- or heterosexual.  And with sexuality as simply a "discourse of acts," it becomes somewhat possible to transhistoricize "homosexuality," even if only as a matter of behavior.  Apparently, Kinsey's model presupposes either that all human beings are potentially bisexual, or that some forms of bonding among individuals of the same sex -- called "homosociality" in more recent scholarly literatures -- just happen to turn genital now and then [44-5].

There are several useful problems here.  Garcia is right, to a point, that Kinsey's approach includes "even the mainstream, so-called heterosexual majority" in the category of homosexual behavior; that was one reason Kinsey's work shocked mainstream America so much.  But the usual public reaction was to suppose that any man who had an orgasm with another man even once must be a homosexual.  (That fabulous creature whose definition no one can agree on.)  On reflection they might concede that one time might be an experiment; compare Voltaire's famous rejoinder "Once, a philosopher; twice, a Sodomite!"  Or a man might be in prison, with no other option than other males for the duration.  But the fact that many people have and enjoy sex with others of their own sex without thinking of themselves as homosexuals is still extremely difficult for most people to parse.

Remember the trade/queer model that was so common in the US at the time Kinsey and his associates were gathering their data: A man who provided his erection to another man without reciprocation was still a Man, no matter how many times he did so.  A Queer was one who put another man's erection to use.  Superficially, this model was same-gender: Queers were generally contemptuous of "pansies, fags, and swish." They were also as insistent as Trade that Trade are not homosexual.  In Barry Reay's book on the subject, he quotes Thomas Painter, one of Kinsey's informants, who wrote:

Painter, who appeared in Henry’s book along with his hustler associates, later questioned the sexologist’s categorizations. ‘Dr. [George W.] Henry obviously believes that participation in a homosexual act makes one a homosexual, and we do not believe any such thing.’ He was especially critical of the doctor’s characterization of the hustler Leonard R. as a homosexual when he was not homosexual: ‘most male prostitutes to homosexuals are themselves heterosexual [New York Hustlers, Manchester UP, 2010, 63].

This model can be valid as long as it's understood that that it treats homosexuality as a matter of role in sexual acts, not of sexual arousal or desire.  It had to accommodate numerous ad hoc exceptions, however, like "Eddie, who was being pedicated by both Painter and Melcarth and had begun to worry about enjoying it – ‘Eddie … fucks girls avidly’ – was easily convinced that it merely enlarged his sphere of enjoyment and did not make him ‘queer’" [Reay, 124].  Since Eddie would have to be queer according to the Trade/Queer model, something else than accurate classification is going on here.  I'm willing to accept almost any definition of "homosexuality" for purposes of discussion; what I find interesting is that even a given definition's advocates can't stick to it.  And as I've suggested before, the fact that advocates of the Trade/Queer model have to keep insisting that Trade aren't "homosexual" indicates that there's a strong cultural tendency to believe that they are.  That doesn't mean that either side is right -- that remains to be settled -- only that the Trade/Queer distinction isn't as obvious as its proponents want to believe.

Returning to Garcia's "Apparently, Kinsey's model presupposes either that all human beings are potentially bisexual, or that some forms of bonding among individuals of the same sex -- called 'homosociality' in more recent scholarly literatures -- just happen to turn genital now and then." It has been a while; I should reread Kinsey's chapters on homosexuality, but as I remember Kinsey didn't presuppose anything there about why human beings have sexual contact with persons of their own sex.  I do know that he rejected biological and psychoanalytic theories.  His aim was to find out what people did, and with whom, not to classify them as kinds of people -- homosexuals, fornicators, adulterers, masturbators, etc. -- as previous medical sexologists did.  I find it intriguing that so many people are evidently unable to distinguish between acts and actors, even as a thought experiment.

I get the impression from writers about Kinsey that he may personally have believed that "all human beings are potentially bisexual," but it's not even clear what that means.  Many people use the slogan to mean that we are born erotic blank slates, capable of any sexual desire or behavior, until Society forces us into certain categories.  This doesn't work very well, because clearly people don't conform to Society's dictates, even apart from sexual orientation. Masturbation, for example, was regarded with almost universal horror in mid-20th century America, yet it was almost universally practiced.  Besides, Society sends mixed messages on sexuality: fornication is forbidden, but boys also learn that it's fun and a proof of manhood besides, and Boys Will Be Boys; women are to be respected, but there are many women who are not respectable and therefore are fair game for male pursuit.  And so on.

Whether all human beings are bisexual in practice, regardless of Society's categories, is another question.  Whatever Kinsey himself believed, his data didn't show any such thing.  A majority of his male sample were monosexual: 50 percent had exclusively heterosexual experience throughout their lives, and 4 percent had exclusively homosexual experience throughout their adult lives, and most of the rest skewed toward one pole or the other.  I've had some entertaining disputes with people who wanted to define "bisexuality" to mean equal attraction to, or activity, with both sexes, which would exclude most practicing bisexuals from the category; but they refused to say where along the continuum the line real bisexuals and mock bisexuals should be drawn.  It's also possible, of course, to declare Kinsey's data invalid, but I'm not aware of any other evidence that most human beings are bisexual: the claim is an act of faith.

"Potential" is another tricky word.  At birth every human being can potentially learn any language on earth, but no human being can learn every language.  (This is another logical distinction that appears very difficult for many people to grasp.)  A few individuals are able to master many languages, and many people can get along in several; but in real life the potential always narrows down to some degree.   Andrew Holleran once wrote that nobody will have sex with just anybody, but most people will have sex with almost anybody.  It should also be pointed out that the number of people I have sex with is limited not only by my willingness, but by their willingness to have sex with me; this is a hard fact that seems to be left out of the discourse most of the time, as is the difference between my ideal or "perfect" partner and those I actually am attracted to, the ones I'll happily accept if they offer.  As I've also pointed out before, "sexual orientation" is a blunt instrument for describing people's erotic attractions: all my sexual partners are male, but I'm not attracted to all, or even most males, and this seems to be true for most people.

I don't know whether Kinsey would have agreed with me, but it seems unlikely to me that there is only one explanation for the range of behavior he discovered.   Those percentages aren't broken down, for example, according to the role the men involved played in the acts they enjoyed.  (Since the criterion was having an orgasm, I think it's safe to say that at least some enjoyment was involved, a point to which I'll return.  Though this raises the question of whether the orgasms involved were both partners' or just one's.)

The time parameter Kinsey used ("for at least three years of their lives") also may reflect opportunity.  For example, a man might go cruising for easily accessible orgasms from other men while he was single and lived in a city, but then he married and could get regular sex at home -- but he might still go cruising now and then if he traveled on business away from his family.  Depending on his personal inhibitions, he might or might not give his male partners orgasms as well.  (As the example of Painter's Eddie shows, some men are more accommodating than others.)   During World War II, a good many military personnel of both sexes took advantage of same-sex erotic opportunities "for at least three years of their lives" while they were far away from home in cities with lots of gay bars, but found heterosexual opportunities easier and safer when they went home to their farms or small towns.

Whether their "orientations" changed is another question, but we have no way to measure "sexual orientation."  Kinsey counted experiences, not orientations, despite the use of his homosexual-heterosexual continuum and even his interviewing format by more recent researchers, who either assume that experience equals orientation or hope that no one will notice that the two are not the same thing.  Many of Kinsey's critics accused him of ignoring the emotional aspects of sex, but it's arguable that he did so out for convenience's sake, since acts are relatively easy to count and emotions aren't.

Garcia's other alternative, that "some forms of bonding among individuals of the same sex ... just happen to turn genital now and then," might apply to some of the people in what might be called Kinsey's bisexual zone, but it begs the question of why they "just happen to turn genital."  That's Garcia begging the question, by the way, since as far as I know Kinsey didn't suggest this possibility.  I've often talked to people who spoke of sex as something that just happens when "love" reaches a certain level of intensity, but this is certainly not true for everyone.  And it's a reminder that many attempts to explain sexual behavior among human beings ignore the fact of human consciousness.  We may try out things because we hear about them, or learn about them in other ways.  (Rural kids seeing farm animals copulating, for example.)  If they feel good and we can get away with it, we'll probably do them again if we get a chance.  And of course, heterosexuality is compulsory among human beings as it isn't for other animals, but it's forbidden when it's not compulsory, so kids often go to a lot of trouble to get sexual experience -- not just from "instinct" but to be able to feel like adults.

The flaw in essentialist accounts of sexual orientation, whether they're gendered or not, is that they assume that sexuality is driven by mysterious essences in a person.  They tend to ignore the world and people outside the person.  In gendered accounts, we have (say) the "woman's soul trapped in the body of a man," seeking the man's soul in the body of a man. Why it wouldn't be as responsive to a man's soul in a woman's body isn't clear.  This model also founders on why a man would be interested in having sex with an invert: maybe his man's soul is drawn to the woman's soul in the invert's body?  In the nineteenth century the model fostered a narrative of doomed love, the invert vainly seeking "normal" partners.  The underlying assumption is that male and female are opposites, mutually attracted like magnetic poles, but this is an assumption, belied by the fact that all heterosexual males aren't attracted to all heterosexual females, and that some heterosexuals are attracted to some individuals of their own sex.  The latter case is seen as an anomaly, but maybe it's just a sign that the "opposites attract" model of sex is incorrect; Emma Donoghue showed in her book Inseparable that it hasn't always been the only model of love in Western Culture.

Another reason to doubt the gendered model is that people work so hard to find differences at all costs, especially where gender is concerned.  If a lesbian couple both cut their hair the same length, then the blonde must be the femme and the brunette must be the butch.  If both are blonde, then some other difference must be the opposite that constitutes their bond: one is taller, or heavier, or whatever.  Class can also be gendered, with the lower-class partner ascribed butch.

It's interesting to me that even in the Philippines, where a gendered model of same-sex eroticism rules the roost according to Garcia, other models coexist, and not only the supposedly Western "gay" one.  Judging from the popular genre of "macho dancer" movies, which are now a niche market in the West but didn't originate as export products, many of the clients of male sex workers in the boy bars aren't obviously flaming queens.  Bakla -- the noisily effeminate transgender men -- also work in the bars and service male clients who want that type.  In Midnight Dancer, the breakthrough film in the genre, one of the macho dancers has a friendly affair with a bakla coworker, but the emotional focus of the story is his relationship with a masculine client of higher socioeconomic status; again, I suppose the upper-class guy can be read as the Queer to the dancer's Trade, but the dancer is too emotionally and sexually responsive to fit that reductive model very well.

The same consideration applies to Latin America, where the paradigm is often vestida (cross-dressed penetrated feminine male) and mayate (impenetrable macho male), activo and pasivo, but there's still plenty of homogender same-sex activity going on under the activo / pasivo cover.  The dichotomy doesn't hold up under even cursory inspection.  This reminds me of what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu discovered in his early fieldwork on North African Muslim societies:

... I was stupefied to discover, by the use of statistics -- something that was very rarely done in ethnology -- that the type of marriage considered to be typical in Arabo-Berber societies, namely marriage with the parallel girl cousin, accounted for about 3 to 4 per cent of cases, and 5 to 6 per cent in Marabout families, that are stricter and more orthodox [In Other Words (Polity Press, 1990), 4].

Similarly, the dominant model of sexuality in a society might not be the most common; it might even be a minority.  But if everyone pays lip service to it as the way things are, they'll try to make everyone fit it anyway.  In the US, this process reverses the Philippine model: "gay" means two gender-compliant ("straight-acting" is the code) men together, even though many gay men are anything but masculine; gay men obsess over straight men, tops and bottoms; and gender play such as drag is still very popular not only as entertainment but as the guilty, half-denied other side of respectable Homo-American culture.  It's there, but it doesn't count.

Contemporary Debates on the Queer Question

I've just begun reading Thomas S. Serwatka's book Queer questions, clear answers: the contemporary debates on sexual orientation (Praeger, 2010). Serwatka is an openly gay administrator at University of North Florida. As the subtitle of the book suggests, he aims to give an overview of "contemporary debates on sexual orientation," which is a fine project, but Serwatka's execution is, well, flawed.

In his discussion of Kinsey, for example, Serwatka writes:

Unfortunately, despite some of the strengths of his surveys and interviews, Kinsey’s sampling techniques left much to be desired and have justifiably generated a number of criticisms about the accuracy of his numbers. The male participants Kinsey and his colleagues used in their study were predominantly white, they voluntarily signed up to be in a study on sexual attitudes and activities, and they included a higher percentage of college students than would be expected as well as an overrepresentation of volunteers who had been in the prison system.

It takes a certain talent to pack so much misinformation into one sentence. One at a time:

The male participants Kinsey and his colleagues used in their study were predominantly white ...

In fact the participants whose sexual histories were analyzed in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male were all white. Kinsey interviewed African-Americans, but not enough for representative samples, so their histories were not used in the book. Besides, American society is predominantly white and was even more so in the 1930s and 1940s when Kinsey was collecting data, so the question for a representative sample would be whether blacks were underrepresented.

... they voluntarily signed up to be in a study on sexual attitudes and activities ...

I might read this clause more charitably and less critically if Wersatka hadn't already shown that he's misinformed about Kinsey's work. True, the informants participated voluntarily, in that they weren't compelled, but that is true of the participants in other, later surveys that Wersatka cites uncritically. It's hard to imagine how you'd get participants involuntarily.

... and they included a higher percentage of college students than would be expected as well as an overrepresentation of volunteers who had been in the prison system.

True, Kinsey began by getting the histories of college students from the Marriage class he was teaching. But he knew he needed a wider range of subjects, and traveled the country in quest of them. He buttonholed just about everyone he met, and gave lectures which concluded with an appeal for 100% participation by the audiences -- which he often got, often in churches and American Legion chapters.

The complaint about too many convicts in the sample is a perennial, presumably based on the assumption that too many prisoners would stuff the ballot box, as it were, with hot man-to-man action. The trouble is that it isn't true, and has been known not to be true for a long time. As Martin Duberman wrote in a review of a 1997 biography of Kinsey:

... Paul Gebhard (one of Kinsey's co-authors and his successor as director of the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research -- he retired in 1982), himself reacting to criticism leveled against the two volumes, spent years "cleaning" the Kinsey data of its purported contaminants -- removing, for example, all material derived from prison populations in the basic sample. In 1979, Gebhard, with Alan Johnson, published The Kinsey Data, and -- to his own surprise -- found that Kinsey's original estimates held: Instead of Kinsey's 37 percent, Gebhard and Johnson came up with 36.4 percent; the 10 percent figure (with prison inmates excluded) came to 9.9 percent for white, college-educated males and 12.7 percent for those with less education.

So, the numbers dropped by less than one percent. Duberman added:

And as for the call for a "random sample," a team of independent statisticians studying Kinsey's procedures had concluded as far back as 1953 that the unique problems inherent in sex research precluded the possibility of obtaining a true random sample, and that Kinsey's interviewing technique had been "extraordinarily skillful." They characterized Kinsey's work overall as "a monumental endeavor."

Kinsey's original goal was 100,000 histories; he eventually got 18,000, and used about 12,000 of them in the two Sexual Behavior volumes. I get the impression that Serwatka believes Kinsey used every history he took, but Kinsey knew better than that, had a statistician on staff, and built his final samples with care. The result was imperfect, of course, but not for the reasons Serwatka claims.

So, what's going on here? I've gotten as far as Serwatka's discussion of "genetic" influences on sexual orientation, and he presents the contemporary debate about the issue as one between raving queer theorists and fundamentalist Christians on one side, and thoughtful scientists on the other. But he's got a good many of his facts wrong (I may write more about this in a day or two), and the gay and lesbian scientists who've criticized the "born gay" research on scientific grounds are conspicuously absent from his bibliography. I intend to try to finish the book, but Serwatka's hearty, preacher's chalk-talk style is painful to read. I'll soldier on, however.