Still slogging through chapter one, moving on from lying about Bell and Weinberg’s Homosexualities, now we commence to lying about Kinsey. You knew Kinsey would show up here sooner or later…right? But actually…no. Because the more you dig into Hafer’s “facts” via his cites, the more you find yourself with…a very familiar name that is not Kinsey.

First…some links the the previous episodes…

Deathstyle by Dick Hafer – A Review

Hafer’s Homosexuality: Legitimate Alternate Deathstyle – A Personal Review

Hafer’s Homosexuality: Legitimate Alternate Deathstyle – A Personal Review (continued…)

Hafer’s Homosexuality: Legitimate Alternate Deathstyle – A Personal Review (continued…)

In our last episode, Larry…the sensible middle ground between raving bigot Chester and loathsome Mr. Militant Homosexual Sodomite…was saying that anyone who had the three to five hundred sexual partners in a lifetime obsession with sex that homosexuals do (but which Homosexualities Does Not in fact claim), they’d be considered a pervert. To which Sodomite responds that he can’t help being gay, it’s how he was born.

Notice how deftly Hafer does this. One moment sensible middle ground Larry is throwing out a completely false factoid from the Bell and Weinberg study and in the next panel Sodomite just lets it stand without even addressing its factuality. Of course I have hundreds of sexual partners…it’s a service I provide along with package deliveries… So now the reader will likely go along with it, like Sodomite just did.

You wonder if this really is some sort of mendacity on Hafer’s part, or just the reliable blindness of the bigot mindset. Of course it’s true. Everyone knows homosexuals are perverts. So let’s just move along…

So Sodomite, agreeing without saying so, that having hundreds of sex partners is all just part of being a homosexual, says that anyway he can’t help himself because he was born that way.

“THAT’S A COP-OUT!” shouts middle ground Larry. Because “Kinsey and company”, as Larry/Hafer tells us…

“…made two studies by polling homosexuals in the 1940s and again in 1970.  Guess what percentage of them believed THEMSELVES that they were “born that way.”

(the scare quotes are Hafer’s)

“Ninety percent?” offers Sodomite.

“No…ONLY 9%…! The least objectionable answer and only 9 out of 100 could bring themselves to claim it.”

To which Chester asks, “What did they claim as the reason for their deviancy?”

And saying “Look for yourself,” Larry/Hafer provides us with a chart

Early homosexual experiences with adults or peers: 22%
Around homosexual a lot, homosexuals, friends: 16%
Poor relationship with mother:15%
Unusual development (sissy, tom-boy, didn’t get along with own gender, etc) 15%
Poor relationship with father: 14%
Unavailable heterosexual partners: 12%
Social ineptitude: 9%
Born that way: 9%

…all of which adds up to 112% I’m pretty sure that’s not 9 out of 100. But let us pause and take note that even Hafer seems to understand that all the other causes of homosexuality listed in that chart are…objectionable.

Let’s talk about cop-outs. Hafer provides us with two more cites…just not to the source he’s claiming these factoids came from. And I need to point out here how difficult it is to even notice the cites in this book. You have to look closely. Very very closely. The cite numbers are tiny. Probably intentionally so, because they’re only there to add respectability to the bullshit Hafer is shoveling, and the reader is supposed just gloss over them and passively accept what they’re being told.

The first cite is to a paper A.P. Bell, one of the co-authors of Homosexualities, presented at the Nebraska Symposium on Motivation in 1973. If you’re wondering how 1973 can be in the 1940s and also 1970 you are not the target audience of this book. I cannot locate this paper, but the abstract in a subsequent paper by Bell in 1975 might be relevant to this factoid Hafer throws out at us…

Before addressing ourselves to the question “Where do we go from here?” with respect to research in the area of homosexuality, we would do well to take stock of where we have been and where we are. In this regard, I cannot think of a more comprehensive statement than what is to be found in the preface to Weinberg’s and my annotated bibliography of homosexuality. In our summary of the 1265 items which were included in that volume, we pointed out that:

…discussions of homosexuality have consisted primarily of speculations prompted by theoretical models or statements whose constructs have not been tested in any systematic manner…

Studies designed to test these assumptions about the nature of homosexual development have been few, while those which have been conducted have usually included small, biased samples as well as measurements which have been subjectively derived. Little attention has been given to the wide range of homosexual orientation and adjustment; most have viewed homosexuality-heterosexuality as a simple dichotomy…most of their subjects have been those who eschew their homosexual orientation and whose functioning in other areas of their lives has been marginal.

(Emphasis mine)

As I pointed out in the previous installment when Hafer started waving around Homosexualities as some sort of proof that homosexuals were wildly promiscuous, the authors made an effort in the introduction of their study to inform their readers that…

It should be pointed out that reaching any consensus about the exact number of homosexual men or women exhibiting this or that characteristic is not an aim of the present study.

Why? Because for one thing they knew they didn’t, could not, obtain a representative sample. It’s the problem that plagued sex researchers all through the decades. How do you do science, actual, verifiable, reproducible science, on a subset of the human family that is generally terrified of being discovered? Bell and Weinberg had to recruit volunteers from the gay bars and baths because in the early 1970s for most homosexuals, the closet was a matter of survival. How do you reach potential subjects for scientific research that are trying very hard not to be seen? What sorts of subjects does that leave you with? Bell understood that and was warning about it in 1975. He would have known it in 1974.

So there’s Hafer waving this factoid he pulled out of a paper published in 1974, that almost certainly suffered from the same sampling problem that bedeviled Homosexualities, and all those studies Bell is warning about in his 1975 paper. But is Hafer even citing that paper?

It’s a good question because the next cite, tucked away at the bottom right hand corner of that chart above, is this:

Paul Cameron, “What causes homosexuality?” Lincoln NE – Institute for Scientific Investigation of Sexuality, 1984.

That now regrettably named Institute for Scientific Investigation of Sexuality (ISIS) is Paul Cameron’s vanity press. It eventually morphed into The Family Research Council. So that nine percent figure was a Paul Cameron factoid. It did not come from any part of the Kinsey Institute.  The figures in that chart are Paul Cameron figures. Hafer is saying they’re from the Kinsey Institute but his cite says they’re from Paul Cameron.

They came in other words, from the same guy who asserted based on reviewing the obituaries in two gay community newspapers, that the average lifespan of a homosexual is just 46 years.

In further words…

In 1984 the Nebraska Psychological Association issued a statement disassociating itself “from the representations and interpretations of scientific literature offered by Dr. Paul Cameron.”In 1986 the American Sociological Association passed a resolution stating, “The American Sociological Association officially and publicly states that Paul Cameron is not a sociologist, and condemns his consistent misrepresentation of sociological research. “This was based on a report from the ASA’s Committee on the Status of Homosexuals in Sociology, which summarized Cameron’s inflammatory statements and commented, “It does not take great analytical abilities to suspect from even a cursory review of Cameron’s writings that his claims have almost nothing to do with social science and that social science is used only to cover over another agenda. Very little of his work could find support from even a bad misreading of genuine social science investigation on the subject and some sociologists, such as Alan Bell, have been ‘appalled’ at the abuse of their work.” In 1996, the board of directors of the Canadian Psychological Association approved a position statement disassociating the organization from Cameron’s work on sexuality, stating that he had “consistently misinterpreted and misrepresented research on sexuality, homosexuality, and lesbianism.”

-via Wikipedia – Paul Cameron

So here is Hafer citing Bell, and then citing Cameron. Most likely why Hafer isn’t actually citing Bell for the chart itself, but Cameron, is exactly because Bell’s work doesn’t get him where he wants to go. So instead he cites Paul Cameron, not Bell who was among sociologists appalled at the abuse by Cameron of their work. But he introduces these “facts” to his readers as if they came from Kinsey.

Which makes it a fair question: Did Hafer get Any of the figures in this book from the sources he claims he is citing, or did he get them all from Paul Cameron?

Stay tuned…