We shall add to this page if and when we feel inclined but for the time being we have the following broad topics discussed:

1. Call people "homosexual", even if they are not.
2. Use a small sub-group, and claim all gays are like them.
3. Quote reputable people out of context.
4. Use a number of studies that have different approaches.
5. Draw in arbitrary boundaries.
6. Present related data as causing the other.

1. A young man is only sexually attracted to other men but he is still a virgin.

2. A woman has only ever had lesbian relationships but isn't having sex with anyone at the moment.

3. A man has only ever had sex with other men. He is HIV+ and has chosen to be celibate as a result.

4. A woman experimented with men in her teens but feels sexually attracted only to other women. She is in a stable and monogamous lesbian relationship.

5. A man is sexually attracted to both men and women but apart from one or two experiences with other men only has sex with his wife.

6. A woman is sexually attracted to both men and women and is married to a guy. As a couple they use the Personal Columns seek out other women for 3-way sexual encounters.

7. A man, for religious reasons, decides to be celibate but continues to fantacise about having sex with other men (although he denies this in public). Prior to this decision he had been in a gay relationship and has had sex with many men since his adolesence.

8. A woman, for religious reasons, decides to get married and only have sex with her husband but continues to fantacise about having sex with other women. Prior to this she had both homosexual and heterosexual experiences.

9. A man is happily married with children but also has sex with other men in secret (always anonymously and usually in toilet blocks or in parks at night). None of his family or friends either knows or guesses he has sex with other men and he would be horrified if they ever found out.

• Obviously, gay men and women also start off as virgins - but not having had sex doesn't make them heterosexual.

• Obviously, gay and women can also go through periods of not having sex (either by choice or circumstances) - but this doesn't make them heterosexual

• Obviously, people can hide some but not all of their lives from public view

• The surveys are typically done door-to-door by strangers. Only completely openly gay men and women will tell a stranger they are gay. The Batelle study actually required participants to give their Social Security number and the name of their employer!

• The rate of refusing to participate is often very high - 20% to 30% is not uncommon. Obviously those people most keen to remain private will be most likely to refuse to participate.

• Closeted gay or bisexual people will participate, but lie on the survey forms.

• Closeted gay or bisexual people will participate, but not answer certain questions. For example the 1989 GSS "found" 0.6% of people to be "homosexual" and 4.9% to be "bisexual" - but what is not immediately obvious from this claim is that actually 11.9% of people deliberately did not answer those questions fully.

• Those gay men and women who are most likely to tell an interviwer that they are gay tend to live in small areas within the larger cities. If the survey does not include these areas it will not reflect the true picture. The GSS has attempted to defend it's methodology by stating that it did include New York - but this will achieve nothing if they fail to specifically include any of the "gay ghettos". Depending on where you did a survey in San Francisco you could find the city to be 1% gay, or 70%!

One of the more notorious and fraudulent "researchers" in this regard is Paul Cameron. He makes his living from producing "homosexuality studies" for various groups on the Radical Right and all of his work deliberately sets out to present gay men and women in a poor light. Cameron, a psychologist by training, was actually expelled from his professional body in 1984 because of his continual and unethical misuse of data from legitimate researchers.

From Cameron you find the claim, among many, that homosexuals are disproportionately a risk of being a child molester. But, how did he arrive at this claim?

(Cameron has not given his methodology for this claim - a fact that makes his figures suspect to begin with. However it is possible to piece together his apparent way of manipulating the data from other information in this "study" and other statements he has made about the claim.).

First, Cameron used the percent figure for the number of openly gay men (2%) as the number of "homosexuals". He did not include lesbians, and probably because they almost never molest children. By doing this he made the number of homosexuals as low as possible.

Next, Cameron deemed any same-sex contact as being done by "homosexuals" - but for a proportion of opposite-sex contacts he incorporated a special "bisexual factor" that he then subtracted from the "heterosexual" numbers and added to the "homosexual". By doing this he made the number of homosexual attacks as high as possible and the number of heterosexual attacks as low as possible.

Finally, he arrived at a figure of 40% for the number of "boys" that are "abused" by men. He did not use the normal definition of "boy" (that is, a male under the age of 14) but instead decided to call every male under the age of 18 a boy. By doing this he was able to add in all those 16-18 year old males who had sex with another guy. He also did not use the usual definition for molestation; Cameron simply said any male under the age of 18 who had sex with another guy - even if willingly - was "molested". He also did not consider the relative ages of the guys involved and consequently, under his definition, two 17 year old boyfriends were counted as two cases of "molestation". Of course, he did not do any of this stretching for cases involving heterosexual activity and by doing this he was able to count a large number of same-sex encounters as a molestation when by any stretch of the imagination they were not. (Regardless of what Cameron thinks, two 17 year old boyfriends do not molest one another when they have sex!)

Having now fiddled the definitions in his favour Cameron was then able to do some simple division (40%/2% and 60%/98%) to arrive at a claim that "gays molest children over 30 times higher than normal people".

• It is extremely common to see reference to the activities of fringe groups such as ACT-UP or Lesbian Avengers as being representative of all gay men and women. They are not.

• Anyone who has attended a Pride Day will know just how "normal" everyone seems apart from small numbers of "different" (and welcomed) groups representing anything from brightly dressed Drag Queens to big fat and hairy Leather Bears. Should you turn to the TV News that night you'd be forgiven for wondering if you'd even been at the same parade as the camera crew. The media seems only interested in showing the more colourful elements within the community and maybe the rest of us are just too boring to make the story interesting, but it hardly gives a representative view of the celebrations.

• Studies have shown both gay and straight men have about 13 sexual partners during their lifetime. Studies have also shown straight women have about 6 and lesbians about 3. Yet you'll hear a frequent claim that "gays" have on average over 500 sexual partners and that nearly a third have over 1000. You can trace this fraud back again to that malicious Paul Cameron - he mispresented a small study deliberately done on promiscuous gay men in the early 1980's as being indicative of all gay men (It was part of a study done on HIV/AIDS). Frankly, that's about as accurate as using a small group of hard-working prostitutes to represent the sexual behaviour of all women.

• To use Cameron again - he claims to have also discovered that homosexuality cuts "30 years off your life" and that this fall in life expectancy has little to do with AIDS. This particular effort of his took the form of reading the obituaries in gay papers and then comparing the age at death with the average lifespan. What he failed to explain was that the obituaries for most gay men are not placed in the gay papers - such notices are usually only placed to annouce the death of high profile individuals from the bar or club scenes and usually only if the death was tragic or unexpected. Obviously the bar and club scene is dominated by younger gays and deaths seen as tragic or unexpected tend to be viewed this way because the person was young. There is therefore an obviously clear bias in Cameron's sample - and one he has chosen not to note in his publication.

• The psychiatric and psychological professions held for many years that homosexuality was a form of mental illness. The fact that it had done so even before conducting any study on the subject is evidence that the original opinion was formed because of political and cultural considerations and not medical knowledge but it took many decades before therapists started to doubt their assumptions. It took many decades because the only gay men and women publically seen were those who presented for clinical treatment. (The bulk of homosexuals remained invisible because to be homosexual was both a criminal offence and would have resulted in severe social sanctions.) Psychiatrists, who only met gay men and women as patients, falsely concluded that this small sub-group were representative of all gays and that all gays were mentally ill. As this was in accord with their pre-held notions about homosexuality they did not see any reason to doubt their opinions. The Gay Liberation movement of the 1970's which encouraged many non-patient gays to "come out" changed professional views fairly rapidly!

"...is particularly weak, weighing in at less than four pages of text. Here, as in several chapters, Nicolosi reviews an area of research and discusses prevalent controversies, but cites only papers which support his point of view or cites them in a way which radically distorts their meaning. Michael Ross, Anke Ehrhardt, Heino Meyer-Bahlburg, John Money, and Thomas Forde Hoult may all be surprised to see their views cited here on Nicolosi's side."

• that a homosexual would be something else (ie heterosexual) without this adaption
• that in the absense of particular environmental factors the person would not be homosexual
• that the pathology could be measured against what is assumed as a non-pathological state
• that homosexuality could be measured as detrimental of and by itself

• despite many years of attempting to find them no particular environmental factors emerged that could "explain" homosexuality. Theories about family environments etc did not match up to family histories and dynamics of gay men and women as a group (in fact, the opposite became known - gay men and women have the same overall family backgrounds as do heterosexuals)
• studies showed the proportion of homosexuals within the population was the same across many diverse societies and cultures
• attempts at "curing" homosexuality proved dismal failures. All sorts of "treatments" were tried, and none of them worked. Many such "cures" proved worse for the individual than did the "illness"!
• homosexuals as a group did not differ from heterosexuals as a group, apart from the obvious! The psychological profiles of both groups did not differ apart from things directly caused by being assumed as "sick" in the first place (greater stress, depression and anxiety being the clearest examples). Under examination it was impossible for professional therapists to distinguish between homosexuals and heterosexuals using the standard tests that could identify between pathological and non-pathological heterosexuals.
• it became clear that the overwhelming majority of gay men and women did indeed live healthy and productive lives despite the enormous pressures placed upon them
• it became clear that the problems faced by homosexuals in their lives were a result of being part of a misunderstood and hated minority group. Homosexuality did not cause the problems of stress/depression etc - what caused this was elevating heterosexuality to it's postion as the only valid and respected means of sexual expression
• to deem homosexuality pathological because the gay individual knows it will cause offense to some but nevertheless persists with the activity would require proving that homosexuals have some psychic need to cause offense to others. It is clear that this is not the case and the overwhelming majority of gay men and women would rather be permitted to live quietly and without causing offense. A suitable response to such claims that it is we who deliberately provoke and ofend people was put perfectly by Scott Safier:
  "You have offended yourself. I have done nothing but exist."

Baurmann concluded that "homosexual contacts played no important statistical or criminological role". Most of assaults by a man on a boy were later described by the victim as "harmless" and these contacts were almost exclusively without violence or threats. In many cases the victim had actively sought the encounter and often the sexual assault only came to the attention of the police because the parents had complained.

This was in marked contrast to those attacks on girls or women which often occurred under extreme duress and commonly resulted in physical injury. When interviewed all those years later many women continued to show psychological injury as a result. All of the attacks that resulted in injury involved girls or women.

Baurmann also broke down the assaults into three categories. All male victims were found to be within Category I assaults (involving exhibitionism or "comparitively harmless sexual contact", forming 57% of all assaults). Category II (12%) involved assaults of "a more intense nature" while Category III (31%) included all those in which duress, rape or injury occured. Strangers to the victims committed 93% of cases involving exhibitionism, but in 70% of other types of assaults the assailants were known to or related to the victim. The degree of sexual contact and the psychological injury sustained was highly correlated to how well the assailant was known to the victim. Incest formed 8% of cases.