Popular Culture Review Vol. 16, No. 1, Spring 2005 | Page 57

Out of Focus on the Family
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Dobson asserts that “some studies say” that homosexuals “typically”
have more than one thousand sex partners. The footnote attached to that
assertion references “A.P. Bell and M.S. Weinberg, Homosexualities: A Study o f
Diversity Among Men and Women (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), 308-
9; see also Bell, Weinberg and Hammersmith, Sexual Preference (Bloomington,
IN: Indiana University Press, 1981).” The title of the first text immediately
suggests the ruse: “Homosexual///^” and “Diversity.” Dobson makes a blanket
statement about all homosexuals today based on one table in a book about
“homosexualities” and the “diversity” of behaviors. The book’s publication date
confirms the deception. Data more than a quarter century old must be put into
proper historical and cultural contexts, especially when dealing with a subject
that has seen profound changes in the intervening decades.
Bell and Weinberg gathered their data in the mid 1970s, during the
height of the so-called “bathhouse culture” when, as Andrew Sullivan has noted,
the homosexual subculture “all but submerged itself in a sexualized frenzy”
(122). That “sexualized frenzy” ended rather abruptly when a mysterious
retrovirus appeared and, in a matter of years, wiped out “a whole generation of
homosexual men: hundreds of thousands of them,” while faith-based activists
like Dobson and Jerry Falwell urged political leaders like Ronald Reagan to do
nothing about the epidemic (See “Is Reagan’s legacy still hurting gays?”
Advocate.com June 7, 2004). But, even during the days of the bathhouse culture,
the statistics required geographical qualification, as was astutely noted by Mindy
Hutchings while reviewing the draft of this article:
300 to 1000 different partners is a lot of people! Especially
when, demographically, gays only make up 2% of the
population and not everyone lives in a very large city where
this would be even remotely possible. Therefore, those who
did have a very large number of partners were an even smaller
minority of the minority.
The pages in Bell’s and Weinberg’s book (308-9) cited by Dobson
contain tables. The one he alleged was “typical” of all homosexuals today
appeared on page 308, in Appendix C, reproduced here: