http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/12/science/12lett.html
Letters
Published: July 12, 2005
Gauging Bisexuality
To the Editor:
Re “Straight, Gay or Lying: Bisexuality Revisited” (July 5):
Results casting doubt on the reality of bisexuality reported are probably incorrect. In the 300 or more known vertebrate species with natural homosexuality, all combine heterosexual with homosexual relations.
Humans are not likely to differ from other species in this regard, including our closest nonhuman relative, the bonobo. Indeed, in all human cultures homosexual expression has been, and is, combined with heterosexual expression.
The data in the article show that 20 percent of the pool having same-sex relations do identify as bisexual.
These people surely aren't all lying. Instead, psychologists should add a fourth possibility to their list: namely, that they are wrong.
Dr. Joan Roughgarden
San Francisco
The writer is a professor of biology at Stanford.
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To the Editor:
The study of bisexual males conducted by Toronto and Chicago psychologists may demonstrate that men who identify as bisexual are in fact either mostly homosexual or mostly heterosexual (“Straight, Gay or Lying?”). But it fails to disprove what Freud and Kinsey asserted: that the psychological makeup of most males has a significant bisexual dimension.
I have worked with bisexual men as a professional counselor for 15 years. Most of the men I work with are well-educated upper-middle-class married men – leaders in their businesses and communities. Not one of them has ever identified openly as bisexual. If any did, the consequences would be devastating.
These men would never volunteer for the kind of study the Toronto and Chicago scholars conducted. The study is thus one in which truly bisexual men have screened themselves out.
In ancient Greece, most males passed through distinct homosexual stages in both adolescence and adulthood. How do the study's psychologists account for this undeniable fact?
John Craig
Fairfax, Va.
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To the Editor:
The article on bisexuality was interesting, but I confess some amazement that still today, in the year 2005, an article like yours treats women as an afterthought and still makes it into print in a major newspaper (“Straight, Gay or Lying?”). Sure you throw “at least in men” into the second sentence. But you then go on to discuss bisexuality in general based just on the results for males, burying the results for females at the very end of the article.
“Doesn't matter if bisexuality is clear in women; it's what happens in men that really defines the term,” you seem to be saying.
Kind of incredible. Freud would have approved. The rest of us expect better from you.
Ken Forsberg
Madison, Wis.
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To the Editor:
Some gay and bisexual advocates are condemning “Straight, Gay or Lying?” regarding a study suggesting that bisexuality may not exist among human males – something those of us familiar with the scientific literature have known since, basically, forever.
Compare this hysterical – and anti-science – reaction to the conservative Christians' anti-science reaction to studies showing that homosexuality is an inborn orientation like left-handedness. They're identical.
The right hates science because the data contradict (in the case of homosexuality) Leviticus; the left because the data contradict the liberal lie that we're environment-created, not hard-wired in any way.
These particular scientific facts are making these advocates scream like members of the extreme right, though it's they who always tells the right to let go of concepts that are contradicted by science.
Chandler Burr
New York
The writer is the author of “A Separate Creation: The Search for the Biological Origins of Sexual Orientation.”
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To the Editor:
Re “Straight, Gay or Lying?”: The headline is not only disrespectful but also unprofessional in its insinuation. No, those of us living outside the boxes of gay and straight are not “lying,” thank you very much! Many of us have struggled to stay open to ourselves in an increasingly, and oppressively, black-and-white, reductionistic world.
Paul Burns
St. Johnsbury, Vt.
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To the Editor:
Re “Straight, Gay or Lying?”: If our sexual preferences were best detected by who we look at in pornography, wouldn't pretty much everyone be attracted to mildly unattractive people who live on the West Coast and lack acting talent?
Catherine Gaffney
Philadelphia
