APPARENTLY … When you are a young person who has sexual relations with people of the same gender, that doesn’t make you a gay. This is a problem for research scientists, who would like to know whether 1 percent of teenage America is gay, or 21 percent.
apparently
Nobody Knows If Kids Are Gay Anymore
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ThatguyFromBoston
I’ll ask all of the teenagers I’m having sex with and get back to you.
M Shane
I don’t think that there is any moral/legal way for Scientists to tell which kids are gay, since that is priviledged until they are adults. It’s a silly query anyway,all they have to do is extrapolate from the percentage of adults who are out . Of course that will tell you hoe many are out. .People don’t change from puberty to adulthood.
Michael @ LeonardMatlovich.com
“Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheeps and goats. Not all things are black nor all things white.” – “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male,” Alfred C. Kinsey, et al., 1948.
“1-21%”? Well, thanks for narrowing that down for us, Doc. But, therein, lies the rub. Six decades after Kinsey first turned a smugly ignorant and oppressive world upside down, smugly intelligent and oppressive pin-eggheads like Ritch Savin-Williams, the “elfish” “expert” quoted in this article…apparently “gay”-identified himself…are still suffering from “Kinsey envy” [which, based on stories of his endowment, is more than just a play on words].
In wanting to become the household name that Kinsey became, at least in ivy-covered houses, they are still trying to sort everyone into sheep or goats.
Williams was the main “expert” used by the pompous pansy who wrote the “Time” magazine cover story a couple of years ago to bolster his insufferable conceit that gay kids don’t have problems anymore.
QUOTE: “Children who become aware of their homosexual attractions no longer need endure the baleful combination of loneliness and longing that characterized the childhoods of so many gay adults.” Sorry, Mary, too many still do…though “endure” is a poor word choice in any case. “Suffer” is more accurate, and even one kid killing him or herself because they are terrorized by others who think him/her gay is one too many…and it is, in fact, more.
An example of the “Time” article author’s “proof”: “1 in 10” schools now have gay-straight alliances. WOW!…until one stops to realize that that means NINETY-PERCENT still don’t.
Further, while careful to puerilely show off his esoteric vocabulary [“crepitating,” “exiguous”], he carelessly referred to “exgay” and “change” without the quotation marks appropriate to reinforce that such concepts are discredited by the majority of psychiatric professionals.
And statements such as, “Nonetheless, gay kids trying to change can find unprecedented resources,” are “criminal” in their sloppiness. Deconstruct the sentence and it [unintentionally, we hope] means that there ARE resources with which one CAN “change”—a message that no responsible writer, gay or nongay, would wish to send.
But back to Williams: to be fair, perhaps he does not WANT to be “oppressive,” perhaps he’s merely naive, as most academics are, about the uses and abuses of their research beyond their hermetically sealed labs. Class, can you say “Hiroshima”?
But there are those who think he’s smug, challenging him for what they see as unscientific extrapolation to gay youth of all ages generally from his narrow study of privileged, Ivy League college-aged gays even as he accuses them of unscientifically extrapolating from “hustlers.”
In any case, Williams is still a sheepherder, even if some are herded into “not sheep,” and much of his presence in the popular press smells less sacrosanct than sanctimonious.
It’s hard to determine whether one is fish or fowl when your CV lists both extensive “scientific” writing AND being an advisor to those bastians of intellectual profundity, “MTV, ’20/20′, and Oprah.”
To be fair, maybe the problem—as it so often is with mass media—selectively perceived reductions of “science.” Perhaps Williams is merely misquoted or out of context. For while that same CV includes numerous accolades for being an expert witness in disputes over extension of gay legal rights, THE Right quotes him, too, e.g., “sexuality develops gradually over the course of childhood.” From that, they assert that, “Aha! We can interrupt the process and cure them.”
And they’ve used his claims that, today, gay kids don’t have it so bad to challenge the need for non-harassment policies in public schools.
But for his more general thesis, one wants to ask, “What’s your point?” The popular misconception persists that the seven-point Kinsey scale was a measure of “sexual orientation identity” …”sheep” or “goats”….when it was only a sorting of sexual BEHAVIORS…and many “kids” today seem to simply being doing the same thing he did sixty years ago: resist labeling.
That is, or should be, a part of the luxury of being young: the ability to play with firetrucks without “being” a fireman, and to play tomorrow with something else. Adolescence, particularly, is nothing if it is not flux.
But wisdom much older than Kinsey’s still applies to adults: there comes a time when one must put away childish things…including a resistance to labels…whatever that label is.
[img]http://www.iub.edu/~kinsey/services/Humor/kidc44933.JPG[/img]
Chance
Savin-Williams is a religious hack. He has a masters in theology, and yet his book, The New Gay Teenager, supposedly about the experiences of today’s queer youth, says little to nothing about the role religion plays in their lives. It doesn’t take an MA in Jesus to figure out that religion is the only thing that has made gay wrong for the last two and a half millennia, but somehow it didn’t end up in his book.
He wonders why kids aren’t willing to self-identify as gay to some researcher, but can’t put his finger on religion? Either he’s not very smart, or he’s putting his religious beliefs ahead of honesty and equality. And then to go on to say that gay kids really don’t have problems anymore (except for unusual subsets)? Absolutely disgusting.
Brian
People should understand when reading anything from Ritch Savin-Williams that he is a Christian and his book was intended to lessen the outrage about gay teen suicide – by NOT EVEN MENTIONING IT.
He is trying to create “cover” for Christian nut cases by lying and minimizing the problem. Various studies suggest that 1,200-1,500 teens kill themselves each year because they believe they are “wrong and defective.” They get those beliefs from Religion. This ass-hole is part of RELIGION and conveniently his book NEVER MENTIONS IT.
This guy is Christianly dishonest.
TomEM
@ThatguyFromBoston: HA! Good one.
DeAnimator
How about we just stop worrying about it and stop putting numbers on everything. If the labels are breaking down, I would take that as a good thing.
B.
Chance wrote, “Savin-Williams is a religious hack. He has a masters in theology, and yet his book, The New Gay Teenager, supposedly about the experiences of today’s queer youth, says little to nothing about the role religion plays in their lives.”
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ritch_Savin-Williams
“Ritch C. Savin-Williams, Ph.D, (born 1949) is a professor of developmental psychology at Cornell University who specializes in gay, lesbian, and bisexual research. He currently the chair of the Department of Human Development at Cornell. Savin-Williams earned his Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from the University of Missouri in 1971. He later earned an MA in Religious Studies in 1973 and a Ph.D in Human Development in 1977 from the University of Chicago. Savin-Williams retrained in Clinical Psychology at the University of Massachusetts from 1989 to 1993 before completing his residency at Children’s Hospital of Michigan.”
Dr. Savin-Williams’ received a masters degree in “Religious Studies” before entering a doctoral program, and that is not the same as theology. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_Studies “Religious studies, or Religious education, is the academic field of multi-disciplinary, secular study of religious beliefs, behaviors, and institutions. It describes, compares, interprets, and explains religion, emphasizing systematic, historically-based, and cross-cultural perspectives.”
Cornell is not a religious organization masquerading as a university. If Dr. Savin-Williams could not compartmentalize his religious beliefs (whatever those are) from his academic career, it would have been vary hard for him to stay at Cornell.
http://books.google.com/books?id=ISOvF9RJHoMC&pg=PP1&dq=inauthor:Ritch+inauthor:C+inauthor:Savin+inauthor:Williams#v=onepage&q=&f=false
has an excerpt from one of his books. In the preface, he thanks his partner, Kenneth. That would not seem to be consistent with the behavior of a homophobe who justifies his behavior on the basis of religion.
MTiffany
I’m actually looking forward to the death of “homosexual,” “heterosexual,” and “bisexual” and letting people just be “sexual” with anyone they find sexually attractive. And that seems to be what’s happening with the current crop of teenagers. They don’t really seem to care who you’re fucking so long as the fucking is good.
B.
M Shane wrote, “I don’t think that there is any moral/legal way for Scientists to tell which kids are gay, since that is priviledged until they are adults. It’s a silly query anyway,all they have to do is extrapolate from the percentage of adults who are out.”
You can gather data while keeping identities confidential, and there are legitimate reasons for doing that. It’s not just a question of the fraction that are actually gay, but their sexual activities. Statistics on that can be useful for planning various public health programs. For example, someone recently commented on how young straight Christians are engaging in anal sex because they decided they would still consider themselves virgins, and don’t think condoms are necessary because the girl won’t get pregnant. Knowing that can affect what should be emphasized in a sex ed class.