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crossposted on Holy Bullies and Headless Monsters
“Whereas two-thirds of the population are worker bees . . . generally those who engage in homosexuality belong to the other third, the third that so to speak exploits society.” – Paul Cameron
Discredited researcher Paul Cameron (and one of the co-stars of the movie Bruno) seems to have gotten a lot of attention during his tour of Poland in May of this year.
Yesterday's clips of an interview with him was disturbing enough but today's clip is even more disturbing. He seems to be lecturing to a full auditorium and no one is challenging him when he says vicious inaccuracies like the statement at the beginning of this post.
And if anyone did want to challenge him, they would definitely have a lot of material to work with. From viewing the clip, I found things that were basically inaccurate.
The bulk of the clip is Cameron making the inaccurate claim that gays and lesbians molest children at a high rate. As proof of this, he cites two studies (funny how he didn't cite his own work) that according to him comes from the “homosexuals themselves.”
One study he cites is the Bell and Weinberg that formed the basis of the book Homosexualities published in 1978. Homosexualities was produced by the Kinsey Institute. Cameron considers this to be a study conducted by gays since according to him, Alfred Kinsey was a gay man.
But the authors of the study, Alan Bell and David Weinberg, said their work could not be used to generalize about the entire gay community:
“. . . given the variety of circumstances which discourage homosexuals from participating in research studies, it is unlikely that any investigator will ever be in a position to say that this or that is true of a given percentage of all homosexuals.”
Cameron then claims that “around the same time” (his words), researchers Karla Jay and Alan Young sent out questionnaires around the country regarding sexual habits of gays and lesbians.
Now the answers to these questionnaires formed the basis of the 1979 book The Gay Report.
According to one of the best online sites when it comes to debunking Paul Cameron's lies, Box Turtle Bulletin:
The Gay Report was modeled after many other informal sex surveys which were popular in the 1970s and 1980s. Magazines like Cosmopolitan, Redbook, and Playboy often conducted reader surveys.
Twenty-five hundred responses came from a gay magazine questionnaire. The magazine, Blue Boy, was a softcore porn magazine. Because of this, said Box Turtle Bulletin, the authors of The Gay Report:
. . . have virtually guaranteed an exceptionally heavy biased towards the opinions and experiences of those who are much more sexually experienced.
In other words, it is the equivalent of claiming that those who respond to a sex survey in an issue of Hustler magazine are indicative of the American heterosexual population.
Even the authors of The Gay Report said:
We agreed at the outset not to pretend that these percentages represented the practices and views of all gay people—they reflected only our respondents.
And according Box Turtle Bulletin, the number of respondees in proportion to how many questionnaires sent out is too low:
To prepare for this study, the authors distributed “hundreds of thousands” of 16-page surveys across the country, with an abridged version printed in the adult magazine Blueboy, which is sort of a gay equivalent to Playboy or Penthouse. Out of this massive distribution, they received only 5,400 responses. While that may seem like a sizeable response, it is quite low when you consider the response rate. The authors estimate that 400,000 gay men and 100,000 lesbians saw at least one form of the questionnaire.5 That means the response rate for this survey is barely 1%. A negligible response rate like this would render any survey statistically meaningless.
I should point out that these two studies (both conducted over 30 years ago) was the only proof Cameron gave to justify his claim about the lgbt community and child molestation.
Pointing out the errors in Cameron's tour is important for two reasons:
1. I've seen these references to Homosexualities and The Gay Report in work by other religious right groups. I've had to debunk the Bell and Weinberg distortion on this site more times than I can count. So while it's safe to say that many religious right groups no longer cite Cameron by name, there is enough evidence to see that they are still using his distortions.
2. It bothers me that Cameron is able to go to a foreign country that is totally ignorant of his dubious history and pass his lies off for truth. It amazes me that a man who has been dismisssed from so many medical groups, who has faced censured so many times can still attain any type of credibility anywhere. This will no doubt have ugly repercussions for the worldwide lgbt community.
The reason why not enough people are aware of just how influential and dangerous Paul Cameron is has to do with those who have the power to expose him not doing their job. We have got to get on the ball with this one.
Other HB/HM articles on Paul Cameron in Poland:
Homophobic 'researcher' Paul Cameron in all of his repulsive glory
7 Comments
The biggest disappointment in “Bruno”is that Cohen doesn’t take Cameron on.
Here he is playing a sex-mad gay man, claiming (at the point in the film where he talks to Cameron) that he wants to go straight. I would have hoped Cohen would have taken the opportunity to question Cameron about his claim that gay sex is dangerous because it’s so much more satisfying thatn straight sex.
But he didn’t.
The reason may be that …They want to hear his distortions. There is rampant homophobia in Eastern bloc countries. During the reign of the PiS party many Polish gays moved to Britain, not without reason.
CameronI’m inclined to agree with Chris. There’s been tons of homophobia in eastern Europe, particularly the former communist countries. The people probably go there because Cameron tells them what they want to hear.
But it’s a misnomer to call his pronouncements “errors” and “inaccuracies.” They’re lies and distortions, pure and simple.
We have to remember that he’s not trying to make a logical case. He’s trying to whip up homophobic sentiment. Just look at the sentence at the beginning of this post: “Whereas two-thirds of the population are worker bees . . . generally those who engage in homosexuality belong to the other third, the third that so to speak exploits society.”
That’s not an “inaccurate” statement. That’s exactly the type of thing that Nazi propaganda said about the Jews, and it’s downright frightening.
For consistency’s sake….
As you linked to your post yesterday, it’s appropriate to post my annotated response to it. In short, it does not serve “our side’s” credibility to attack that of Cameron with our own errors and omissions.
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Cameron is unquestionably a monster who has done enormous, lasting damage to the movement for both LGBT rights and understanding, and must be forcefully exposed and debunked. But he is no more, as you claimed, “the grandfather of ALL anti-gay junk science,” emphasis mine, than Barack Obama is the grandfather of all African-American candidates for President. He’s not even the “father.”
He certainly planted new, extremely toxic ideas, but it was into soil that had been previously plowed and made fertile for such fresh quackery by others that Peter LaBarbera, Matt Barber, et al., continue to use to “authenticate” their hatred. He is but one of the architects of their homohatred, and, with respect, to assert that they wouldn’t exist without Cameron is “junk” of another type.
As documented in Simon Levay’s Queer Science: The Use and Abuse of Research into Homosexuality [1996], and numerous other histories, antigay activists built the foundation of their industry on three other men who were being published and interviewed long before Cameron came upon the public scene in 1982.
“The real psychoanalytic attack on homosexuality was initiated by Freud’s followers, particularly by those working in the United States. Three names-Lionel Ovesey, Irving Bieber, and Charles Socarides-are especially prominent in this field.” – LeVay.
Socarides, as some know, was, ironically, the father of Richard Socarides, a gay member of the Clinton administration, who continues to be active in the fight for LGBT equality.
As expressed in their major works below, all three essentially shared the same belief that homosexuality is a mental illness, particularly the result of a “smothering mother” and absent or hostile father, and that it could be cured. They were rabidly opposed to the American Psychiatric Association’s removal of homosexuality from its list of “mental illnesses.”
Bieber was publicly quoted saying in response, “a homosexual is a person whose heterosexual function is crippled, like the legs of a polio victim.”
Ovesey was also influential in developing anti-trans theories, including the idea that MTFs are simply trying to replicate their mothers in themselves through surgery.
And, unlike Cameron, Bieber, Socarides, and Ovesey were not drummed out of professional organizations, and continue to influence many psychologists and psychiatrists today who cling to the belief that being gay is dysfunctional no matter what the APA says.
BIEBER:
Homosexuality: A Psychoanalytic Study of Male Homosexuals, 1962.
It remained the leading “authority” until the 1973 APA declassification. But its damage to popular fears has persisted ever since a LIFE magazine article in 1964 on gay males and smothering mothers…Homosexuality in America, A secret world grows open and bolder, Society is forced to look at it and try to understand it…convinced millions of parents that…on top of being Biblically condemned “degenerates”… something was mentally wrong with their sons, giving rise to the “My mother made me a homosexual” meme. Though it was written nearly 20 years before anyone had ever heard of Cameron, much of it is echoed today in antigay industry propaganda, forming the basis for Cameron’s outrageousness to be believed. Why would someone sexually attack children, consciously shorten their lifespan by exposing themselves to AIDS through thousands of sex partners, his audience might ask themselves? Because they are, by definition, mentally ill, psychosexually twisted … therefore, anything goes.
LIFE:
“ever since the 1962 publication of a famous study headed by Dr. Irving Bieber, modern analysts have put the blame less on heredity than on childhood experiences. In Dr. Bieber’s view, of course, homosexuals are psychologically sick: the emotionally disturbed offspring of emotionally disturbed parents. He believes strongly that the homosexual society is ‘neither “health” nor happy’,” and that indeed the very term ‘gay world’ is only a flippant and rather pathetic attempt to cover up deep and chronic feelings of pathological depression. Most analysts, psychiatrists and psychologists tend to agree. ….
Do the homosexuals like the Communists, intend to bury us? Yes, indeed, suggested a startling front-page story in the New York Times and other newspapers last month. A committee of highly respected New York Academy of Medicine had come to the conclusion that American homosexuals want far more than to be merely tolerated and even more than to be ungrudgingly accepted.”
Cognitive Psychoanalysis: Cognitive Processes in Psychopathology, 1980
SOCARIDES:
The Overt Homosexual, 1968
The World of Emotions: Clinical Studies of Affects and Their Expression, 1977
Homosexuality: Psychoanalytic Therapy, 1989
OVESEY:
Homosexuality and Pseudohomosexuality, 1969
The transsexual syndrome in males, 1974
Thank you MichaelThank you for that overview, Michael. I am definitely appreciative of that.
I gave Paul Cameron that name as the “grandfather of all gay junk science” merely as a euphemism to emphasize that it is his studies and theories that are mostly used by the right. Also, while some religious right groups do not cite him by name, they have taken to manipulating some of the same studies he distorted to prove their point, (i.e. Homosexualities and The Gay Report.)
Also, I would wager that Cameron’s name pops up more than the three you mentioned when if one would troll over religious right webpages.
In addition, Cameron was very good at exploiting the “ick” factor when it comes to homophobia. The three you mentioned were clinical, but Cameron got right to the heart of lies with his claims about gerbils, feces, the castration and molestation of children, etc. Unfortunately the AIDS crisis helped him on that point.
So while you have an excellent point (and I thank you for the historical perspective), in terms of influence, my claim about Cameron can be seen as correct.
Now that we have gotten past the technicalities, let’s talk about what we can do to make people remember the evils of Cameron and also of those you mentioned.
Two main differences: he’s still alive and eager to play dirty….
The Big Three operated from white-gloved “professionalism” and the therapist’s couch…he’s a bottomfeeder.
And there’s another possible explanation…he could share the same Mad As A Hatter padded cell that Phelps keeps auditioning for.
Regardless, you asked what we can do?
My answer: out of the blogs and into the streets.
The APA only “officially” discredited Bieber and his fellow shrink thugs when they were FORCED to by literal INVASIONS of their annual conventions by gay activists like Frank Kameny, Barbara Gittings, and Bruce Voeller.
As Kameny later recalled the 1971 protest:
“They had this row of elderly psychiatrists sitting in back wearing their gold medals with a ribbon around their necks. And we were sitting there; we knew what was going to happen.
And right in the middle of [US Attorny General] Ramsey Clark’s speech the doors burst open and all of our people burst in. The elderly psychiatrists were enraged and proceeded to beat our people on their heads with their gold medals. [The psychiatrists] pushed a lot of them out, including the person we had arranged to to seize the microphone and give the speech.
[The psychiatrists] locked the fire doors. So people milled around for a bit and nothing was happening and I decided we were going to lose this altogether, so I came forward up on the stage and seized the microphone.
The moderator asked me what I was doing. I said I’m seizing the microphone from you, and he said “Well, tell me your name and I’ll introduce you.” So I did and he did. And I proceeded to denounce them until one of the elderly psychiatrists just pulled the plug out of the wall. But I never needed a microphone to be heard, so I went on anyway.
And the psychiatrists were down below shaking their fists at me and calling us Nazis. A few days later we went into their exhibit area and they had someone, a guy from Iowa, who was selling devices for aversion therapy. We denounced him and sort of forced him to close down there.
That began to get things moving.”
Flyer they distributed to convention members in 1972 after the APA agreed to give gays their own convention booth:
http://www.kamenypapers.org/co…
A year later, the membership voted to remove homosexuality from their official diagnostic manual of mental illnesses-THE first great victory in the fight for gay equality.
The events Cameron appears at are relatively easy to identify ahead of time, as are similar homohating conventions like the “Love Won Out” cons [and that's not short for "conventions"].
I know there have been some pickets, leafletting of the latter but there must be much more, civil disobedience, etc. Stonewall would never have happened on a blog.
The same applies to ending DADT and DOMA, etc.
No more Mr. Nice Gay.
I have one problem with thatI have one problem with that. This is a different time from the 1970s.
The point is exposing Paul Cameron, not making him look like a martyr for free speech. Yelling and screaming and shouting him down only makes him stronger. The only way to effectively beat Cameron is to call him on his lies intelligently and also control the tone of the discussion in which his lies are called out.
But that takes work. It bothers me that too many of us want to get militant but will not sit down and do the research and the planning to use that research in a way that will get our point across and not give the other side power or ammunition.