Sex, Gender and Pop Culture

So, we all know that (at one time) many states had (or have) sodomy laws on the books. It seems logical then, after watching Boys Beware and reading some of Paul Cameron’s articles that gay men could, theoretically, be engaging in illegal sexual acts. But what Boys Beware and Paul Cameron are writing about is not just engagement in sodomy, but in a variety of other criminal activities. Let’s take a look at what Paul Cameron alleges about gays and lesbians and criminal engagement:

http://www.familyresearchinst.org/FRI_EduPamphlet4.html — Violence and Homosexualty Pamphlet

These murders fit traditional psychiatric opinion: excessive violence is naturally associated with other forms of social pathology. From this perspective, those who rebel against society’s norms – homosexuals, prostitutes, alcoholics, etc. – are more apt to be violent also. Gay leaders reply that they are not pathological, rebellious, or sexually deviant. They contend that gays are gentle, loving people and that the violence they experience proves that they need special ‘hate crime’ laws to protect them from non-homosexual ‘gay bashers.’

Paul Cameron argues that people who are deviant are more apt to be violent. This is, of course, not a logical argument. Just because someone is an alcoholic, doesn’t mean that they are a mass murderer. He goes on to argue that homosexuals make up 3% of the population, but they commit large % of mass murders and homicides. The problem here, of course, is Paul Cameron’s manipulations of statistics to make them show that homosexuals are criminals. But, he concludes that, Most of the murderers in the lifespan study whose sexual orientation could be determined were also homosexual.

http://www.familyresearchinst.org/FRI_EduPamphlet6.html The Psychology of Homosexuality.

In The Psychology of Homosexuality, we get right to the point. Paul Cameron alleges that homosexual men engage in the following criminal activities:

– homosexuals were about twice as likely to have been arrested for a non-sexual crime and about 8 times more apt to have been arrested for a sexual crime;

– homosexuals were about 50% more apt to claim that they had recently shoplifted, cheated on their income tax, or not been caught for a crime.

also:

Saghir & Robins (12) compared 146 gays with 78 heterosexuals and reported less stability (more lovers, more job-changing) and more criminality among homosexuals. Bell & Weinberg (5) contrasted 979 gays with 477 heterosexuals and found more instability (psychiatric, marital) and more criminality among gays. Cameron & Ross (13) questionnaired 2,251 randomly-obtained respondents and reported that heterosexuals evidenced more social cohesion (numbers and kinds of intimate relationships), less self-destructive behavior (smoking, drug use, suicide attempts), and less endangerment of others (via driving habits, deliberate killing).

We can see here all of the criminal activities in which homosexuals allegedly engage. We know practically nothing about the samples that yielded this data, we are simply presented with data without context. I would wage a guess that we are dealing with either a) small sample sizes or b) ambigous definitions of homosexuality which results in the criminalization of gays and lesbians.

Although Paul Cameron’s work is not very influential (it used to be, but since he has been kicked out of the American Psychological Association and the American Sociological Association), the “homosexual as criminal” rhetoric is still repeated in some circles. It is really not clear to me if homosexuals are criminals simply because they engage in sodomy, or if homosexuals are criminals because of drug use and bath house sex (funny, when heterosexuals engage in drug use or public sex, we don’t criminalize them), however, the criminalization of homosexuality has been pervasive in American society over the past 50 years.

(I would just like to point out that homosexuals are always singled out in the media whenever they engage in dubious behavior, too)