First appeared October 3, 1994, in The New Republic.
IN THE WORLD OF anti-gay activism, researcher Paul Cameron is something of a darling. When columnist Pat Buchanan wrote about AIDS and gay death in March 1993, he cited a study by Cameron. When columnist Don Feder wrote about gay servicemen and child molestation in July 1993, he also cited Cameron. Two years ago Cameron served as the scientific consultant for both the Oregon Citizens Alliance and Colorado for Family Values, the main groups pushing antigay referenda on those states' election ballots. Statistics from Cameron's studies were included in "Gay Agenda,� a videotape produced by the religious right and widely circulated during last year's debate on gays in the military. Also last year, officials of the U.S. Navy and Army circulated Cameron's studies around the Pentagon as they tried to block Bill Clinton's softening of the gay ban. More recently, officials of Clinton's Justice Department cited a Cameron study in a brief prepared in connection with a gay ban lawsuit.
So who is Paul Cameron? Not the dispassionate, respected analyst that these boosters would have you believe. Cameron is chairman of the Family Research Institute (FRI), an arch-right Washington think tank that counts neanderthal GOP Representative Robert Dornan of California among its national advisory board members. Cameron himself is also a demonizer of gays: several times he has proposed the tattooing and quarantining of AIDS patients and raised the possibility of exterminating male homosexuals. Most important, he is the architect of unreliable "surveys� that purport to show strains of violence and depravity in gay life.
Until 1980 Cameron was an instructor of psychology at the University of Nebraska. When his teaching contract was not renewed, he devoted himself fulltime to a think tank he founded called the Institute for the Scientific Investigation of Sexuality (ISIS),where he touted himself as an expert on sexuality, particularly on the societal consequences of homosexuality. During the 1980s he published hysterical pamphlets alleging that gays were disproportionately responsible for serial killings, child molestation and other heinous crimes.
Shortly after Cameron made these claims, several psychologists whose work he had referenced -- including Dr. A. Nicholas Groth, director of the Sex Offender Program at the Connecticut Department of Corrections -- charged Cameron with distorting their findings in order to promote his antigay agenda. When the American Psychological Association (APA) investigated Cameron, it found that he not only misrepresented the work of others but also used unsound methods in his own studies. For this ethical breach, the APA expelled Cameron in December 1983. (Although Cameron claims he resigned, APA bylaws prohibit members from resigning while under investigation.)
In 1987 Cameron moved to Washington and created FRI, a "non-profit educational and scientific corporation.� Ever since, he has been a virtual one-man propaganda press, periodically revising his brochures and distributing them to policymakers. "Published scientific material has a profound impact on society,� he has said.
Unfortunately, the misrepresentations persist. Distortions and sloppy methods continue to shape Cameron's studies. As anyone who has taken a statistics class knows, a survey is valid only if the sample it uses is representative of the whole population. Sex surveys pose a particular problem, since many people who normally would be included in a representative sample are loath to discuss their private lives. That, however, hasn't deterred Cameron from his work.
Consider, for instance, his 1983 ISIS study, a survey of the sexual and social behavior of 4,340 adults in five American cities. Although thousands of heterosexuals allegedly responded to his survey, Cameron could get only forty-one gay men and twenty-four lesbians to respond. The extremely small sample size should have invalidated any conclusions about the sexual behavior of the gay population. In any case, the skewed results of the survey show that Cameron did not get an adequate random sample of heterosexuals either. He claims to have found that 52 percent of male heterosexuals have shoplifted; that 34 percent have committed a crime without being caught; and that 12 percent have either committed or attempted to commit murder. Most people would toss out such a survey but Cameron published the results in several pamphlets and in "Effect of Homosexuality upon Public Health and Social Order,� an article in Psychological Reports.
In one pamphlet, Murder, Violence and Homosexuality, Cameron asserts that you are fifteen times more apt to be killed by a homosexual than by a heterosexual during a sexual murder spree; that homosexuals have committed the most sexual conspiracy murders; and that half of all sex murderers are homosexuals. Cameron based these conclusions on a sample of thirty-four serial killers he selected from the years 1966 to 1983. He stacked the deck not only by including phony figures (he counts in his sample the claims of Henry Lee Lucas, who subsequently recanted his boast that he murdered hundreds of people) but by examining only those serial killers with an apparent sexual motive. This allowed him to include John Wayne Gacy and his victims but to exclude the great majority of serial killers who are heterosexual, according to sociologist Jack Levin, the author of Mass Murder: America's Growing Menace.
In Cameron's writings on child molestation?the pamphlet Child Molestation and Homosexuality and two published articles, "Homosexual Molestation of Children/Sexual Interaction of Teacher and Pupil� and "Child Molestation and Homosexuality'?he concludes that gays have perpetrated between one-third and one-half of all child molestations; that homosexual teachers have committed between one-quarter and four-fifths of all molestations of pupils; and that gays are ten to twenty times more apt to molest children than are heterosexuals. These figures are said to be based on the content of other child molestation studies, yet Cameron has distorted those studies to get the results he wants. For example, he defines all adult male molestation of male children as molestations committed by homosexuals, a definition rejected by the very experts Cameron cites. Groth, among other experts, has explicitly said that most molesters of boys are in fact men who are heterosexual in their adult relationships. These men are attracted to boys, he says, largely because of the feminine characteristics of prepubescents, such as a lack of body hair.
Cameron also has provided anti-gay organizations with research indicating absurdly high rates of extreme sex practices and venereal diseases among gays and lesbians. In his pamphlets on these subjects, Cameron has claimed, for instance, that 29 percent of gay men practice "urine sex� and that 37 percent of gay men have sadomasochistic sex. Gay men, he says, are fourteen times more apt to have syphilis than heterosexual men and are three times more apt to have had lice. Lesbians are said to be nineteen times more apt to have syphilis than straight women and are four times more apt to have had scabies. Cameron's findings, however, are based on two sources: his discredited 1983 ISIS survey and other studies that ignore random sampling techniques. Several studies Cameron cites to support his conclusions rely on the responses of gay men who were recruited entirely from V.D. clinics.
A Cameron study that has received perhaps the most attention is "The Lifespan of Homosexuals.� It concludes that less than 2 percent of gay men survive to old age; that lesbians have a median age of death of 45 that gays are 116 times more apt to be murdered than straight men and twenty-four times more apt to commit suicide, etc. The source of this material? A comparison of obituaries from gay newspapers with a sample from regular newspapers?a method that would be laughed at by any reputable scholar. Obituaries in gay papers do not accurately portray deaths in the gay population as a whole. They are not meant to provide a public record of deaths of all gays but to allow members of the urban gay community to express mourning for their peers, particularly those whose lives have been cut short by illness or accident. Gays who die outside these communities or who die of natural causes are much less likely to be written up in a gay paper.
In the coming months, public debate over gay issues is going to get even more intense; the military gay ban question is far from settled, and at least two states may see anti-gay referenda on their ballots this fall. Cameron will help out with these campaigns as he pushes his new book, The Gay Nineties. His research will again be cited by anti-gay activists everywhere. It's time to set the record straight.