First appeared in The Windy City Times August 27, 1998.
A study published in Pediatrics suggested that self-identified gay high school students are more likely to engage in "risk behavior" than are other students. Religious right groups claim this shows gays are "self-destructive" while the study's own author suggests that such behavior is a response to rejection by the majority culture. There are problems with both interpretations.
A SEEMINGLY HARMLESS AND INOFFENSIVE little article about teen-age gays recently became a focus of controversy between gay-supportive researchers and the religious right.
Back in May, Dr. Robert Garofalo and colleagues published a study in Pediatrics suggesting that self-identified gay high school students are more likely to engage in a variety of "risk behaviors" than other students are.
In a survey of 4,159 Massachusetts high school students, the researchers found 104 students who said they were gay, lesbian or bisexual. The gay youths were 2-3 or even more times more likely than other students to smoke dope, use alcohol, use cocaine, inject drugs, be threatened with a weapon, miss school out of fear, attempt suicide, and so forth.
Then on July 14, a group of religious right and "ex-gay" organizations placed an advertisement in the Washington Post citing the article as evidence that gays are trapped in a self-destructive lifestyle.
"Studies also show a high degree of destructive behavior among homosexuals, including alcohol, drug abuse, and emotional or physical violence," said the ad, "it's not lack of acceptance... it's... the visible response to a broken heart."
After a distressing three-week time lag, Garofalo stated publicly that he was "horrified and angry" at how the religious right had interpreted his study.
In an Aug. 4 interview with the Boston Globe Garofalo fumed, "It's a complete misrepresentation of what the research actually says. It comes to the completely opposite conclusion of what the paper concluded."
Garofalo told the Globe that the youths' behavior was actually a result of the alienation that gay teenagers face "in a culture that is often unaccepting."
Robert Knight, point man on gay issues for the Family Research Council, fired back, saying there is no merit to the theory that alienation can produce self-destructive behavior. Rather, said Knight, "homosexual behavior is the symptom of deeper, unmet emotional needs. Everyone in their heart know the behavior is wrong. People who are caught up in it are covering their emotional distress by abusing substances."
Frankly, there are problems with both interpretations.
Go back to Garofalo's article. Although Garofalo could establish a statistical link between being self-identified as gay and a greater tendency to experience these "psychosocial and medical risk factors," the survey could not show was what was a cause and what was an effect.
Garofalo acknowledges this in the article: "There are several limitations to this study... We can only examine the association between sexual orientation and health risk behaviors and not draw conclusions about causality." If he now thinks the "risk behaviors" are a response to a hostile culture, that could be true, but nowhere in his article does he say that.
Let us start with the fact that 104 seems a surprisingly low number of gay students. Sure enough, 62 additional youths said they were "not sure" about their sexual orientation and surprisingly 387 (9.3 percent) refused to answer the question at all. No doubt too some of those who marked "heterosexual" simply lied.
So many young gays can be found in the "non-gay" group that had lower rates of all those risk behaviors.
Even among the 104 who said they were gay, fewer than half said they had engaged in most of 40 the "risk behaviors" listed. That suggests that many of the self-identified gays were handling themselves quite well even by the stringent standards of the survey.
All this scarcely supports the religious right theory that "homosexuals" engage in self-destructive behavior because of "emotional distress" over behavior they know to be wrong. But it also weakens Garofalo's broad claim about gay alienation, at least for many students.
But what about those who do engage in sex, alcohol, drug use, and so forth? The study also found high rates of missing school because of fear, having personal property damaged, being physically attacked, being threatened with a weapon, and so forth. For Robert Knight to ignore the impact of verbal and physical hostility on young gays' attitudes and sense of self seems plainly dishonest.
Is Garofalo's interpretation about "alienation" the better one? It is certainly appealing to many of us who remember an uneasy youth. But "alienation" is too vague to do much work; it obscures more than it illuminates. No doubt there is hostility toward young gays, but does the hostility produce alienation which then induces risk behaviors? Does risk behavior cause alienation? Or does behavior somehow prompt the hostile reaction? What exactly is going on?
For one thing some of the categories seem odd. it seems strange to treat smoking cigarettes as a risk behavior like cocaine use. And why is having three or more sexual partners in your life a risk behavior? Drug use might be a response to stress, but can also just be fun. And why would social hostility cause high rates of steroid use? The whole thing is a conceptual tangle.
Now think of some possible ways to link being gay, engaging in risk behaviors, experiencing hostility and alienation.
- Gay youths might feel more alienated from a hostile society and less restrained by traditional social norms and more willing to smoke, drink, do drugs, have lots of sex and antagonize their peers.
- Gay youths who are insecure might have a desire to "act out" and behave in a exaggeratedly cross-gendered fashion, take drugs and deliberately flout social convention. This may cause them to be harassed at school.
- Gay youths who are harassed at school may drink and use drugs as an escape and seek more sexual partners as a source of self-affirmation and needed pleasure.
- Gay youths who find that gay sex was not the terrible, dangerous thing they had been told might have less reason to believe societal warnings about drugs.
- Youths who realize they were gay at a young age might act cross-gendered, thinking that is how to be gay. That could induce other youths to harass them, and then they might use drugs for escape, compensatory pleasure and so forth.
There are other possible combinations. And different causal links may be true for different students. Questionnaires cannot tell us these things.
Ultimately, researchers will just have to go and talk with young gays and ask them how they feel about their lives, the reactions they get, the pressures they face, how they cope with stress, and what expectations and hopes they have for the future.
That would not be a bad idea for Robert Knight either.