GAY TRUTH

A controversial new study argues that a host of research on gay, lesbian and bisexual teenagers could be based on faulty data because of confused teens and “jokesters” who later said they were straight. The report focuses on the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health , a survey that followed a nationally representative group of tens of thousands of teens into adulthood. Add Health, as it is known, is considered one of the most important sources of data on the lives of young people, including those who are gay, lesbian and bisexual. What caught the attention of Ritch Savin-Williams , a professor at Cornell University , was the fact that more than 70% of the teens who said they had ever had a “romantic attraction” to someone of the same sex later told researchers that they were straight. That struck Savin-Williams as odd, since teens usually come out of the closet, not the other way around, he said. In his analysis published last month in the Archives of Sexual Behavior , Savi...

ITHACA, NY ,  - Questions are being raised about the validity of research on teenagers with same-sex attractions after a Cornell University professor found that more than 70 percent of teens who said they had ever had a same-sex “romantic attraction” later told researchers that they were unreservedly heterosexual . The study, published last month in the  Archives of Sexual Behavior , analyzed data from the  National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health , also known as Add Health, which conducted four waves of surveys on teens as they matured into adulthood from 1994 to 2008. Study author Ritch Savin-Williams , director of Cornell's Sex and Gender Lab, said that some of the "inconsistent" data may have been caused by confusion over the questions in Add Health, which could have led some teens to incorrectly say they were homosexuals. But Savin-Williams highlighted "the existence of mischievous adolescents who played a ‘jokester’ role" "In t...

November 27, 2013 ( BreakPoint ) - A fifteen-year-old New Jersey boy, identified in court records as “ John Doe ,” has struggled with unwanted same-sex attraction since he was ten. Two years ago, at his urging, his family took him to see a therapist in New York who specialized in what court documents refer to as “ Sexual Orientation Change Efforts .” According to John Doe, the therapy has helped him. In his words, “every day would get a little better.” We know this because his family is challenging a New Jersey law that, like a similar law in California , “ban[s] licensed counselors from engaging in talk therapies that reduce the level of same-sex attractions in minors for whom such reduction is a personal goal.” As we’ve previously pointed out here on BreakPoint, not only is so-called “reparative therapy” controversial, its efficacy remains unproven. While there are people who have successively made the transition from same-sex relationships to heterosexual ones, there are...