Originally published 1986 Page count 241 | Language English Pages 241 | |
Authors | ||
Male Homosexuality in Four Societies: Brazil, Guatemala, the Philippines and the United States is a 1985 work about male homosexuality by sociologists Frederick L. Whitam and Robin Mathy.
Contents
Summary
The authors discuss male homosexuality in four societies: Brazil, Guatemala, the Philippines, and the United States.
Reception
Male Homosexuality in Four Societies was reviewed by Evelyn Blackwood in the gay magazine The Advocate, and by sociologist John Gagnon in the American Journal of Sociology.
Sociologist Barbara Risman gave the book a mixed review in Social Forces, writing that it provides the "strongest social-scientific argument yet made for the essentialist paradigm of sexuality" according to which sexual orientation is biologically innate. However, Risman maintained that while the work "raises hard questions that cannot be ignored" its authors' argument for their position "ultimately fails on logical, theoretical, and empirical grounds." In Risman's view, while they deserved to be commended for their complex "multi-method, cross-cultural" design, their work still suffered from "serious problems of sampling bias and analytic technique". Risman questioned the value of their finding that the gay men in their samples reported more "cross-gender interests" than the heterosexual controls, and accused them of "disregard for the large body of scholarship on sex/gender systems".