The argument that homosexuality is the result of childhood sexual abuse is relatively new. Yet it has gained considerable currency over the past three decades. It is cited most frequently by religious and socially conservative groups, such as Heterosexuals Organized for a Moral Environment (HOME), who back up their claims with “academic” and “scientific” studies. HOME summarizes the all-encompassing conclusion of these studies by writing, “It is a well-documented fact that many, many homosexuals were sexually abused when young . . . we can see that sexual abuse can theoretically account for every case of homosexuality. . . .”1
The studies they quote have been overwhelmingly discounted by professional psychologists, who view them as junk science motivated by an extreme anti-LGBT agenda. The American Psychological Association has definitively stated that “to date there are no replicated scientific studies” that prove that a history of sexual abuse causes same-sex desires in women or men.2 As popular as these discredited studies remain among many conservative groups, this myth did not originate with the studies. Both the myth and the studies reflect preexisting, though relatively recent, beliefs about homosexuality, and perhaps all sexual desire, that have made sexual abuse one of the go-to explanations whenever opponents of homosexuality seek to answer the question “What causes someone to become gay?”
The force of this myth, and its growing acceptance as common sense among large segments of the public in the past three decades, are a direct result of both the increased visibility of homosexuality and rising political gains of gay people during this same time. The myth’s most vociferous proponents view the mere public presence of homosexuality as a threatening, overwhelming force whose political demands are inherently abusive to them and their values. They have transposed this personal sense of cultural shock onto the lives of LGB people to come up with the explanation that childhood sexual abuse must have caused their homosexuality. In addition to being wrong, this twisted logic is also a diminishment of the very real, widespread occurrence of sexual abuse. Like most traumatic experiences, sexual abuse does have the potential to influence a person’s life, but how it does so varies from person to person and cannot be reduced to one story line.
The simplemindedness of this myth is self-evident. To the very complicated question “What causes homosexuality?” it poses a single, reductive answer: sexual abuse. A young girl who is sexually abused by a man becomes a lesbian because she has turned against men. A young boy who is abused by a man becomes homosexual because the abuse has programmed him to do so. This topsy-turvy logic aside, which predicts radically different results from an act of abuse—heterosexual abuse turns young females against men and into lesbians; homosexual abuse turns young males toward other men and makes them gay—what is unmistakably true is that sexual abuse is largely perpetrated by heterosexual men, although there is a small percentage done by women.
Many people argue that homosexuals are “born that way,” and others argue that it is a choice (see myth 7, “Homosexuals Are Born That Way”). But this myth is very different. It is not about a person choosing homosexuality or being born gay, but more about what happens developmentally because of a sexual event that occurs during youth. To understand the larger social implications of this myth, and to see more clearly what animates it, we might restate the basic question as “How do human beings learn what and how they desire?”
As we explore our sexual desires, the actions we take, especially when they are pleasurable, may very well lead us to take more actions of a similar nature. Sexual expression is a learned experience, and we often learn by doing. People who view homosexuality as a sin or mental illness use this truism to make their point. Their panicked response begins with imagining any exposure to homosexuality as education in the wrong things and by the wrong people—which they then equate to sexual abuse to claim that actual sexual abuse causes homosexuality.
This is a vague but expansive argument that rests largely on our culture’s misguided insistence that children are “innocent.” To many adults, the belief in children’s innocence means, above all, that children (perhaps especially their own) are devoid of all sexual feelings or interests. Because they are “innocent,” simple exposure to the idea or reality of homosexuality, not necessarily a homosexual act, makes them “victims” (see myth 8, “LGBT Parents Are Bad for Children,” and myth 16, “There’s No Such Thing as a Gay or Trans Child”). The phrase “childhood sexual abuse” alone makes many people shudder. They cannot think of anything worse than an adult sexually abusing children. Equating simple exposure to the concept of homosexuality with actual sexual abuse gives this myth its power.
Ironically, the myth maintains its power because of heightened awareness of actual sexual abuse. In the past fifty years, Western culture has become increasingly aware of, and sensitive to, the reality that many children are physically, psychologically, and sexually abused by adults. Alongside this growing awareness has come the acknowledgment that abuse often has severe life consequences for the victim.
If the cultural power of the myth that sexual abuse causes homosexuality depended only on science, it would be as discredited as the studies that social conservatives keep quoting. Instead, the proponents of this myth have hinged their argument to the real incidence of sexual abuse, exploiting that reality to promote their anti-LGBT agenda.
Our culture portrays the tragedy of childhood sexual abuse all the time. It is the premise of popular films such as Sleepers (1996) and Mystic River (2003) and is routinely featured in plotlines on crime-based television shows such as the various Law and Order series. There was even an entire reality television show, To Catch a Predator (2004–2007), predicated on sting operations that would trap men interested in having sex with teenagers. American culture is, in many ways, obsessed with child abuse, in particular, childhood sexual abuse. It is not surprising, then, that groups who want to attack LGBT people and their efforts to gain social freedom and basic equality under the law have quickly grasped for a connection between child sexual abuse and homosexuality.
With so many “ripped from the headlines” stories presented as fiction and so many real people unintentionally trapped in a sensationalized TV show that presented itself as activist journalism, it is clarifying to consider some facts about childhood sexual abuse. Most medical professionals define childhood sexual abuse as sexual activity, or the pressure to have sex, between an adult or an older adolescent and an underage person. But even this simple definition has to be qualified. In most states, the age of consent falls between sixteen and eighteen. People under this age cannot legally consent to sexual activity. If a person over the age of consent has sex with a person under that age, it is a crime. (The age restrictions vary from state to state.) Whether an age difference means the encounter is inherently abusive is an open question, especially since the law denies that the younger partner has any agency or desire in the encounter. Many people agree that, particularly for later adolescence, there should be a broader understanding, at least socially, around the ability for older teens to consent to sexual activity. Should a same-sex sexual encounter between a fourteen-year-old and a sixteen-year-old—two teenage boys fooling around—be considered sexual abuse of the younger teen when the age of consent is sixteen?
Not surprisingly, many of the studies that “prove” a link between childhood sexual abuse and homosexuality use a strict legal definition of abuse. If you are under the age of consent, you cannot consent, period. This is asserted as fact no matter how close in age you are to the person you had sex with and no matter your maturity and self-understanding. If the younger person ends up identifying as gay, such an encounter is “proof” of abuse causing homosexuality in the eyes of the people promoting this myth. What was completely consensual sex at the age of seventeen, and could surely have been important for the development of the “victim’s” sexuality, can actually be considered sexual abuse under the law.3
There are many studies of the pervasiveness of childhood sexual abuse and who actually commits it. Studies differ in their findings. In 2009, Clinical Psychology Review conducted a review of sixty-five studies from twenty-two countries that looked at the incidence of childhood sexual abuse. They found that worldwide, 19.7 percent of women and 7.9 percent of men reported experiencing sexual abuse before they were eighteen. In the United States, the rates were 25.3 percent for women and 7.5 percent for men.4 Most researchers agree that these figures are most likely vast undercounts; some studies show higher figures, also with the proviso that these involve undercounting as well. Research has shown that the likelihood of a child being sexually assaulted by a stranger is very low, probably 10 percent or under the number of reported instances. Acquaintances of the child’s family account for 60 percent of the abuse, and 30 percent is perpetrated by people related to the child in some way.
Even though these figures are well established and accepted by a wide range of professionals in the medical and social-work fields, the myth still persists that a child is most endangered by random strangers and that gay men are the major perpetrators of child sexual abuse. The thinking here is quite simple and circular: (1) Sexual abuse of children is a crime, and crimes are committed by sexual criminals. (2) Homosexual acts have historically been criminalized, and although not criminalized now, are certainly considered by many people to be psychologically deviant and sinful. (3) Therefore, homosexuals are sexual criminals and, like other sexual criminals, must be committing these acts of abuse. The loop of this circular logic is closed by the further—and incorrect—argument that children who are sexually abused by homosexuals are destined to grow up to abuse others in the same way.
The myth that sexual abuse causes homosexuality first emerged in the late 1970s. The feminist movement of the time questioned not only gender roles but the structure of the nuclear family. Feminist thinkers such as Kate Millett and Shulamith Firestone flatly stated that children were an oppressed class of people. Firestone’s chapter on children in her landmark The Dialectic of Sex is titled “Down with Childhood.” Young people were organizing on their own behalf, and there were several national youth liberation movements that argued for greater freedom for young people, including young children. These ideas were disruptive to the status quo, and the government’s response was to pass a series of laws intended to protect children, in particular the 1974 Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act. These laws also had the effect of disempowering children by treating them as passive and reinforcing their victimhood. The gay liberation movement, and later the LGBT rights movement, started after the Stonewall riots of 1969. All of this radical social change in such a condensed period of time created the perfect environment for the backlash against homosexuality to take the form of moral panics over endangered children.
Throughout the 1970s, the LGBT rights movement fought for and eventually won legal battles that allowed lesbians and gay men to be included under city and county laws that prohibited discrimination in employment, housing, and public accommodation based on race, ethnicity, religion, and national origin. In 1977, the commission for Florida’s Miami-Dade County passed, by a 5 to 3 vote, such an antidiscrimination ordinance.
In response to this, Anita Bryant, a popular singer, Miss America runner-up, and devout Christian, formed Save Our Children, a political advocacy group with religious overtones, to overturn the ordinance through a referendum. Her main message was that this antidiscrimination ordinance would allow for openly lesbian and gay teachers to “recruit” children to homosexuality by simply offering the example of being openly homosexual or through overt sexual seduction. Despite a well-organized movement against it, her campaign was successful, and the referendum overturned the antidiscrimination ordinance by a margin of 69.3 percent to 30.6 percent.
Bryant’s campaign spread to other cities, and many of the lesbian and gay antidiscrimination laws that had been passed in the 1970s were repealed. The lesbian and gay community organized again against this backlash. As a result, in 1978, when California state representative John Briggs introduced Proposition 6, which would have banned all lesbian and gay teachers from the state school system, citing similar concerns to Bryant’s, it was defeated 58.4 percent to 41.6 percent.
Bryant and Briggs both argued that the intention of homosexuals’ supposed abuse and molestation of children was specifically to make the children homosexuals. They also claimed that this abusive transformation could happen just by lesbian and gay men being open and visible, thus equating homosexual openness and visibility with an attack on childhood innocence. Implicit in all of this is the idea that the innocent child, if allowed to develop undisturbed by bad influences, will grow up to be heterosexual. Bryant stated, “What these people really want, hidden behind obscure legal phrases, is the legal right to propose to our children that theirs is an acceptable alternate way of life.” This dramatic statement, while not mentioning childhood sexual abuse, inflates the logic underlying the myth that sexual abuse causes homosexuality. Homosexuality was such a threatening presence that it could overpower children’s true heterosexual natures and make them gay. This was an abuse of nature, but more to the point, it was imagined as a usurpation of the parental right to control children’s access to sexual information. Throughout the enormous national press coverage at the time, no one thought to ask lesbian and gay youth what they thought about their sexuality and why or how they came out as gay.
The context for this damaging argument was that American culture had become more accepting of gay and lesbian people and culture. Not only had the gay rights movement helped bring about significant legislation to ensure that discrimination would be addressed, many women and men were now coming out, and there were more images of gay people in films and on television. Bryant and Briggs used the rhetoric of child molestation, but their real concern was that young people might decide for themselves, in part due to the increase in “gay rights” and gay visibility, to come out as homosexual. Since they could not admit that some young people may actually be homosexual, they elaborated more and more on the myth that gay people molested children to make them homosexual. Intensely politicizing the situation, they resorted to war metaphors. Describing gay activists as “militant homosexuals,” they accused them of recruiting children to their ranks. Bryant famously said, “As a mother, I know that homosexuals cannot biologically reproduce children; therefore, they must recruit our children.”5
Since that time, the idea that lesbians and gay men recruit, seduce, lure, or trick young people into becoming homosexual has become more widespread and a hallmark of anti-LGBT rhetoric. The very concept of convincing or forcing young people to be gay against their nature is predicated on the idea that same-sex desire is inherently bad, as well as irresistible. For the people who make this argument, any sexual desire in children is a bad thing because it can overpower the person who experiences it.
The belief that heterosexuality is the only natural form of sexual attraction has led to the stigmatization of same-sex attraction as a particularly pernicious desire that somehow enters you from the world “out there.” When people come out in their teens or younger, it is not only presumed that a gay person must have recruited, or abused, them, but that the very act of another person, especially an older person, saying, “I’m gay,” has the force to make them gay as well. In addition to being absurd, this panicked logic diminishes the integrity and vibrancy of young people’s sexuality and trivializes their ability to make healthy, informed, and pleasurable decisions about their own lives.