I believe gaydar might exist, but not in the sense Bailey presents it. When gaydar was first explained to me, it was described as how a person inter-acts with his environment, not just how that person acts. For example, does he make more eye contact with men or women? In a museum does he spend more time looking at the Venus de Milo or David? If he talking to someone and his attention is distracted (even subtly by eye movements) of a good looking person walking by, is that person likely to be male or female? etc.

It speaks volumes to homophobia in our culture…

Varnell said it best:

These and related difficulties lead to me wonder why Bailey continues to try to do sex research when he demonstrates so little understanding of the human psychology involved in sex and sexual arousal and seems so unself-critical about research designs that include sample bias, dubious testing procedures, built-in assumptions, unaccountable anomalies, etc. Whatever he is doing, it is not psychology and it is not science.

Warren, without knowing exactly what reference Boo intended, this statement might be relevent:

As we learn more about the causes of sexual orientation, the likelihood increases that parents will one day be able to select the orientation of their children. … allowing parents to select their children’s sexual orientation would further parent’s freedom to raise the sort of children they wish to raise and because selection for heterosexuality may benefit parents and children and is unlikely to cause significant harm.

It’s a bit of an unusual argument to make, to say the least, and does give some insight into the mind of the man.

Getting beyond the initial shock of the quote (almost as jarring as selecting race… an idea lurking there unsaid), I’m not sure that removing all same-sex attracted persons from society would be without harm. I don’t think there are many of us who would without hesitation remove Aristotle, Alexander, Whitman, Turing, Micheangelo, or Da Vinci from history. The world would be a quite different place and probably not for the better.

His book used to be available to read online at the National Academies Press website, but they’ve apparently taken it down. To be fair, he doesn’t explicitly call for wiping the gay population out, but around pp. 114-116 he talks about how it should be considered morally acceptable for parents to use selective abortion to ensure themselves straight children (in the name of “parental liberty” of course).

Also, I meant to provide the proper cites:

Greenberg, A.S.; Bailey, J.M. “Parental selection of children’s sexual orientation.” Archives of Sexual Behavior (2001) 30(4):423-437.

The abstract is available here.

But I do know that J. Michael Bailey co-wrote an article with Aaron S. Greenberg arguing that since “the likelihood increases that parents will one day be able to select the orientation of their children”, that parents should have the option of “selecting” for heterosexuality. In their conclusion, they write:

“We believe that many people find parental selection for heterosexuality intuitively troubling or even abhorrent. We also believe, however, that this is one of those intuitions that does not stand up to rational analysis. The general enterprise of attempting to influence what a child will be like cannot be objected to. Raising a child consists exactly in attempting to dictate what that child will be like in a multitude of ways. Virtually everyone beleives, and rightly so, that it is, indeed, a primary duty of parents to take steps, bother pre- and postnatal, to assure that their children possess certain charactieristics and do not possess others.”

…which is why I was never that keen on etiology arguments either way.

So much for biological determinism being politically correct. I think rhetoric like Bailey’s will slowly erode support for the born that way theory of sexual orientation in the gay community. So perhaps will the eventual realization that it’s probably not true anyway.