But what it does show – which is important – is that men attracted to other adult men are no more interested in children than men attracted to adult women.

Unfortunately, it’s not clear that the study shows this.

What the study does show is that there is such a thing as homosexual men who are neither teen-attracted nor child-attracted, but are only adult-attracted.

However, the sampling problems already discussed make it difficult to draw the conclusion that “men attracted to other adult men are no more interested in children than men attracted to adult women.”

For example, take another look at the top row of “teleiophiles.” There is definitely a hetero/homo symmetry in the height of the color bars. But note the little I-shaped brackets at the top of each color bar, representing “confidence intervals” (CI). Here there’s a notable lack of symmetry between the hetero and homo sides; among teleiophiles, the hetero CI’s are uniformly short and far from overlapping with each other, but the homo CI’s are rather long and much more nearly overlap, though without actually overlapping.

I would defer to a statistician, but what this appears to me to suggest is that homosexual teleiophiles, on average, tended to be slightly more hebephilic (i.e., a bit more responsive on the boner-o-meter) than the heterosexual teleiophiles. Of course, this could be an artifact of sampling or methodology and not really meaningful, but it does prevent the study from being the triumphant rebuttal you’re looking for.

Again, the study is only a definite rebuttal to the extremist claim that there is NO age preference among homosexual males, and that therefore ALL men who date other adult men are also potential pedophiles. But I would stand by my assertion that any sort of “no homosexual men are non-pedophiles” claim is rather rarely made today, although it may have been in wider currency when this study was done circa 1971. (In which case, one could say that the study was very important in its own time, but less so today.)

But the study is of less value in rebutting the (still current) claim that homosexual men are, to some unspecified degree, “more likely” than heterosexual men to be pedophiles.

– Is the plethysmograph considered reliable in measuring sexual arousal? Is there a protocol for administering a plethysmograph test – for example, procedures to relax the participant, the medium and duration of the sexual stimuli, etc?

– Has there ever been an attempt to use the plethysmograph to assess “ex-gays” who claim to have changed their orientation (as opposed to behavior)?

Finally, although I am no expert, I understand that the allegation of a link b/t gays and pedophilia is often backed up by a citation to a 1988 study by a researcher named WD Erickson. Although I have not seen the Erickson article, I have read that it contains a sentence, citing the conclusion of some other source that, in a particular group, 86 percent of abusers of male children identified themselves as gay or bisexual.

However, as I understand it, this was not the focus of the Erickson study, Erickson never vetted the statement, and there is no available source cited to support it. So you have this single sentence in a 23 year-old study that keeps appearing over and over, and no way to address it. Has anyone ever tried to track down this data or contact Erickson to get some clarification as to the source?