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The topic of homosexuality is beset by a plethora of writing and a paucity of knowledge. Professional pundits pontificate on their pet etiological theories, and clinicians, who should know better, politicize a scientific issue by voting on whether homosexuality is an “illness.” Yet even the most elementary and basic investigatory work in this area still remains to be done and reported. Yeats's observation that “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity” is nowhere more applicable. Homosexualities, therefore, is a most welcome attempt at filling at least a portion of this horrendous void.
Homosexualities is the second of three planned publications on homosexuality by the Institute for Sex Research, founded by the late Alfred C. Kinsey. It is an unpretentious, somewhat biased, nondogmatic, basically sociological excursion into the gay world of the San Francisco Bay area. The authors and their associates report on interviews with over 1500 men and women, homosexual and heterosexual, of diverse races and social positions, regarding the varied dimensions of their sexual and social lives: the number and nature of their sexual relationships, levels of sexual activity, sexual techniques employed, friendship and family relationships, psychological adjustment, etc. The raw data, having been fed through a labyrinthian maze of programmers, computers, statisticians, and what have you, emerges with composite images of diverse lifestyles lived by individual human beings. Perhaps the book's greatest contribution is precisely this observation: that homosexuals per se cannot simply be regarded as some monolithic entity contrasted with the varieties of heterosexual lifestyles and experiences. Bell and Weinberg emphasize how homosexuals differ from each other while, at the same time, expounding on five major lifestyles found within the homosexual subculture. “Close-coupled” homosexuals live much like married heterosexuals, presumably stable and satis