Letters to the Editor

Dr. Friedman's Reply

Contrary to what Dr. Zuger suggests, we did not assume that the information given by our subjects could be accepted at face value. We pointed out the limitations of retrospective methods at the end of our article. We recognized that the data that we were evaluating consisted to a large degree of the memories of our subjects. Despite this constraint, which was identified prior to the beginning of our study, we nonetheless made the judgment that it would be interesting to proceed.

We did not believe that our subjects led “an entirely neurosis-free existence.” Few individuals manage this, regardless of sexual orientation. Our subjects did not, however, by history suffer from specified conditions of psychopathology during the past year. It is possible in fact that some individuals may have manifested effeminate behavior early in life and minimized it, or not reported it. This is a legitimate weakness of our design. We did not have the impression that our subjects consciously attempted to reduce effeminate mannerisms present during adulthood. It is true that many individuals, both homosexual and heterosexual, had painful, difficult childhoods. It was enlightening that they frequently had the capacity to continue growing, later in the life cycle, in such a way as to overcome earlier adversities.

In our article we were cautious in speculating about the etiology of homosexuality. One reason for this caution was that we don't have the view that homosexuality is a unitary entity. The relevance of findings derived from individuals such as the ones we studied for other types of individuals who manifest homosexual orientation remains to be established. Furthermore, we feel that the issue of etiology is so complex that we were reluctant to use our findings to support a single etiological model, even for the men in our study. We did, however, speculate that extinguishing factors such as male aggressive competency during juvenile years would markedly diminish the