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Point By Point: A Look At Paul Cameron’s Medical Consequences of What Homosexuals Do

Part 7: “Medical Consequences Of Homosexual Sex”

Including the Horrible Dangers of Kissing

Jim Burroway

February 27, 2006; revised October 15, 2006

So now that we’ve covered almost every conceivable sexual activity, Dr. Cameron is now ready to turn his creativity towards describing the medical consequences of all that activity.

…70%25 to 78%,13 of gays reported having had a sexually transmitted disease. The proportion with intestinal parasites (worms, flukes, amoeba) ranged from 25%18 to 39%19 to 59%.20 As of 1992, 83% of U.S. AIDS in whites had occurred in gays.21 The Seattle sexual diary study3? (sic. - ed.) reported that gays had, on a yearly average:

1. fellated 108 men and swallowed semen from 48;
2. exchanged saliva with 96;
3. experienced 68 penile penetrations of the anus; and
4. ingested fecal material from 19.

No wonder 10% came down with hepatitis B and 7% contracted hepatitis A during the 6-month study.

3. Weinberg George. Society and the Healthy Homosexual. (New York: St. Martin”s Press, 1972).

13. Jay, Karla; Young, Allen. The Gay Report: Lesbians and Gay Men Speak Out About Sexual Experiences and Lifestyles (New York: Summit, 1977).

18. Jaffe, Harold W.; Keewhan, Choi; Thomas, Pauline A.; Haverkos, Harry W.; Auerbach, David M.; et al. “National case-control study of Kaposi’s sarcoma and Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia in homosexual men: Part 1, Epidemiologic results.” Annals Of Internal Medicine 99, no. 2 (August 1983): 145-151.

19. Quinn, Thomas C.; Stamm, Walter E.; Goodell, Steven E.; Mkrtichian, Emanuel; Benedetti, Jacqueline; Corey, Lawrence; Schuffler, Michael D.; Holmes, King K. “The polymicrobial origin of intestinal infection in homosexual men.” New England Journal of Medicine 309, no. 10 (September 8, 1983): 576-582.

20. Biggar, Robert J.; Melbye, Mads; Ebbesen, Peter; Mann, Dean L.; Goedert, James J.; Weinstock, Robert; Strong, Douglas M.; Blattner, William A. “Low T-lymphocyte ratios in homosexual men: Epidemioligic evidence for a transmissible agent.” Journal of The American Medical Association 251, no. 11 (March 15, 1984): 1441-1446.

Rigdon, John E. “Overcoming a deep-rooted reluctance, more firms advertise to gay community.” The Wall Street Journal (July 18, 1991): B-1.

21. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. HIV/AIDS Surveillance Report, February 1993 (Atlanta: US Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; 1993): 1-23.

25. Schechter, M.T.; Jeffries, E.; Constance, P.; Douglas, B.; Fay, S.; Maynard, M.; Nitz, R.; Willoughby, B.; Boyko, W.J.; MacLeod, A. Letter to the Editor: “Changes in sexual behavior and fear of AIDS.” Lancet no. 8389, vol 1 (June 9, 1984): 1293.

Dr. Cameron appears to have mistakenly cited reference #3 (with a question mark, perhaps as a note to himself to check the citation) when he should have cited reference #5:

5. Corey Lawrence; Holmes, King K. “Sexual transmission of hepatitis A in homosexual men.” New England Journal of Medicine 302, no. 8 (February 21, 1980): 435-438.

For this section, Dr. Cameron is back to talking about gay men only. Not one allegation applies to women. Otherwise, there are a lot of statistics in this short paragraph. Let’s break it down, and bear with me, because it will start to sound like a broken record:

“70%… of gays reported having had a sexually transmitted disease” Schechter et al. (#25) is a very brief letter to the editor which doesn’t offer any figures for those who reported having an STD. This attribution is either an error or a fabrication.

The details of Jay & Young’s The Gay Report were first discussed here. More information can be found in our review of The Gay Report.

“78% of gays reported having had a sexually transmitted disease” We’ve also noted that Jay & Young (#13) suffers from an exceptionally low response rate barely more than 1%, and that the authors grudgingly admit that their results are not representative. But that’s not the full story.

In the chapter dealing with sexually transmitted diseases among gay men, the 78% statistic is nowhere to be found.DDDD There isn’t a composite statistic for gay men anywhere. Eight different diseases are listed in a table, but for four of them, the number of respondents who reported never having had that disease was in excess of 80%. For the other four, 74% reported never having had scabies, 67% reported never having had nonspecific urethritis (NSU), and 59% reported never having had gonorrhea. Only lice (“crabs”) was experienced by a majority of respondents, with 73% saying they had been infested at least once.

And while Dr. Cameron doesn’t talk about lesbians in this section, we should note that the story here is very different among the lesbian respondents. None reported having syphilis, and only 1.3% reported having contracted gonorrhea at least one, but most of them got it from men, not women!EEEE

The details of the Jaffe et al. study were first discussed here.

“proportion with intestinal parasites… 25%” Jaffe, et al. (#18) consisted of 170 gay men, with 50 AIDS patients and 78 others recruited from an STD clinic. The authors stated that “obtaining a true random sample of homosexual men to serve as controls did not appear feasible.” They also did not obtain a sample of heterosexual men to serve as controls either, which means we have no way of knowing how this figure would compare to them.

The details of the Quinn et al. study were first discussed here.

“proportion with intestinal parasites… 39%” Quinn, et al. (#19) consisted of 194 patients from an STD clinic, 119 of whom were selected specifically because they were being treated for intestinal symptoms. While Dr. Cameron charitably appears to obtain his 39% figure from the asymptomatic control group (and shows a rare willingness to bypass an opportunity for an even higher number by including the group with intestinal symptoms), he gets this figure from patients who have what the authors refers to as “anorectal or enteric pathogens” Anorectal or enteric pathogens are not equivalent to parasites, but includes viruses and bacteria. Since all 194 participants were patients at an STD clinic, this should come as no surprise. And without a control group of heterosexual men from the same STD clinic, we can’t compare these figures to those of STD patients overall.

The details of the Biggar et al. study were first discussed here.

“proportion with intestinal parasites… 59%” As stated earlier, Biggar, et al.(#20) analyzed only 78 gay men in Aarhus and Copenhagen, selected for the study for their extremely high risk behavior. The authors stated that their small-sized sample was “unlikely to be representative of the general homosexual community of either city.” Again, there were no heterosexuals to serve as a control group, so we have no idea whether this number is higher than expected, or if so, by how much.

The same footnote also cites the July 18, 1991 Wall Street Journal (#20). The article, which addresses mainstream businesses deciding to advertise in gay magazines, isn’t relevant to this statistic. It appears that Dr. Cameron doesn’t intend to use the Wall Street Journal as support for this data. Later in this pamphlet, he will cite this footnote again for a different contention in which both articles of this footnote are relevant.

“83% of U.S. AIDS in whites had occurred in gays” The CDC HIV/AIDS Surveillance Report (Feb 1993, #21) was compiled at the very height of the AIDS epidemic in the US. This statistic is a very strange one: Why would he talk about whites only?

The answer is easy: if he includes non-whites, the figure drops to 64%. Even though this figure is quite high, it apparently isn’t shocking enough for Dr. Cameron. This again reveals his habit of manipulating data to obtain the worst numbers possible.

The details of the Corey & Holmes study were first discussed here.

“The Seattle sexual diary study reported…” The long list of statistics from the “Seattle diary study” is referenced to the wrong source again. It should refer to Corey & Holmes (#5), in which every participant in the study was a patient at an STD clinic. The study only counted the number of instances of each sexual activity, not the number of partners for each activity. For example the study claimed that respondents performed fellatio nine times per month on average. It doesn’t claim that these were with nine different men as Dr. Cameron claims.

Exchanging Saliva?

Among the many strange and lurid descriptions of “what homosexuals do,” I presume “exchanged saliva with” is probably more commonly known as “kissing”. And if I’m not mistaken, exchanging saliva is very popular among heterosexuals as well. But it isn’t necessarily popular with Paul Cameron.

Back in 1978, before Dr. Cameron made a name for himself in anti-gay circles, he published a rather unusual sexual advice book for teenagers and their parents, Sexual Gradualism: A Solution to the Sexual Dilemma of Teenagers and Young Adults. His system of “sexual gradualism” promoted the slow escalation of sexual activity for teens through eight different “levels,” with the eighth level, sexual intercourse, reserved for married couples.

The seven levels that he allows for unmarried teens however is quite surprising — and probably alarming among his conservative supporters. At level four, he was okay with teens fondling breasts. At level five, he sanctioned mutual masturbation; at level six, full nudity in a shower or bathtub; and at level seven, oral sex.FFFF

That’s right. The very same oral sex that he condemned in the second part of Medical Consequences — the same oral sex that supposedly verges on “consuming raw human blood, with all its medical risks” — he counseled parents in 1978 to permit it for their teenagers. He even suggested that parents provide a safe place in the home so their teens could safely explore sexual activity:

Gradualism would best be practiced in the home [emphasis his]. A responsible set of parents might allot a room, privacy, access to a bathroom, a television and snacks for their teen-agers to practice gradualism. Providing privacy and encouraging them to develop in friendship and perhaps sexuality without fear of adult interference is civilized and civilizing.GGGG

But when it comes to kissing (at level 3), his opinion is rather different. He permits it, but:

Kissing, which is a fairly casual level of intimacy in our culture, is probably among the most harmful practices in which our culture indulges. I know of no absolute way to compare the amount of disease attributable to sexual intercourse as compared to mouth to mouth exchange.HHHH

So when Dr. Cameron decries homosexuals “exchanging saliva” in Medical Consequences, maybe he’s not being particularly anti-gay. It could be that he’s not so sure about it for straight couples either.

Please continue with:

Part 8: “Effects on Lifespan” Dr. Cameron’s most famous statistic.

Notes:

DDDD. Jay, Karla; Young, Allen. The Gay Report: Lesbians and Gay Men Speak Out About Sexual Experiences and Lifestyles (New York: Summit. 1977): 691-692. [BACK]

EEEE. Jay, Karla; Young, Allen. The Gay Report: Lesbians and Gay Men Speak Out About Sexual Experiences and Lifestyles (New York: Summit. 1977): 671. [BACK]

FFFF. Cameron, Paul. Sexual Gradualism: A Solution to the Sexual Dilemma of Teenagers and Young Adults. (Sun Valley, CA: HumLife Publications, 1978): 7. [BACK]

GGGG. Cameron, Paul. Sexual Gradualism: A Solution to the Sexual Dilemma of Teenagers and Young Adults. (Sun Valley, CA: HumLife Publications, 1978): 24. [BACK]

HHHH. Cameron, Paul. Sexual Gradualism: A Solution to the Sexual Dilemma of Teenagers and Young Adults. (Sun Valley, CA: HumLife Publications, 1978): 7. [BACK]