Box Turtle Bulletin

Steady and sure, to the finish...
“Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife…”
This article can be found at:

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

Part 10: “The Biological Swapmeet”

Another Dangerous Thing Homosexuals Do: They Travel

Jim Burroway

March 13, 2006

Here is where Dr. Cameron really hits his stride. For the first paragraph under this heading, he summons every rhetorical flourish he can muster as he describes an imaginary world of a bacchanalian drug- and alcohol-fueled orgies, in which every bodily fluid and waste is consumed in every unhygienic part of the world. I won’t repeat it here simply because, as entertaining as it may be, it’s not backed by a single shred of evidence.

But in the second paragraph where the “swapmeet” takes place, Dr. Cameron describes the world-wide perils posed by homosexuals using just one rather peculiar statistic:

Every year, a quarter or more of homosexuals visit another country.20 Fresh American germs get taken to Europe, Africa and Asia. And fresh pathogens from these continents come here. Foreign homosexuals regularly visit the U.S. and participate in this biological swapmeet.

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.

So here’s the statistic: at least one-forth of all homosexuals visit another country every year. That seems like an awful lot of traveling for any one group of people to me. And as far as Dr. Cameron’s statistics go, this one seems pretty innocuous. Traveling isn’t an especially terrible or shocking thing for people to do — even if they do it a lot. You might be tempted to ask “who cares?”

Well, just for completeness, I decided “what the heck.” While I’m at it, I may as well look into this one too.

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

Remember Biggar, et al. (#20)? That one consists of only 78 gay men in the cities of Aarhus and Copenhagen. Because this was performed in 1981 just as AIDS was first being noted in the United States, the Danish researchers went out of their way to find gay men who had traveled to the U.S. for their study. Because they were looking specifically for travelers to the U.S. to see if any of them were showing any signs of AIDS, they managed to find 22 men (of 78) who visited between 1978 and 1981.

So Dr. Cameron once again turns the data completely on its head. Yes, a quarter of the men in this study traveled to other countries, but that proportion exists only because the researchers went looking for them. That’s also why they clearly said their sample wasn’t representative of either Aarhus or Copenhagen, let alone the world over.

We’ve seen this footnote twice before, and both times I said that the citation for the Wall Street Journal (#20) wasn’t relevant. Well it’s finally relevant here, but just barely. The article describes mainstream businesses that were interested in advertising in the gay press. But in this article there was just one small sentence related to travel:

Midway Airlines, which has been operating under bankruptcy proceedings and trying to woo new customers in its core Chicago market, has been taking out full-page ads in the gay press there.

That’s it — some homosexuals travel and one struggling airline wanted their business. The only purpose this article appears to serve is to pad the footnote. Who knows? Maybe homosexuals do travel in large numbers, but apparently not in large enough numbers to save a struggling airline. Midway Airlines went out of business barely four months later.

So even when it comes to a statistic that is completely innocuous, it still ends up being utterly bogus. By now, is it any surprise?

Please continue with:

Part 11: “The Pattern of Infection” Gays endanger everyone. But believe it or not, he’s starting to run out of steam.