Homosexuality and Lesbianism

Abstract

DefinitionsHomosexual behaviour often occurs among persons who do not have a settled homosexual orientation. Sometimes, as among prisoners, it can be the direct result of lack of contact with the opposite sex. Around puberty, especially among males, it may represent the easiest way of testing sexual performance. In Kinsey's great survey of American white males, 37 per cent had had at least some overt homosexual experience to the point of orgasm since adolescence, 10 per cent had been more or less exclusively homosexual for at least three years between ages 16 and 55, but only 4 per cent remained so all their lives. Kinsey regarded sexual preference as potentially changeable and a matter of degree, not the clear, permanent dichotomy that had been popularly supposed.