From the Deep Archives: Karla Jay and Allen Young's THE GAY REPORT
"Beyond Masters and Johnson: Homosexuals speak for themselves"
This week Karla Jay posted on Facebook a “Throwback Thursday” photo of herself and Allen Young on the occasion of their fourth collaboration, The Gay Report, in 1979, which reminded me that I’d interviewed them and written about the book for the Boston Phoenix back in the day.
“In an age of ‘sexual liberation’ and ‘sexual awareness,’ lesbians and male homosexuals have often been conveniently forgotten or intentionally left out. Many of us wanted to talk about our experiences, but we didn’t have the opportunity, or circumstances kept us silent.” Thus began a questionnaire distributed throughout the United States and Canada early in 1977 for the express purposes of giving lesbians and gay men the opportunity to speak about their sexual experiences and lifestyles. The 16-page survey, prepared and tallied by writer-editors Karla Jay and Allen Young, contained short-answer and essay questions on everything from masturbation techniques and rate of orgasm to politics and self-images. And the results have just been published in The Gay Report (Summit Books, $14.95), the most fascinating and comprehensive record to date of contemporary gay life.
It was the phenomenal success of the Hite Report, Shere Hite’s 1976 best-selling study of female sexuality, that inspired Summit Books to commission a similar project concerning gays’ sexuality. The Gay Report, a formidable 800-page volume based almost entirely on the words of the thousands of gay people who answered the questionnaire, has been released almost simultaneously with Masters and Johnson’s much-ballyhooed examination of homosexuality. Yet the authors of The Gay Report don’t see their work primarily as sex research – perhaps because they themselves are not primarily sex researchers. Karla Jay teaches English at Pace University, in Brooklyn; Allen Young lives in rural Massachusetts and participates in the anti-nuclear movement; both are freelance journalists and radical gay activists. But they are best-known and well-respected for the three anthologies of essays they have edited: Out of the Closets: Voices of Gay Liberation, After You’re Out, and Lavender Culture. Although they were somewhat reluctant to undertake a national gay-sex survey, they soon saw that it offered a chance to further the philosophy that informs the anthologies.
“I believe that part of oppression is having other people tell your story,” says Jay. “So the thing that appealed to me about a survey of this kind was the same thing that attracts me to the anthology form: the chance to let many people speak for themselves. For instance, I’m not a lesbian mother, and for me to try to write about the experience of being a lesbian mother would be as oppressive as it is for a straight person to say what it’s like to be gay. This is especially true when it comes to sex. I think in the gay movement we tend to get hung up on the rhetoric, and talking about rights and all that, and we don’t talk enough about sex. Granted, there are some things in the book that make me want to throw up, but I think it’s valuable to learn about other people’s experiences. Besides, Allen and I have a reputation for printing things that we don’t agree with.”
This approach distinguishes The Gay Report from other, more clinical studies. As Young points out, “Most psychiatric research into homosexuality starts with a basically negative, or at least neutral and scholarly, attitude – very much the way a scientist might looks at bugs or monkeys as something that might perhaps have something to offer the higher form of species – in this case, of course, the higher form being heterosexuals. So I don’t place this book in the tradition of scientific sex research. I do place the book in the post-Stonewall gay-liberation literature, the writings of gay people trying to communicate with each other and to reveal the reality of the gay experience to the straight society.”
The many voices in The Gay Report give it a perpetually shifting tone. Depending on what chapter you flip to or what mood you’re in, the book can read like pornography, a sex manual, or a hilarious party conversation. It may often seem like an almanac: any thought or feeling about any particular sex act or romantic impulse or political argument can probably be confirmed somewhere in these pages. On the whole, the report is a sort of verbal history, a combination perhaps of The Joy of Gay Sex and Gay American History.
Young agrees that there was a certain amount of documentation to his work. “I found as I was going through the material—and maybe it’s my own interest in history that I brought to my editing work – I had a subjective preference for stories of people’s lives that were very situational. For example, one of my favorite things in the whole book is the story of the man who has a hot sexual encounter during the coronation of King George VI, in England. Sometimes I went out of my way to choose something that was important, like the experience of someone who was considerably older.”
Amazing stories abound in this book. “I lived with a lover for four years. At first it was fine, but then she wanted to keep me in the house. But I didn’t want to give her up. On her birthday, she wanted to take me out to dinner, but I was sick. A quarrel ensued, and I shot her. She did not press charges and came to visit me at the jail every day until I got out. When I got out finally, we didn’t go back together but we are still friends.” Elsewhere, a man recounts with touching straightforwardness a troubled 25-year-long relationship: met when both were 16, remained faithful (“like David and Jonathan”) for 10 years, weathered a threatening outside affair, suffered sexual problems because of one’s transvestism and the other’s alcoholism, resumed vows of sexual monogamy, and parted when one died at age 41, after which the survivor fell in love with a man who had been a friend of the couple’s for 15 years. The remarkable thing about these first-person accounts is that many contain truths, observations and descriptions of behavior that would be too complicated and unwieldy to notate in a more clinical survey.
The questionnaire that Jay and Young composed and distributed was in two parts: the first consisted of approximately 100 short-answer/multiple-choice questions, the second of 25 essay questions. Nineteen hundred questionnaires were received from gay men, 1000 from lesbians; of that number, only about half answered the essay questions. In addition, Blueboy (a slick, large-circulation gay men’s magazine) published the short-answer section of the questionnaire, and 2500 readers responded. When the completed questionnaires were returned, Jay and Young took the essay answers and edited them down to what now constitutes the bulk of The Gay Report. (“What appears in this book,” they write in the introduction, “is less than 10 percent of the material submitted to us.”) The short-answer sections were turned over to technical assistant Don Barrett, a staff member of Boston’s Gay Community News, who tallied the results by computer. These statistics appear in the book in the form of charts introducing each new topic.
The statistics play a subsidiary role in the book. Although the authors were satisfied with the range of people who responded, they will not claim that the figures arrived at represent the practices and views of anyone except people who filled out questionnaires. Instead, as Young points out, “The statistics place people’s sexual choices and experience in some sort of context. They help overcome certain stereotypes. Perhaps the most obvious one is the idea that gay men like to dress in women’s clothes. Relatively few men like to dress in women’s clothes, at least in terms of our sample. In the question of sex acts, for example, there’s been a lot of attention focused on sadomasochistic practices in the gay-male community. The statistics that we’ve gathered show that about 10 percent of the men are fairly frequent participants in S-M sex. However you feel about sadomasochism, at least there’s a concrete statistic that shows it’s a substantial amount of people but, on the other hand, a minority.
“Or let’s say you’re a person who doesn’t like anal sex. Well, you can see from the statistics in that section that if you have really strong feelings against anal sex, you’re in a minority but you’re certainly not alone. I think the combination of the statistics plus people’s comments can contribute to some sexual liberation. I think straight men have a lot to learn about anal eroticism, which is something that is certainly not unknown among heterosexuals, but I think most of them – because of homophobia or ‘asshole-phobia’ – don’t understand or are completely blocked on the subject. Reading some of the things gay men have to say about it could be very educational. Who knows? It could decrease the incidence of rectal cancer….”
What did the authors learn from The Gay Report? “I was surprised,” says Jay, “at the statistic that the majority of lesbians had had less than 10 sex partners in their whole lives.” Young says, “I was somewhat taken aback by the high percentage of people who said they felt they had been forced in some way to participate in sex or a specific sex act. I think that happens a lot to people when they’re younger, where there’s a willingness to have sex but not a mutual understanding of the pace at which the sex proceeds to the type of sexual encounter that’s going to take place. People really need to speak up about what they want. I think gay men will take no for an answer if it’s stated clearly.” Both Jay and Young mention encountering a considerable amount of indifference and even hostility toward the gay movement and having to make a special effort to include political viewpoints other than their own. “There were many critical comments made about the gay movement,” says Young, “and as a participant in the gay movement I was tempted to talk back to some people, to lecture and made comments when I felt people didn’t understand certain things or misinterpreted things. But that wasn’t the concept of the book.”
“There are several important aspects to the book on a research level,” Jay concludes. “First of all, it’s the largest sample of lesbians and gay men – especially lesbians – that has ever been included in this kind of survey. It is also, at this point, the most current. Masters and Johnson finished their testing in 1968 – that’s 11 years ago – and Alan Bell completed the actual research work for Homosexualities in 1970, while ours only took two years from start to finish of course, in 25 years our statistics may be useless, too, but the firsthand human experience we’ve gathered in The Gay Report is true, and that won’t date.”
Boston Phoenix, May 1979
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