In March 2001, Gary Glenn of the American Family Association of Michigan declared that upwards of 50 percent of gay relationships are beset by domestic violence — and that, each year, 650,000 incidents of same-sex domestic violence occur.
In order to find that statistic, Glenn had to overlook 12 years of developing research that suggests a gay domestic violence rate not much higher than among heterosexuals.
Instead, Glenn cited a 1991 book, "Men Who Beat The Men Who Love Them: Battered Gay Men and Domestic Violence," by Patrick Letellier and David Island. The book was written before any substantive research on the subject had been done. The authors conjectured that, since men might be more prone to violence than women, putting two men together might result in a higher rate of domestic violence. Island and Letellier extrapolated from data on heterosexuals and took a wild guess that there might be as many as 350,000 to 650,000 incidents per year.
Glenn cited only the 650,000 number, made a 1991 wild guess sound like a current statistical fact, and calculated that such a quantity might be 50,000 times higher than the FBI’s sketchy annual counts of hate crimes.
In essence, Glenn sought out an extreme number, misleadingly attributed it to Island and Letellier, and then broadcast the fabrication as far as he could.
Just one month ago, the Culture and Family Institute and Focus on the Family resurrected Glenn’s fabrications and rebroadcast them as evidence that hate crimes are committed by homosexuals against homosexuals, not by gay-bashers. To date, the following organizations have published the fabrications.
American Family Association of Northwestern Pennsylvania
American Voice Institute of Public Policy
Fifth District Republicans, State of Washington
Traditional Values Coalition (PDF brochure)
Web Today (Conservative News)
According to Google, Dr. Judith Reisman repeats the distortion frequently. On the page linked above, she carefully bypasses key phrases when she quotes from the Island-Letellier book. Reisman’s hatchet jobs have been published by the ex-gay Abiding Truth Ministries, the Catholic Family Association, Fr. Rich Perozich (spiritual adviser to Courage RC), and Pat Robertson’s Regent University.
Patrick Letellier refuted Glenn’s fabrications, but I find no corrections or apologies issued by those who have distorted Letellier’s work.
Hate Crimes, Domestic Violence, and the Extreme Right:
Setting the Record Straight
By Patrick Letellier
My name is Patrick Letellier, and I am one of two "prominent homosexual activists and researchers" whose work on same-sex domestic violence has been widely cited — and, I hasten to add, grossly distorted — by Gary Glenn, President of the Michigan American Family Association (AFA). I write today to set the record straight, so to speak. …
Letellier’s response should be required reading for the tolerance movement, as well as the religious right.
For those who wish to read some current research for themselves:
Letellier cites reports on gay domestic violence issued by the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Projects. They are available here.
For the sake of contrast: The American Public Health Association published a study in December 2002 on battering among "men who have sex with men" — not always gay couples, and not lesbians. The study abstract is available here; articles that refer to the study are listed here.)
Comments in response to this post:
Data? What data? I didn’t notice any data in this discussion.
What I did notice was a projection based on an assumption (that males in same sex couples might commit a corresponding amount of violence as males in opposite sex couples) but I haven’t seen any evidence to suggest that that has anything to do with reality.
Or that it has anything to do with the reality of female couples–something that is almost always ignored in these discussions.
raj • 8/11/03; 4:22:36 AM
Recent book called, I think, Soul Beneath the Skin, goes into police statistics on the number of arrests, complaints etc in various major cities. Shows that by a large margin, gay pride events are the most peaceful large scale events ever held in major cities. Compares the arrest rates for comparable events: gay events have the lowest. When the broncos won the super bowl, the mayor finally had to bring in troops from Ft Carson to restore order. Gay bars have the lowest incident rates of any alcohol serving venue. Gay neighborhoods tend to have substantially lower rates of domestic disturbance calls. The author cites sources for this. Good to hear from you Raj.
Dale • 8/11/03; 1:20:50 PM
It is all well and good to refute the gay domestic violence “statistics” that are being distributed by the groups such as the American antiFamily Association, but a more interesting question is why they are distributing the statistics. And to whom. It is clear that they are not distributing them to social service groups for the purpose of suggesting that they provide services to gay couples. Not by a long shot.
What is clear is that they are distributing them to people to try to instill the thought that gay people are violent. This strikes me as being an extension of what their co-conspirator Scott Lively tried to do in the thoroughly discredited–but still distributed–Pink Swastika.
Information on the book I referred to and to its backers:
https://www.manifestlove.org/book.htm
Drawn from sociology, anthropology, epidemiology, public health, social psychology, and gay men’s own stories, it shows how gay men have created a profound, invisible set of social experiments:
We have built the least violent public culture seen among any men (Chapter 2);
Our patterns of altruism, caretaking, and volunteering are seen in no other communities of men (Chapter 3);
We caretake more consistently in our sexual relations (Chapter 4);
We build intimate relationships not just in couple, but in webs (Chapter 5);
We enjoy the world’s richest, most elaborate, innovative sexual cultures (Chapter 5);
We pioneer powerful new norms of communal intimacy, support, and brotherhood (Chapter 6);
We craft whole new ways of being men with women (Chapter 7);
Our innovations have no parallel in modern times. Caregiving, volunteerism, service, non-violence, intimacy, friendship, community, gender peace — all are shared experiments in love.
Soul Beneath the Skin suggests that we are present at the creation of a radiant new public ethics — a lived spirituality– with deep implications for gay men and for society.
What the group behind the book believes, radically different from exgay theology:
Spirituality and Ethics
As gay men, many of us remain simultaneously aware of our strengths in friendship and loving actions, yet distrustful of imagining any larger purpose, pattern, or lesson in the ways we live our lives.
Across time and cultures, many societies have long viewed gender-divergent men as channeling beauty, ritual and sacred wisdom into culture. In fact, our work may go far deeper.
Manifest Love explores the idea that gay men may also function to channel a kind of love into culture, a love beyond Eros to caritas, a radically transformational form of social communal relation. That is, that the values, practices, rituals, and norms of our gay male worlds are an experiment in a new kind of beloved community.
Manifest Love takes seriously the possibility that gay men are evolving a set of ethics that embody some of the values most important to society, yet which remain largely unseen or unappreciated by gay men ourselves, as by the straight world.
Is this spiritual work? Spiritual is as spiritual does. It’s time to understand the deeper, culture-changing practices gay men bring societies in which we live, and to ask whether, in ways we barely see, all of us– gay and straight– are present at the creation of a set of transformative ethics, one we call Manifest Love.