It's also time again for religious right groups to push their sad counterpart, Day of Truth, in which other students are encouraged to dissuade the supposed gay agenda.
Let's be honest. The Day of Silence has been a huge success every year while the Day of Truth has been a flop. I guess this is a case where the young has more sense than adults when it comes to accepting their lgbt peers.
So this year, the Day of Truth seems to have gone through a change in an attempt to seem hip and appeal to the young.
Its webpage is really cute and there seems to be a "we just want to start a conversation" vibe going on.
And of course there is that semantic claim that the Day of Truth preaches true tolerance for "those who make not agree with the homosexual agenda."
But don't be fooled. Like all other vestiges of the religious right, the Day of Truth is peddling inaccurate information about the lgbt community and the majority of it is contained in its resource guide page.
There is a pdf file from written by "Mike," a supposedly former gay young man, called Homosexuality isn't the answer. This is some of the things he says:
Many researchers have studied how gay-identified people live. The research has convinced me that embracing homosexuality is not the satisfying dream-come-true that society makes it out to be, even for those who are exclusively attracted to the same sex. Let’s look at how.
Research has shown that many gay-identified men, over their lifetime, have a lot of partners. In the 1980’s, two researchers named Mattison and McWhirter studied 156 male couples over a period of five years. Out of all these couples, only seven claimed that they were sexually monogamous while they were together, and none of these were long-term. Of the couples who stayed together more than 5 years, none were monogamous.
And this isn’t biased research from a religious or conservative group. Mattison and McWhirter were openly gay men.
It's interesting that a young man would have the gumption to look up a study that was published in 1984. It's also interesting that "Mike" referred to the Mattison and McWhirter study without mentioning the part in which they said their work couldn't be considered an adequate representation of all gay couples:
“We always have been very careful to explain that the very nature of our research sample, its size (156 couples), its narrow geographic location, and the natural selectiveness of the participants prevents the findings from being applicable and generalizable to the entire gay male community.”
"Mike" also says:
More recently, in 2003 a Canadian professor named Barry Adam released a study about gay men. He reported that only 25% of the men he interviewed claimed to have been in monogamous relationships at some point, and these were mostly younger men in relationships shorter than three years.
Of course "Mike" omits several things about the study. According to a Washington Blade article:
Adam recruited the men for his study through ads in gay publications and leaflets distributed at gay organizations and bars in Ontario. To qualify for the study, the men had to be in a relationship for at least a year. The relationship of one couple spanned 23 years.
The sample of 70 men - including both members of 10 couples and 50 other men - included 41 Caucasians, 16 Asians, five men from African and Caribbean descent, seven Latinos and one Canadian Aboriginal.
The article also says:
I doubt that "Mike" is who he says he is. Most likely, he is a Day of Truth staffer dressing up distorted studies as a "personal story of freedom from homosexuality."
Adam's research team did not calculate the average length of non-monogamous relationships. It was not clear if partners became non-monogamous over time, or if they agreed to be in an open relationship from the beginning, Adam said.
The study sample was diverse but may not be representative of gay men as a whole, because "genuinely random samples of gay and bisexual men are virtually unachievable," Adam said.
