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Chicago Gay Paper Nixes Ad
From Controversial Sex Researcher
By
Mark Fitzgerald
Published: August
15, 2006 3:35 PM ET
CHICAGO
The Chicago Free Press will no longer publish an
ad soliciting gay males for a sex study because
of the involvement of a controversial
Northwestern University professor, the
gay-oriented weekly declared in its current
issue.
The action
has stirred strong emotions among defenders and
opponents of the work of the professor, J.
Michael Bailey.
A
transsexual activist, Lynn Conway, hailed the
Free Press in an e-mail for taking "a courageous
action ... (that) is a new and very effective
way to defend against rogue scientists such as
Bailey."
At the
same time, the newspaper has been "inundated" by
letters defending Bailey's work -- many of them
apparently prompted by an e-mail blast to a
listserv from Bailey himself, Free Press Editor
Louis Weinberg said Tuesday.
In an editorial in its Aug. 9
edition entitled "Bad Science," the newspaper
said would not allow itself to be used "to
further the dubious agenda of someone who
believes he should not be held accountable to
our community."
Bailey is the author of the 2003
book, "The Man Who Would Be Queen," which
angered transsexual and transgender persons for
some of its assertions, which Bailey said are
based on rigorous data. Northwestern
investigated allegations that Bailey acted
improperly during the research for the book, but
never disclosed any specific discipline. Bailey
resigned as head of the psychology department,
but remains on the faculty.
Bailey has also angered some gay
activists with research he says show that
bisexuality probably does not exist as a sexual
orientation in men; that gay men "on average and
in some respects" tend to be more feminine than
straight men; and that the traditional
explanation that a transsexual woman is a "woman
trapped in a man's body" is wrong, and better
explained, among "one kind" of transsexual women
as "erotic excitement at the idea of becoming a
woman."
"The main
complaint is that Bailey's been accused of a lot
of improprieties over the years, and he's never
returned our calls," Editor Weisberg said. "He's
using us as science experiments but not being
very accountable to us as a community."
In an e-mail to
E&P, Bailey said researchers placed the ad
looking for two or more gay brothers from the
same family for a genetic study of male sexual
orientation.
"We
have advertised around the country for this
study, and we have never had a problem," he
said.
Bailey, in
his e-mail to colleagues, said the editorial was
"very hostile and very inaccurate." And in a
letter to the Free Press he also sent to
E&P, Bailey said he had responded to “the of
the various accusations against me concerning my
book” on this Web page:
http://www.chron.org/tools/viewart.php?artid=1248.
“What should be
obvious to anyone who takes the time to visit
the vast websites that a very few angry
transsexual women have erected in my honor is
that they hate the ideas I wrote about,” Bailey
wrote. “I have been willing to say -- in my
book, in my research on male bisexuality, in my
research on femininity in gay men, and in my
work generally -- things that are true but that
make some people irate.”
He said his conclusions simply follow
research data, and that “if I believed that my
work was truly harming gay people, I would stop
doing it.”
In its
editorial, the Free Press said “we cannot in
good conscience steer our readers to a study
that Bailey is part of,” and that before
accepting future ads for sexuality research, the
ad staff will ask who is involved in the
study.
“If Bailey
is,” the newspaper said, “we won't accept the
ads.”
Mark Fitzgerald (mfitzgerald@editorandpublisher.com)
is E&P's editor-at-large
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