Male Homosexuality in Four Societies

Male Homosexuality in Four Societies: Brazil, Guatemala, the Philippines and the United States is a 1985 work about male homosexuality by the sociologists Frederick L. Whitam and Robin Mathy.

Male Homosexuality in Four Societies: Brazil, Guatemala, the Philippines and the United States

Cover of the first edition
Authors	Frederick L. Whitam Robin Mathy
Language	English
Subject	Male homosexuality
Publisher	Praeger
Publication date	1985
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print (Hardcover and Paperback)
Pages	241
ISBN	978-0030042980

Summary

The authors discuss male homosexuality in four societies: Brazil, Guatemala, the Philippines, and the United States.^[1]

Reception

Male Homosexuality in Four Societies received a mixed review from the sociologist Barbara Risman in Social Forces.^[2] The book was also reviewed by Evelyn Blackwood in the gay magazine The Advocate.^[3] In the American Journal of Sociology, it received a notice as an important new book,^[4] and a review from the sociologist John Gagnon.^[5]

Risman wrote that the book provides the "strongest social-scientific argument yet made for the essentialist paradigm of sexuality" according to which sexual orientation is biologically innate" and "raises hard questions that cannot be ignored". However, she maintained that its arguments "ultimately fails on logical, theoretical, and empirical grounds." In her view, while it deserved to be commended for its complex "multi-method, cross-cultural" design, the work still suffered from "serious problems of sampling bias and analytic technique". She questioned the value of its finding that the gay men in their samples reported more "cross-gender interests" than the heterosexual controls, and accused its authors of "disregard for the large body of scholarship on sex/gender systems".^[2]