Jun 17, 2005  |  By: DYANA BAGBY  | COMMENTS     

ANTI-GAY GROUPS are already touting the conclusions of a soon-to-be published study by the conservative Family Research Institute that claims being gay is as dangerous as smoking or using illegal drugs, with a New York group calling for a warning label on gays.

Paul Cameron, known for anti-gay research regularly quoted by conservatives to denounce gay rights, asserts in a study that gay men die younger than heterosexual men. Cameron based his conclusions on what he said was a review of 10,000 obituaries published in the Washington Blade, and data from the federal Centers for Disease Control & Prevention on the ages of people who die from AIDS.

“[The data] suggests there are all kinds of choices people can make. You can choose to smoke, or to have fun with illegal intravenous drugs or engage in homosexual activity,” Cameron said in an interview this week.

“Certainly the data shows that homosexuality and shooting drugs seem to be among the most dangerous choices people can make. Homosexuality is a tremendous public health risk,” he added.

Cameron said the study of the obituaries, which he compared to the CDC report “AIDS Cases in Adolescents and Adults, by Age — United States, 1994-2000,” supports his research and shows that gays die 20 years earlier than heterosexuals.

According to Cameron, the newspaper obituaries show the median age of death for people with AIDS was 42 while CDC data concludes the average age of deaths of gay men with AIDS was 43.

Cameron then takes the AIDS deaths reported in the Washington Blade and averages them in with other deaths of gay men reported in the paper to come up with, what he said, is an average age of death for all gay men at 60 while the average age of death for adults is 80.

CDC disputes findings
Cameron’s methodology is simply bad science, said Ronald Valdiserri, deputy director of the CDC’s National Center for HIV, STD and TB Prevention.

“[The CDC] does not collect statistics on the lifespan of gay men,” Valdiserri said. “While gay men continue to be severely impacted by HIV and AIDS, AIDS-related death data cannot be used to indicate that homosexual men live shorter lives than heterosexual men overall.”

Because there is no national database that gives a count of all gay men in the U.S., “making assumptions about the group as a whole is difficult,” Valdiserri added.

Titled “Gay obituaries closely track officially reported deaths from AIDS,” Cameron’s report appears this month in the journal Psychological Reports. The publication requires authors to pay $27.50 per page for their work to appear.

Anti-gay groups regularly cite Cameron’s work to oppose gay rights. This week, the New York Christian Coalition used the most recent Cameron report to suggest gays should wear warning labels.

“We put warning labels on cigarette packs because we know that smoking takes one to two years off the average life span, yet we ‘celebrate’ a lifestyle that we know spreads every kind of sexually transmitted disease and takes at least 20 years off the average lifespan according to the 2005 issue of the refereed scientific journal Psychological Reports,” said Rev. Bill Banuchi, executive director of the New York Christian Coalition.

Banuchi issued the press release as part of a denouncement of the first Gay Pride Day in the town of New Paltz, N.Y.

In the recent issue of Intelligence Report, the Southern Poverty Law Center labeled the Family Research Institute as “extremist.” The SPLC said Cameron was the “longtime house psychologist” of the anti-gay movement and noted that Cameron said in 1985 that “extermination of homosexuals” might be needed in the next three to four years.