ABSTRACT
Homosexuality was removed as a mental disorder from the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1973, and in the three decades since research on lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) populations has increased dramatically. A 1984 review of the literature by Shively, Jones, and DeCecco identified 1,160 unduplicated titles from the previous ten years that “referred to heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality, or to sexual orientation in general” (p. 128), of which only 228 included LGB samples. In 1996, Sell and Petrulio found 667 research reports published between 1990 and 1992 in which homosexuality was the focus; 152 of them were unduplicated studies of LGB populations (excluding those in which subjects were selected based solely upon their HIV status). Yet, Sell and Petrulio (1996), along with Chung and Katayama (1996), recognized an “underlying conceptual confusion” about the nature or meaning of sexual orientation that seemed to span this growing body of research. “Sexual orientation” was rarely or inconsistently defined, and methods of assessment varied widely from study to study. Further, there were challenges inherent to the study of an historically hidden and hard-to-reach population that was being transformed by its declassification as pathological.
