SAILER ON JOBS WITH LOW AIDS RATES - SPORTS, ROCK STARS
<a href="../99/05/sailgay.txt">\doc\web\99\05\sailgay.txt</a>


From:           	SteveSlr@aol.com
Date sent:      	Tue, 23 Mar 1999 17:55:10 EST
To:             	h-bd@egroups.com
Subject:        	[h-bd] Re: Homosexuality & Reality: AIDS rates by profession


Steve Sailer replying to Ian Pitchford:


Ian.Pitchford@scientist.com writes:
<<  ... As in the case of mental disorders its also likely that
"homosexuals" who
 either become available for study, or become the object of wider public
 attention, form a biased sub-group of the general population, and since
 many
of
 those having homosexual proclivities are unlikely to identify themselves,
 for
a
 variety of reasons, I don't see how we can claim to have knowledge of a
 representative group, or any reliable estimate of the extent of
 homosexual behaviour. Even if we ignore this problem and assume that we
 have identified
a
 representative sample, what is the scientific basis for the assumption
 that similar, or even identical, behaviours have a common cause? A
 well-known
figure
 like Liberace might be an archetypal homosexual as far as the general
 public
is
 concerned, but in what scientific sense his he more typical than my

neighbour,
 a married Sergeant in the county police force who has sex only with other
men,
 and whose proclivities are known to very few. You definitely wont see him
 on the Rikki Lake show, or marching on a gay parade, except as a police
observer.>>


Steve Sailer replies:


Ian makes some good points here. We definitely do need to be careful in
defining what we mean by "homosexual." That, however, does not mean that
we can't know anything about at least certain classes of homosexual and
their tendencies. Tragically, we now have have a pretty good data source
on which occupations are most attractive to men who like to be sodomized:
AIDS death rates. Now, it's important to realize that these numbers tell
us nothing about "homosexuals" in the broadest sense because lesbians are
almost 180 degrees different. For example, lesbians almost never get AIDS
from lesbian sex. Nor does it tell us much about males who, say, like to
sodomize pretty boys, but are repulsed by the notion of being on the
receiving end. All we can examine is this one class of homosexual. 


With that said, striking patterns are obvious. For example, I read the
obituaries in the New York Times closely throughout 1993, paying careful
attention to the details surrounding the death of any man below 60. (This
was before the development of the new life-extending AIDS treatments.) The
evidence supported many traditional stereotypes about which occupations
are most attractive to men who like to be sodomized: e.g., choreographer,
dancer, Broadway songwriter, figure-skater, wine expert, spy, head-hunter
(corporate not New Guinean), religious leader, etc. 


What was equally striking were the professions with low AIDS death rates:
e.g., rock star and professional athlete. (The unexpected deaths of
celebrities in the U.S. usually leads to intense media scruitiny these
days [e.g., the deaths of Rock Hudson, Len Bias, and Florence
Griffith-Joyner], so it's unlikely that too many AIDS deaths were covered
up. )


Let's look at the numbers: About 3,000 roster spots exist on major league
teams in baseball, football, basketball, and hockey. There are also
several hundred de facto big leaguers in individual sports like golf and
tennis. So, the total number of top tier North American male athletes,
current and retired, must be somewhere around 20,000. Nobody believes the
old canard anymore about gays being 10% of the population, but even if we
use a more realistic 2.5% estimate, that still would suggest that there
should be 500 current or retired current big leaguers who are gay.


Clearly, however, there are far fewer. How do I know? Look at the AIDS
rates, which are almost negligible among major league athletes. A couple
of years ago the L.A. Times ran a huge investigative report on AIDS In
Athletics, but they could only find, on average, one AIDS victim per
sport. The two sports with multiple AIDS cases were boxing (where a tragic
number turn to heroin to relieve the pain) and, of course figure skating
(e.g, both male Olympic gold medalists from the Seventies died of AIDS).
Figure skating and the handful of other dance-oriented sports (e.g.,
diving) are the obvious exceptions that prove the rule: sports are
fundamentally tests of masculinity, and gay men tend to be less interested
in sports because they tend to be less masculine. In women sports, the
mirror image is seen: lesbians are heavily overrepresented. For example,
the outstanding lesbian sportswriter Mariah Burton Nelson estimates that
30% of the women touring pros in golf and tennis are homosexual. 


Rock stars are also underrepresented in the ranks of those with AIDS,
despite lots of heroin use and heterosexual promiscuity. Rock stars are
notorious for coming to an early end, dying of drug overdoses (Hendrix,
Joplin, and Morrison, to name just one year's toll), plane crashes (Buddy
Holly, Otis Redding, Lynrd Skynrd), choking on their own vomit when drunk
(Led Zeppelin's drummer and AC-DC's Bon Scott), choking on somebody else's
vomit (Spinal Tap's drummer), car and motorcycle crashes (Hank Williams,
Duane Allman, almost Bob Dylan), getting shot (e.g., Sam Cooke. Marvin
Gaye, Tupac Shakur), choking on a sandwich (Mama Cass), etc.. 


What they don't do much is die of AIDS. Freddie Mercury of Queen is the
biggest exception. I can also think of a member of the B-52s. I'm sure
there are others, but they are far fewer in rock than in most other forms
of music. Even the gender-bender superstars of the 70's seem to end up
married to supermodels (e.g., Jagger and Bowie). I suspect this pattern is
because men who are in danger of catching AIDS from anal-receptive sex
tend to be more musically talented than the average man. Of all forms of
music, however, rock requires the least talent and the most macho
charisma. 


It's also worth noting that there tend to be differences in sexual
orientation along the lines of instrument played. For example, singers and
keyboard players (e.g., Elton John or Little Richard) are more likely to
be gay males than guitarists, especially electric guitarists. In America
at least, keyboard players across a variety of musical styles are more
likely to be gay than other instrumentalists (besides electric guitarists,
possibly drummers and saxophone players tend to more likely to be
heterosexual than the average for highly talented musicians). In 1984
Presidential candidate Jesse Jackson was asked how he could claim to be
running a "Rainbow Coalition" open to homosexuals when he spent much of
his time campaigning in black churches. He answered, "Lots of black
churches have gay organists."


In summary, I think Ian does an excellent job of articulating the
mainstream social science view on the topic of human differences. I find,
however, that such thinking tends to pitched at a high level of
abstraction, seldom dirtying its hands by bothering to come up with
real-world examples to support its philosophy.


Steve Sailer
http://members.aol.com/steveslr
----------------------
 Ian Pitchford continued:
<< I think that it is extremely improbable that categories defined in
terms of the
 vague concepts of folk psychology will yield a set of natural kinds
indicative
 of underlying nomological unity. To take a useful analogy, how successful
would
 we be in categorising defects in the operation of a computer in the
 absence
of
 any knowledge of its functional components? Five entirely different
 phenomena could be attributed to five different errors, or five similar
 phenomena to
one
 single cause, when in fact all of the different phenomena could be caused
 by
a
 single hardware fault, and the five similar phenomena could be caused by
 five different software faults. As Scott Atran has pointed out, our ways
 of
thinking
 about the natural world seem to be constrained by an innate essentialism;
 so
we
 have to be particularly careful not to group people together simply by
 how
they
 look or behave. Of course people, especially scientists, will claim that
 they aren't subject to these crude cognitive biases, but some will still
 group "American blacks" together as a race, despite the lack of any
 genetic basis
for
 this grouping. If, as Dean Hamer thinks, some homosexuality in men is
 caused
by
 a gene beneficial to women but not to their male offspring, then such
 homosexuality is an evolutionary by-product, and the resulting behaviour
 in
men
 is no guide to the nature of the cause.


 In the case of cognitive phenomena such as intelligence, as an
 evolutionary psychologist I'm interested in core psychological faculties
 having the properties of Fodorian modules. Any module will be subject to
 heritable variation, and so people will differ in their cognitive
 capacities and resultant behaviours. If intelligence is a faculty then it
 should have an identifiable domain of operation. If it's the product of
 the interaction of a number of faculties then it should be dissociable in
 complex ways, as each of the contributing modules will have their own
 domains of operation. This
latter

 possibility seems to be likely as it is compatible with the neurological
 data in a way that "g" isn't; so I'm interested as to what cognitive
 faculties exist, and which of these contribute to what we call
 intelligence. I believe
it
 is this modular perspective that makes evolutionary psychology so
 revolutionary. This perspective has nothing in common with that leading
 some
to
 group people together on the basis of sexual preference, and then to
 infer a whole host of behaviours and traits ranging from effeminacy to an
 interest in fashion on the basis of that grouping.


 Regards


 Ian Pitchford <Ian.Pitchford@scientist.com>
 Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies
 Department of Psychiatry
 University of Sheffield, S10 2TA, UK
 http://www.human-nature.com/
  >>


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