The changeability of adolescent same-sex attraction

This is an excerpt from the book, "MY GENES MADE ME DO IT ! Homosexuality and the Scientific Evidence" by Dr N.E. Whitehead

There is substantial literature that the sexual orientation of adolescents is notoriously unstable, and this has been known since at the least the time of Kinsey. It is one of the basic facts that most people in this field know.

Kinsey (Pomeroy, 1972) found about 2% of his sample although homosexual at one time had made a “satisfactory heterosexual adjustment”. The degree of change in this varied. This should be compared with modern estimates that 2-3% of the population is gay or bisexual, which is the standard estimate, based mainly on about 30 surveys from the ‘90s.

This means a substantial fraction experience changes of various sorts. Kinsey found many of these changes were even as adults. It was the standard psychological opinion even in the middle of the 20th century that adolescent sexuality was fluid, as shown by the following forthright comment from (Barnhouse, 1977)

    "It is impossible for me to state strongly enough that to present this model to young people, or to          allow them - as often happens in the contemporary climate of open discussion - to imagine that            their transitory adolescent experiments are truly indicative of a settled homosexual disposition, is        not only evidence of psychiatric ignorance, but is specifically wicked as well." (p153-154)

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