If you were to sit down to write an anti-gay tract, you wouldn’t necessarily have to follow all fifteen steps. Some may not apply depending on the particular subject you’re working with. But the more of these steps you follow, the closer your work will come to matching the “best” that anti-gay groups have to offer.
Step 1: Set the stage. Most anti-gay tracts begin with a short opening section similar to mine. This is where you quickly dispense with the notion that gays and lesbians are actually human beings, let alone friends, family, neighbors and fellow citizens. Instead, gays and lesbians are portrayed as a faceless sex-obsessed hoard representing a dark and ominous force in American culture.
It’s important to set this stage right away — to make sure your reader is on board with the premise that the rich and complex lives of gays and lesbians can be reduced to one singular component — because it leads directly to the subject that many Americans find very uncomfortable: sex.
Step 2: Talk about sex. A lot. Most general-topic anti-gay tracts begin with a detailed description of sexual practices. There’s a good reason for that: no one looks good when their entire life is reduced to one-dimensional statistical descriptions of sexual practices.
Talking about sex can be rather gross, but don’t let that stop you. In fact, that’s the whole point. You want your audience to share your revulsion of gays and lesbians, and this is the easiest way to do it. Talk about sex as though it were the only thing that matters to gays and lesbians. Not love, not relationships, not commitment, not families – just sex.
To reinforce this point, anti-gay writers make extensive use of the term “homosexual” throughout their tracts. By constantly emphasizing “homo
sexual” instead of using the terms “gay” or “lesbian”, the
sexual component of gays and lesbians are emphasized above all other aspects of their lives. And the more you portray gays and lesbians as sex-obsessed homo
sexuals, maybe your readers won’t notice the irony of your tract being obsessed with the sex lives of supposedly “sex-obsessed” people.
Step 3: Use plenty of references. Professionals are smart people, and smart people use lots footnotes or endnotes.
An abundance of reference citations gives your article a scholarly tone and allow you to build trust with your readers. With them, your descriptions of those fearsome homosexuals will have the full backing of professional authorities. Having lots of references is probably the most important step you can take in building a convincing anti-gay tract.
And there is an additional beauty to having plenty of reference citations: while footnotes are impressive, nobody actually reads them. You can use virtually any source you want to and nobody will bother to see whether it actually means anything or not. Having seen your extensive reference citations, they’ll just take your word for it.
Another advantage to using lots of reference citations is this: once your reader gets accustomed to seeing them sprinkled throughout the page, you can easily slip in all sorts of “facts” without providing any source citation at all. Once you have established “cred” you can do just about anything.
Step 4: Cite authoritative sources, such as national probability-sampled surveys or governmental statistics. If you want your readers to be afraid of your target, you have to give them lots of reasons to be fearful. The best place to start is by using reliable surveys and governmental statistics, sources that everyone can trust.
But you’ll find that it’s not so easy to get the really juicy statistics you’re looking for this way. For one thing, Americans — gay or straight — are generally not that sexually adventurous, and these surveys tend to back that up. And for another, because of the expense of mounting these surveys, they typically don’t get enough gay men and women for making valid comparisons. Because the margins of error for these smaller subgroups are just too high, it only takes a few screwballs to throw the averages off.
But if you can use these more reliable surveys to your advantage then go right ahead. Be sure to brag that you’re using a nationally representative study – this is something you
don’t want to hide.
You can also use official governmental reports to back up your arguments. While these reports aren’t necessarily representative studies, they have the advantage of being
official, which presumes a lack of bias. Whether this is really true or not is a matter of debate, but that’s okay. The only people debating it are academics and activists, not your average reader.
When you cite governmental statistics, you are, as far as your readers are concerned, staking your claim to the full faith and credit of the United States of America. It’s hard to get any more authoritative than that.
Step 5: Slip in other less reliable “random” surveys. As I said before, Americans aren’t generally that adventurous, so it’s difficult to find the really scary stuff if you stick with probability-sampled surveys. But that’s okay because there are many more wide-ranging surveys to choose from which are not probably-sampled. Some are representative of selected cities or regions which may not represent everyone nationally; others are hampered by methodological limitations which prevent them from being representative altogether.
When it’s time to switch to a less reliable survey, just quietly slip it in. Nobody will notice that you didn’t describe it as “probability-sampled.” And here’s a bonus trick: you can call some surveys a “national survey” even when it’s not probability sampled. If your readers just assume that it is, it’s not your fault. You didn’t say it was. Sins of omission don’t count in culture wars.
Step 6: Cite casual surveys. Anti-gay writers often cite casual sex surveys published by gay magazines such as
The Advocate or
Genre. When you’re ready for the really scary stuff, casual surveys like these can be an excellent source for salacious statistics even though they are utterly unreliable for providing
valid statistics.
To learn more about the problems inherent with casual surveys, see our review of
The Gay Report, a book based on a casual survey from the 1970’s that has long been a favorite source among anti-gay writers.
Not only do these surveys omit the views of non-readers, they many not even reflect the views of that magazine’s readership. At best, they only reflect the views of those who are motivated to fill out intimate and detailed questionnaires on sexuality. That’s why casual surveys tend to reflect the views of the more sexually adventurous, which makes them a favorite among anti-gay activists.
One classic misuse of an STD study is the case of the so-called “Dutch Study,” which supposedly proved that gay unions last only eighteen months and that gay couples average an additional eight partners per year outside. To learn exactly how they came up with this, see our report,
Straight From The Source: What The “Dutch Study” Really Says About Gay Couples.
Step 7: Add behavioral statistics using convenience samples from clinical research, especially STD/AIDS and other medical studies. As with casual surveys, the pay-off here can be huge. But you need to be sneaky about it. For example, if you’re using a study based on people being treated for STDs, you cannot make that too obvious. (Well, you have to put the study’s title in your footnotes, but don’t worry. Like I said, nobody actually reads footnote.)
People who engage in risky sexual behavior are far more likely to contract an STD. This means that studies based on people recruited from STD clinics are far more likely to provide juicy statistics for sexual behavior. You can also find interesting statistics from studies of drug users or economically-stressed urban populations.
Step 8: Manipulate the data. This is where you can put your analytical skills to the test. As you delve into all of these studies, you’ll find that there is often more then one way to present the data. Of course, you’ll want to choose the method that depicts your targets in the worst possible light. There are many ways to do this.
Here is one popular trick: Notice how sometimes you might find some writers using awkward phrases like “those who behave homosexually” instead of simply saying “homosexuals.” Why do you suppose that is?
It turns out there is a very important difference. For anti-gay writers, one great opportunity for manipulation comes in deciding how to deal with bisexuals. Because bisexuals behave heterosexually as well as homosexually, you get to put them on whichever side that gives you the best outcome. All you have to do is work the numbers to see what works best for you.
Sometimes you can combine bisexuals with homosexuals (i.e., “those who behave homosexually“), and other times, you can combine them with heterosexuals (in which case, they usually just become “heterosexuals”). Or you can leave them out altogether. It’s all up to you. And you don’t have to be consistent about this – nobody else is. You can decide this on a case-by-case basis and adjust your descriptions accordingly.
Another opportunity arises when surveys over-sample smaller populations in order to get a better snapshot of these smaller groups. The overall survey can be statistically adjusted to become a representative sample, but the smaller subset by itself is not. But that doesn’t mean
you can’t use data from that smaller subset. When it comes to statistics, there are many ways to skin the onion.
How to Write an Anti-Gay Tract in 15 Easy Steps 
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