Professor Ritch C. Williams: Mostly Straight Adults

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/12/03

Professor Ritch C. Savin-Williams, an emeritus professor of developmental and clinical psychology at Cornell University, specializes in sexual and gender development among adolescents and young adults. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and has written ten books, including Mostly Straight: Sexual Fluidity Among Men and Bi: Bisexual, Pansexual, Fluid, and Nonbinary Youth.

His research focuses on the sexual continuum, resiliency, and mental health of sexual-minority youth, challenging traditional identity development models. Also a licensed clinical psychologist, Savin-Williams has consulted for major media outlets and served as an expert witness on LGBTQ+ issues. Savin-Williams discusses his research on sexual minorities, noting a discrepancy between public health literature’s negative portrayal and the fulfilled lives many LGBTQ+ individuals lead.

Savin-Williams notes that his transition into clinical psychology gave him deeper insights into the lived experiences and challenges in contrast to the overemphasis on pathology. He highlights the fluidity of sexual identity, especially among younger generations, and previews his upcoming book on the mental health of non-heterosexual youth.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Today, we are here with Ritch C. Savin-Williams. We will discuss your expertise, focusing more on orientation and identity than technology. I plan to do this as part of a larger series of interviews on various aspects of sexology. You transitioned into clinical psychology training in your forties, correct? What sparked your interest in making that switch and pursuing retraining?

Professor Ritch Savin-Williams: Most of my work has been in basic science research on sexual minorities. As I read the literature — initially limited but eventually more comprehensive — I noticed that what I was experiencing with real people in real time, whether they were gay, lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, or otherwise, often differed significantly from what I was reading, particularly in public health and clinical psychology journals. Initial research tended to emphasize problems like suicidality and homelessness. Still, many people I worked with lived happy, fulfilled lives and felt a sense of strength and community.

I realized certain individuals were in trouble, but I wanted to get closer to their lived experiences rather than just sending out surveys or questionnaires where people remained anonymous. For me, that has been more fulfilling. I had always wondered what it would be like to be a clinical psychologist. I had chosen the research path instead of the clinical one, and I still believe that was the right decision. However, I wanted to add a clinical component to my research and talk to real people face-to-face. I decided to combine my research background with the clinical skills I had developed during my clinical training. I began seeing clients and conducting in-depth interviews in my research universe. This was incredibly rewarding, and I hope for the clients as well. It provided me with insights into people’s real lives, far removed from the generalizations in the public health and clinical literatures.

Jacobsen: What were some of your early findings when dealing with individuals one-on-one and observing them living fulfilled lives that didn’t match the health literature? How did this challenge your views on public health research at the time? 

Savin-Williams: In the mid-1980s, I attended a conference in Minneapolis. I wasn’t presenting because I hadn’t published anything but went as an observer. There were about a dozen presenters, and every single one of them talked about how difficult life was for sexual minority youth. I found myself comparing their presentations to my own experiences as a faculty advisor for the gay student group at Cornell. The students I worked with were some of the most creative, artistic, and vibrant people I’d ever met. I liked them a great deal. However, I couldn’t reconcile the bleak picture painted by the public health professionals with the lives of these students. I couldn’t deny the validity of what the social workers, clinicians, and public health experts were presenting — they had an audience — but I felt that the audience was biased toward seeing sexual minorities as fundamentally troubled.

I supported helping LGBTQ+ people in need, but I felt the public health narrative was going too far in portraying this as the universal experience of all gay people. Instead of saying, “This is what happens to some gay people,” they were expanding it to, “This is what it means to be gay.”

As a result, they pushed for federal funding to investigate and provide services. While I supported this intention, I disagreed with the framing that seemed to pathologize the entire community. But when I tried to counter it by providing a larger context, I was pretty much shut down.

Indeed, maybe it was a decade later, when I tried to present this perspective, I remember being booed by other researchers who were mostly public health professionals. I understood, and I did say, “Not all gay people are healthy.” It would not be very smart to claim that, and it would go against everything I had read and experienced. However, their desire not to see gay people as potentially healthy or as major contributors to society was strong.

I didn’t feel the need to name gay adults in history who had made spectacular contributions to the world, though I felt like doing it. It seemed unseemly if you will. Besides, my focus was on youth. They might have said, “Yes, adults are different,” but that was not my focus.

Jacobsen: So, what decade was that period when you were shut down? A decade later, when were you booed? Let’s have a timeline in mind. I’m aware of the social commentary from the American Civil Rights era — the pain of being a gay man coming out in the 1940s and 1950s.

Savin-Williams: This was probably in the mid-1990s. Let me back up a bit. I attended a conference sponsored by the American Psychological Association, and they asked me to write an article summarizing the state of gay youth in America. Small task, right? I summarized every study I could find on gay youth. There weren’t many, but certainly several dozen. All of them showed horrific outcomes for being a gay youth in America. I summarized that literature, but I added a paragraph — which no one has seemed to read, I’m convinced — that essentially said, “We need to remember that these studies are not based on a representative sample of gay youth. Rather, by definition, they focus on youth in trouble. That’s why we can study them.”

That study I wrote was published in a major psychological journal and became my highest-cited article for 20 or 30 years. I don’t want to deny the whole thing, but it’s out there; it’s public. What frustrated me was that no one wanted to read that paragraph, the one that would cause them to question everything I was summarizing. So that’s part of what was going on. That context was out there when I presented at a conference and was booed. Then, the person who was supposed to respond to my presentation spent his entire time attacking me, accusing me of denying that gay youth needed help and trying to end all grants for assisting them. I decided not to fight. I’m not much of a fighter. I spoke with that individual 2 or 3 years later, and he admitted, “To be honest, I’ve never encountered a suicidal gay adolescent, but it seemed appropriate to discuss it.” I thanked him for his honesty.

However, that reinforced for me the fact that there were many motivations behind this research. Some were driven by a genuine desire to help. Still, others were about grabbing the money — because our government, thank goodness, was providing funding to help gay youth in trouble, those with HIV, and those who were homeless or suicidal. However, there was no funding to support healthy gay youth.

If you need money to sustain yourself and your research, you’re not going to say, “Let’s talk about how creative and well-adjusted gay youth are.” That perspective is seen as trite and banal, even though it’s not culturally framed that way.

Jacobsen: So, the medicine example is that prevention is the best cure, correct? So, support for mental health-inducing activities, such as social acceptance and praising achievement, is a much better preventative than emergency intervention, right? The equivalent, by analogy, would be that when these kids are homeless, addicted to substances, or HIV positive, it’s like someone arriving at the ER with a severe affliction.

Savin-Williams: Right. It’s important to have the ER — absolutely. It’s not too late, but it is late in the day for that kind of help.

Jacobsen: That’s a good point because it’s not framed that way often.

Savin-Williams: Right. The net effect could have been better science. This is not just the clinical side because I know that, as clinicians, people want to discuss their struggles. Still, they also want to talk about their strengths — the good components of themselves. I encourage that. Let’s look critically at someone’s life, not just focus on what’s going wrong. I understand that as a clinician, but what bothered me was the science — because I’m a scientist.

I’m at a university, where supposedly we do solid research, but most writers in this area weren’t. They were at universities more focused on seeking funding and support. I’m not saying Cornell didn’t want me to get research grants — of course, they did — but I couldn’t. I made attempts. But who do you go to for funding? The department of goodwill and good things? I don’t know. That’s when I decided to conduct my research. That’s what I do. That’s what I get paid for. It’s who I am at heart.

I’m also a clinician. I care about people, but I also care about an accurate portrayal of people. I’ve talked to youth who say things like, “I don’t want to be gay because look at what happens to you if you’re gay.” I know it’s hard to believe that kids think or say that, but they do. They don’t read the research, but they see the articles or media portraying a horrific picture of what it means to be gay. Do you think they want to come out as gay under those circumstances? 

Jacobsen: This brings me to another point. You had qualifications in religious studies at the graduate level before transitioning into psychology. So, in this context, during the eighties, nineties, and 2000s, you were facing pushback for your research or observations about the reality of LGBT youth or adults living fulfilled lives.

The cultural context you were navigating was largely religious, with enough of a milieu for individuals to preach in the way Billy Graham preached or the World War II healing revival movement preached, along with Charismatics, Baptists, and others. Yet, those numbers are rapidly declining — the Baptist movement particularly and mainline Protestant denominations.

We now see a re-entrenchment into a fantasy of traditional masculinity in some of these hardline evangelical and Catholic movements.

So that seems like a reaction to the fact that such a significant decline has happened. In Canada, if you check the line of best fit from Statistics Canada to this year, Canada, for the first time, will likely be less than half Christian. I want to be careful that I’m understood. I’m not saying all Christians, nor any particular denomination or sect.

I’m speaking about trends as a whole, and then there are specific denominational trends within those trends. It’s like bell curves within bell curves, in a sense — right? Meta-Gaussian distributions or something like that. This line of thought makes me think about that cultural ocean in which you grew and developed as an academic, a researcher, and an honest observer. With your qualification in religious studies, did American religious life and culture at the time play a role in some of these views being expressed in the public health literature?

Savin-Williams: Well, certainly, the religious right would use this information to support their point of view for things like conversion therapy — saying, “If life is so bad, come to our side, and we’ll help you.” I don’t know how much they use that argument, but it’s important to note that this still exists today. You can say this was happening in the ’80s and ’90s. Still, I’ve reviewed much of the literature — not all of it, of course, but most of it. As of 2024, I have not found a single article that examines the contributions, benefits, or mental health of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or fluid individuals. None. I can show you over a hundred articles that indicate pathology but none that discuss health.

By the way, many of these researchers are gay themselves. It’s not just straight, religious people conducting this research. Some are, yes, but many are our friends and supporters, and I don’t doubt their good intentions. I think they are wrongheaded. The approach should emphasize the positives of being gay, not just the negatives. But that escapes most people. If you want to get published in my field, you go with the flow — you don’t go against it. If I tried to publish an article on what I’ve just said, I guarantee it would be rejected because it wouldn’t be believed.

One article went through that process, and I eventually decided it was ridiculous. I wasn’t going to waste my time butting my head against a system that refused even to let me enter the pages of their journals to present my perspective. So, this is the subject of my next book.

Jacobsen: Let’s pitch that next book! What is the working title? What is the main research question? And what have you found so far?

Savin-Williams: Well, you’ve caught me early in this process. I had thought my last book on straight men would be my final one — a glorious topic to explore and write about. After that, I said, “I’m done.” But then I kept feeling this nagging thought — like, I can’t publish articles, but maybe I can publish a book. So, it’s going to be something like The Mental Health of Not-Straight Youth, or maybe Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Whatever Youth. That’s where I’m leaning. I will review the past literature — its good and bad aspects — what it accomplished and didn’t, and maybe explore the effects.

Jacobsen: Why was this research done, and what were the consequences?

Savin-Williams: There will be a lot of speculation on my part, which is why I write books rather than articles these days. I know the reviewers will be the people I’m not being kind to. How’s that for a gentle rejection?

Jacobsen: What is this concept — mindful of the time, we’ve got six minutes left — of “mostly straight,” especially among many millennial young adults who are coming into full recognition of their identities?

Savin-Williams: We always thought that fluidity and flexibility were more of a “woman’s thing” because women tend to be more changeable in how they view their sexual identity and their recognition of orientation — not their sexual orientation itself but how they identify and understand that orientation. They don’t need to be rigid or categorical — they can move along a spectrum.

That literature is growing and is fairly well accepted now, especially among women. Most people agree with it. My argument, and why I’ve researched “mostly straight” men, is that we’re beginning to see this with Generation Z guys as well. They’re saying, “That’s how I am, too.”

Of course, I wanted to incorporate biological data, like genital arousal tests and pupil dilation. Indeed, many men who identified as straight had some level of attraction or response to male images. And several men have said, “If the right guy comes along, you just never know.”

Some of this was romantic — they could fall in love with a guy, and some have. Some of it was sexual. So, this is something I felt needed more attention — not just among women, but also men.

Jacobsen: What percentage are we talking about?

Savin-Williams: Well, we know it’s about 10% right now for women. And once again, I’m focusing on young adults. There’s no evidence that this will change, but we’ll see. It’s usually around 3%, 4%, or 5% for men.

That’s wrong. If we knew the real numbers, 15 to 20% of “straight” people are mostly straight. And they are delightful individuals. If I had to pick my friends from those I’ve interviewed, I’d say, “Give me the mostly straight ones.” They’re thoughtful, dynamic, and flexible.

Also, something I found surprising was that they were less homophobic than gay men. They are mostly straight individuals. If you want a proper perspective, you should ask the mostly straight.

Jacobsen: So what do they think about same-sex attractions?

Savin-Williams: “Yes, not a bad idea.” “Yes, I support them.”

Jacobsen: “Thoughtful, dynamic, and flexible” — those qualities sound like they’re in the

ballpark of the definition of mental health.

Savin-Williams: Yes, it does. It’s striking.

Jacobsen: There may be something wrong with the way we think about masculinity and femininity as strict categories. We need to think more in terms of fractionation and parsing.

Savin-Williams: You’re spot on because we get so caught up in rigid categories. The only categories that seem clear-cut are whether you’re born male or female. But sexual orientation exists along a spectrum, and so do gender identity and gender expression. It’s not just masculine or feminine, and I don’t think it’s just gay or straight. It seems so obvious that I can’t believe we’re still using such strict categories in our research. “Pick your category,” I say. Throw that study away — it’s irrelevant to most young people today. I’d even extend that to the boomers and certainly the millennials. That’s just not how they view themselves anymore. But if you force them and don’t offer any other option, they’ll choose the one closest to who they think they are. But we got that wrong.

Jacobsen: Any final thoughts on today’s conversation?

Savin-Williams: Well, first of all, I appreciate this opportunity to preach. I have training in religious education, ministry, and so forth, so I’m aware that sometimes I get carried away with giving “the good word.”

Jacobsen: Stop your homilies, Ritch! It was wonderful to listen to you at your lectern, Ritch, thank you so much for your time today. I’ll be in touch.

Savin-Williams: Thanks, Scott.

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