"The myth of a gay teen suicide epidemic is built upon a flimsy statistical foundation. Gibson, a homosexual social worker in San Francisco, uses statistics from mainly homosexual sources and then extrapolates them to the general youth population using the discredited Kinsey estimate of a 10 percent gay population.

"A perusal of Gibson's report turns up numerous contradictions and statistical impossibilities. For example, he refers to one author who speculated in 1985 (in the gay newspaper The Washington Blade) that as many as 3,000 gay youths kill themselves a year -- a number that exceeds the total number of annual teen suicides by more than a thousand (...The National Center for Health Statistics reports that in 1991, the latest year for which statistics are available, the breakdown is as follows according to age categories: 5-9 (1); 10-14 (265); 15-19 (1,899); 20-24 (2,852) for a total of 5,017 (phone interview with author, January 31, 1994). Even if we accept this expanded definition of 'youth' to include 24-year-olds, the figure in Gibson's report of 3,000 annual gay youth suicides would mean that well over half of all youth suicides are by homosexuals -- a patent absurdity).

"To reach his core conclusions on the high rate of homosexual suicides, Gibson points to assorted gay survey studies that claim homosexual youth are far more likely than their heterosexual counterparts to have considered or to have attempted suicide. These studies rely on surveys of troubled and often runaway youth. Generally, they have found a much higher rate (two to four times higher) of suicidal tendencies in their 'gay' respondents compared with their 'straight' respondents. Gibson then multiplies this higher rate by the disputed Kinsey figure of a 10 percent homosexual population to produce his figure that 30 percent of all youth suicides involve homosexual youth.

"David Shaffer, a Columbia University psychiatrist and specialist on adolescent suicide, has said, 'I struggled for a long time over [Gibson's] mathematics, but in the end it seemed more hocus-pocus than math' (David Shaffer, interview with author, April 22, 1993). Nevertheless, Gibson's claims have been repeated over and over as homosexual activists made them part of their lore...

"In addition to his reliance on the false Kinsey estimate of the homosexual population, Gibson's study is fraught with difficulties that should disqualify its findings, among them: