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			In 1948, pioneer sex researcher Alfred Kinsey published a book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, which reported a number of findings that surprised the nation, and became the focus of controversy for decades. Homosexual behavior was not restricted to people who identified themselves as homosexuals, Kinsey found. And when you added this group to the group who reported exclusively homosexual experiences, Kinsey concluded that 10% of the population was homosexual. What's more, Kinsey conceived heterosexuality and homosexuality as opposite ends of continuum of sexual orientations; then, to the surprise, dismay, or outrage of many, he added five different hybrid sexualities in between these two poles to form his seven-point sexuality scale. Since Kinsey's time, dozens of other researchers have conducted their own studies and developed their own sexuality scales, for the most part revising downward Kinsey's initial numbers.
			"At present it is clear that researchers are confused as to what they are studying when they assess sexual orientation," Randall Sell writes. Over the last 130 years, a half dozen or more terms have been used to describe sexual orientation-- from the now obscure classifactions (Dionings, Urnings, and Uranodionings), to the currently used terminology of homo, hetero, and bisexual. Terms are one thing, Sell makes clear, but how we actually measure sexual orientation is another. And the psychological and behavioral scales on which we measure sexual orientation are seriously flawed.
			In the past several decades, a new positive gay "identity" has emerged and grown in America. But this could not happen until a negative, pathological definition was torn down. Through much of this century, the medical and scientific community defined homosexuality as sickness, deviance, sex perversion, a form of criminality, and worse. A landmark event in the redefinition of homosexuality came in 1974, when the American Psychological Association officially repudiated the pathological definition of homosexuality. Though psychodynamic explanations of homosexuality no longer prevail, many maintain emphatic belief in them.

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