2.11 In memoriam: Vern Bullough

Quotes from

Vern Bullough, our greatest Sexologist, dies at 77

Percy, William A., The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, 1 November 2006

The GLBT community has lost its most effective advocate from outside the gay world. Sexologist, activist, nurse, and historian, Vern Bullough died from cancer on June 21st at 77. 

[...] 

Born a Mormon in Salt Lake City in 1928, Vern renounced that religion while a teenager. He received an introduction to homosexuality and its study through his wife Bonnie. Her mother, living in Las Vegas, had come out in the 1940's as a lesbian and entered into a lifelong relationship with Berry Berryman. This couple introduced Vern and Bonnie to a side of life heretofore closed off to them. 

By the time they reached college, they were already publishing works about homosexuality. Vern eventually wrote, co-authored, edited, or co-edited almost sixty books, some with Bonnie, who was primarily a nurse, though she later gained a doctorate in sociology. To bring himself up to par about medicine, Vern picked up a degree in nursing from California State University in 1980, and the two wrote prolifically together on nursing as well as sexology.

But this was many years after he'd gotten his BA from the University of Utah, in 1951, followed by a doctorate in the history of medieval medicine and science from Chicago just three years later. 

Vern moved to Los Angeles in 1959 to begin teaching at California State University at Northridge, where he remained until 1980. He became a board member of the ACLU's Southern California chapter -- on the condition that the trend-setting chapter, the oldest in the nation, would acknowledge homosexuality as a civil liberties issue. 

[...] 

As Vern himself recognized, his most important book was Sexual Variance in Society and History (1976)
[...], 
a most diligently researched and enduring work. Vern classified societies as sex-positive, neutral, or sex-negative, and basically showed that most homophobia stemmed from Leviticus, the Sodom story, and the  Pauline epistles, and that Jewish, Christian, and Moslem societies were far more likely to condemn and persecute sexual minorities than were other societies.

Vern's work included major studies of prostitution, contraception, and all the "trans" people [...]. 
He edited a sex series for Prometheus Press that facilitated translations of Karl Ulrichs and Magnus Hirschfeld into English. But beyond all this, Vern fought for better recognition of homosexuals in history books and maintained that pederasty, or intergenerational sex, was historically common. 

He always supported the work of Bruce Rind, even when Rind and the American Psychological Association were unanimously condemned by both houses of Congress for publishing Rind's skillful synthesis of all previous studies of the effects of intergenerational sex. Like Harry Hay, Vern never denounced NAMBLA.

[...] 

Unlike his flamboyant role models Alfred Kinsey and Hirschfeld, Vern was modest and retiring. His writing and speaking styles were as unsparkling as his wardrobe. 

[...] 

But behind the bland exterior was a genius: brilliant, indefatigable, generous, loyal, and inspiring. Accused of pedophilia because he served on the editorial board of Paidika, he was undeterred in supporting research into all variations of sexual behavior. A driven researcher like Hirschfeld and Kinsey -- and subjected to similar threats -- Vern remained surefooted and unflappable. Like them, but with degrees in history and nursing, he neglected no avenue of understanding, from the sciences and the humanities, to the fine arts, genetics, medicine, sociology, and psychology. Unlike them, he never collected much raw data himself, but he understood statistics and knew how to analyze and interpret such surveys.

Vern's learnedness and high professional standing, combined with his nonjudgmental outlook, over the years established a vital link between the gay and straight communities. Facts are facts, and science is science, and no amount of wishing them away, no amount of
pressure or calumny, ever deflected Vern from his mission--to learn the truth and communicate it to others.