A survey of attitudes toward homosexuality among helping persons in Knoxville, Tennessee

The purpose of this study was to assess the attitudes toward homosexuality among helping persons in Knoxville, Tennessee. A 20item questionnaire related to needs and problems of homosexuals was sent to six groups of helping persons in May l973. Eighty percent (68) of the questionnaires returned were completed.

The small ranges between the means of the six groups seemed to indicate that there were no meaningful differences in attitudes toward homosexuality among the groups. Helping persons favored legalizing homosexual behavior between two consenting adults in private, they favored ending discrimination against homosexuals in state and federal employment, and they stated that they would work with a homosexual client who was not interested in changing his sexual orientation. Helping persons objected to having a homosexual son or daughter and they were opposed to homosexuals being permitted to adopt children.

The attitudes toward homosexuality of helping persons in Knoxville seemed to be slightly less supportive of homosexuality than the attitudes toward homosexuality among professionals in the San Francisco area. Helping persons in Knoxville seemed, however, less likely than professionals in San Francisco to label homosexuality as an illness or disease.

Helping persons in Knoxville were slightly more inclined than deans of students and directors of counseling centers to believe that homosexual seduction during the college years would cause a homosexual orientation in the life style of the victim. Over three-fourths of the helping persons in Knoxville favored campus recognition for gay groups as compared with less than one-fourth of the deans of students and directors of counseling centers sampled by Blair (1971).

Recommendations for further research included follow-up studies in one, two, or five years, and assessing the differences in attitudes toward homosexuality between ministers of different denominations, psychologists from different schools of psychology, and between the students in various helping professions and the professionals already in the field. The recommendation was also made that a method of assessing mental health workers' behaviors toward homosexual clients needs to be established.