Subject: Press Release - Gay Survey
From: "Macavity" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 11 Sep 1999 15:51:02 -0400

Announcing

The First International, Internet Survey 

of Gay & Lesbian Coming Out Experiences

- Please publicize this information -

I need your help to get this information to the gay community. I am 
asking for your assistance in distributing this information through your 
readership/membership/publications or a link to your webpage etc.

I am writing to inform you of a survey which has been posted on the 
Internet to survey the "coming out" experiences of LGBT people. It is 
being conducted for three reasons:

  1.. A couple of friends and I got talking and thought it would be 
interesting to do 
  2.. I'm collecting data for a book/series of articles based on the 
survey results 
  3.. I think that the information would be valuable to have for a 
number of reasons
What I'm doing has not yet been done before to my knowledge. I've done 
some research on the On-Line bookstores and have only been able to find 
books about coming out that deal with either people's stories or 
situationally-specific coming out experiences (i.e.. coming out in the 
military, to your wife, if you're lesbian, at work, etc). I think that I 
am attempting something new. I am not interested in simply creating a 
collection of coming out stories. That has been done. 

In my daily work, I design, administer and analyze surveys for clients. 
My area of expertise is survey design and analysis. So what I'm now 
attempting is to survey every gay person with Internet access that I can 
inform about this survey and produce what may well be the first set of 
internationally collected statistics about gay people and their coming 
out experiences. 

These are the sorts of things I'm asking people. 

  a.. How old were you when you came out? 
  b.. What year did you come out? 
  c.. Did you come out by choice or were you outed? 
  d.. Did coming out cause you to have to relocate?
I hope to be able to produce valid, reliable statistics about gay people 
and the "global" experiences associated with coming out. I'd like to 
eventually have the study published in the Journal of Homosexuality and 
other academic journals. If I'm right and I'm the first to have 
attempted this, it might be ground-breaking research and precedent 
setting. 

Here is the link to my site - the survey is live on the web now. 

http://members.execulink.com/~macavity/index.html 

Please bear in mind, the website is a "personal" site and was created 
long before the idea for the survey popped up, thus, it's a little less 
"professional" in tone than I'd like (but I had to post the survey 
somewhere!) 

Last point. Although I am gay and am out - I am preserving my 
confidentiality out of consideration for my parents (who I am out to and 
who know about this survey). I am doing this for the same reasons that 
John Reid wrote "The Best Little Boy In The World" under the pen name 
"Andrew Tobias". My choice to be active in the gay community and to 
conduct this research should not have to be achieved at their expense by 
forcing them out of the closet as well. They would prefer that I 
maintain a low profile.  Therefore, please forgive me for not signing my 
name.

Thanks for your time and consideration.

MaCavity

[email-masked]