Am J Psychiatry 1988; 145:495-497
Copyright © 1988 by American Psychiatric Association
Behaviors and attitudes related to eating disorders in homosexual male college students
J Yager, F Kurtzman, J Landsverk and E Wiesmeier
Department of Psychiatry, UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute 90024.
To investigate whether homosexuality predisposes males to eating disorders,
the authors studied 48 nonpatient homosexual male students at UCLA. The
homosexual men had higher prevalences of binge-eating problems, of feeling
fat in spite of others' perceptions, of feeling terrified of being fat, and
of having used diuretics than other male students. They also scored higher
on the Eating Disorders Inventory scales for drive for thinness,
interoceptive awareness, bulimia, body dissatisfaction, maturity fears, and
ineffectiveness. One of the 48 homosexual men and one of the 300 comparison
group men met criteria for probable past histories of eating disorders.
