Some commentators suggested that some of Bell and Weinberg's findings were obvious and that their study was not needed to establish them, and critics charged that they drew conclusions not justified by their data.

The NIMH Task Force invited the Institute for Sex Research to submit a proposal for a comprehensive study of the development of homosexuality.

The book's direct predecessor was Patterns of Adjustment in Deviant Populations, a 1967 survey of white gay men in Chicago designed by Bell and Gebhard and funded by NIMH.

Bell and Weinberg comment that, "Our correspondence and personal meetings with these individuals were of great help to us in constructing a viable interview schedule.

[9] The philosopher Timothy F. Murphy considered it useful despite its limitations, provided that it, like other studies, is regarded as part of a scientific process of "measuring the adequacy of hypotheses and evidence".

[11] Paul and Weinrich suggested that because their data was collected in 1969, they may have missed "growing cultural developments in the gay younger generation of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

"[9] The philosopher Michael Ruse suggested that the AIDS epidemic has probably made their findings about gay sexual behavior obsolete.

[14] Laumann et al. argued that while Bell and Weinberg covered a wide range of sexual behaviors, their failure to use probability samples meant that their study "could not be used to estimate population rates."

[15] The historian Martin Duberman observed that in 1976 he heard a rumor that the study "would give renewed respectability to the long dominant but recently challenged psychoanalytic view (associated primarily with the work of Charles Socarides and Irving Bieber), that the parental configuration of absent/hostile/remote father and binding/suffocating/domineering mother was what produced gay sons."

He also accused them of being credulous about their informants' reports, employing special pleading and circular reasoning, seeking to demonstrate preferred conclusions, and making misleading use of statistics.

"[22] The psychologists Stanton L. Jones and Mark A. Yarhouse observed that the conclusions of the authors of Homosexualities were based on convenience samples, which have no known representativeness.

He suggested that like similar studies, Homosexualities appealed to "people who need to combat the way we have been stigmatized by one set of experts with the reassurances of another."

"[24] The psychologist John Paul De Cecco dismissed the book, writing that while Bell and Weinberg presented it as definitive, it suffered from the "theoretical blindness" that has dominated research on homosexuality in the United States since the early 1970s.

He contrasted it unfavorably with the work of European thinkers whom he credited with "provocative theoretical speculations": the philosophers Michel Foucault and Guy Hocquenghem, the gay rights activist Mario Mieli, the sexologist Martin Dannecker, and the sociologist Jeffrey Weeks.

[34] Hall praised the book for helping to counter the image of homosexuals as "dysfunctionals", and believed that it would be useful for jurists, employers, educators, and legislators.

[28] Duberman characterized the book as "the most ambitious study" of male homosexuality yet attempted, but was critical of its authors' "sample techniques and simplistic typologies".

He argued that their "rigid" approach created an impression of a "fragmented and oversimplified analysis" and came "at the expense of providing a complete picture of homosexual behavior."

[31] Carrier criticized Bell and Weinberg for continuing "the mainstream focus of research on that segment of the population most closely identified with the middle-class American culture."

"[32] Lynch argued that Homosexualities was in part an attempt by its authors to overcome statistical weaknesses in the work of Kinsey and his colleagues, and that as a result they had put more effort into "data processing" than into "understanding the premises and conclusions of the study."

He suggested that they were "sometimes silently at odds" with Kinsey and his colleagues, and that they had limited their accomplishments by beginning with an attempt to test negative stereotypes about gay people.

He considered them naive to believe that Homosexualities would make legislators and community leaders change their negative attitudes to gay people.