Growing Up Straight (1968 book)

Growing Up Straight received a negative review from James Colton in Tangents. Colton ridiculed the Wydens' advice on how to prevent homosexuality, and accused them of making contradictory and inconsistent claims and of citing experts such as Evelyn Hooker and Judd Marmor only when it served their purposes to do so.[2]

The gay rights activist Dennis Altman compared Growing Up Straight to the journalist and social critic Vance Packard's The Sexual Wilderness, Patricia Sexton's The Feminized Male, and Hendrik Ruitenbeek's The Male Myth. He described them as part of a trend to attack the collapse of American masculinity and femininity and connect it to "an alleged growth in homosexuality." He wrote that the book, "makes very explicit the connection between the fear of a declining sex role dichotomy and increased homosexuality; mothers and fathers are counseled to act out all those she-woman and he-man stereotypes as a model for their growing children."[3]

The neuroscientist Simon LeVay described Growing Up Straight as an example of psychoanalytic ideas influencing general attitudes toward homosexuality.[4] The reparative therapist Joseph Nicolosi and Linda Ames Nicolosi stated that Growing Up Straight has been seen as a classic.[1]