Queer-Baiting for Faith, Fun, and Profit
Brudnoy, David
Queer-Baiting for Faith, Fun, and Profit This is the second of our PERSPECTIVE essays. As urith the first, it does not necessarily reflect the views of the Editor or The Alternative staff. Then...
...But the argument from history is tricky, and no clear-cut conclusions can easily be drawn...
...The laws of all but five states prohibit homosexual behavior in much the same way as the laws of fifteenth-century Spain prohibited the practice of the Jewish faith...
...More disturbing are the articles or asides which touch on sex matters from this point of view in the better conservative journals...
...but in attitudes as well...
...Quotes Szasz: "Thus has the physician replaced the priest, and the patient the witch, in the drama of society's perpetual struggle to destroy precisely those human characteristics that, by differentiating men from their fellows, identify persons as individuals rather than as members of the herd...
...In Red nations today, the two most heinous crimes, punished with almost equal ferocity, are political deviation and homosexuality...
...let me bring them out to you, and do to them as you please...
...One might consult Dr...
...Szasz writes: "So long as man can denounce each other as mentally sick (homosexual, addicted, insane, and so fourth)-so that the madman can always be considered the Other, never the Self-mental illness will remain an easily exploitable concept, and Coercive Psychiatry a flourishing institution...
...Szasz writes: "It is nothing less than obscene to talk about the homosexual as a sick person whom we are trying to help so long as, by treating him as a defective thing, we demonstrate through our actions that what we want him to be is useful, rather than annoying, an object for us, and that what we will not tolerate is his wanting to be an authentic person for himself-" The brilliant psychoanalyst-sociologist Ernest van der Haag asserts: "Prohibition of homosexuality is not needed to protect society....I do not believe that homosexuality as such can or need be treated...
...7) The author wants no criminal sanctions against adult homosexual acts, but he lures us into the shadowy world of homosexual seducers of minors, for whom he craves punishment...
...The case is often made for active homosexuality among the ancients...
...In his famous "Letter to an American Mother" (April, 1935), Freud noted that "homosexuality is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness...
...There is scant chance of excape...
...During the Middle Ages, writes Edward Westermark in his Origin and Development of the Moral Ideal, "heretics were accused of unnatural vice (homosexuality) as a matter of course...
...the Jews condemned it in practice...
...And we find similar approaches in other media...
...In his movie The Damned, Visconti equates Nazism with Sexual Decadence, arm-chair Krafft-Ebing, nothing more...
...It is as if homosexuality were equivalent to measles, and measles the same as leprosy, and leprosy identical to murder...
...As Dr...
...In fact, the rejection of homosexuals is currently expressed through a set of twin attitudes: from the conservatives, hostility...
...And he tells us with considerable feeling that, when solicited by other males, many men will physically beat their homosexual petitioners because "the assailants are...unwilling to face, and so emotionally disturbed by, their own underlying homosexual tendencies...
...In legal courts today, instead of sentencing a homosexual to prison, a humane, liberal judge will often let the homosexual go, on condition that he seek psychiatric "help...
...The town itself, however, gave its name to the generic term used in the West to describe most forms of homosexual activity, and some types of other sex activity: sodomy...
...9) His scorn is reserved for the "homosexual who flaunts his perversion and even makes it into a badge of distinction...
...They glorified the activities of those mountain and desert hermits such as Saint Simon Stylites, who utterly refused to see any woman, even his pleading, wailing mother...
...Freud's view has not predominated in American psychiatric circles, however...
...Gay Liberation, as the Advocate pictures it, manifests here and there the whining, self-pitying, special-pleading of inferior creatures begging to be thought equal, on the one hand, and, on the other, represents nothing so much as blatant, teasing, titillating cutesyness and sex come-ons, which will repel those who already think homosexuals are evil, and will evoke a chord of condescending sympathy from those who think homosexuals are sick...
...Honest, non-aggressive pride in being what one is has usually been considered admirable, in theory at least, by American conservatives and liberals alike...
...Examples are many, but one might do...
...Such material is a Left-liberal caricature of the Right and those on the responsible Right disdain it...
...II Kings 23:7 again talks of the Sodomites...
...Wilde was described by Muggeridge, wholly gratuitously, as "this overweight, overblown, over-articulate sodomite," after which the article went further down-hill...
...the Christians followed the Jews...
...I don't understand...
...The word is derived from the medieval Latin Bugarus and Buigarus...
...Many other films suggest the same thing...
...German Jews were exterminated in the hundreds of thousands, although they were a vital part of the German people...
...their punishment was "relaxation, ' (burning...
...Unfortunately, the article by Dr...
...Homosexuals are a group of medically stigmatized and socially disparaged individuals...
...one hundred homosexuals came before the Valencia Tribunal...
...The Devil, with whom witches satisfied their cravings by rather torrid copulation, was thought to have a forked penis for penetration at once vaginally and anally...
...The Boutilier precedent stands at the high court level although various recent lower court rulings are reopening the matter...
...Of course, some on the Left are like those mentioned in Merle Miller's famous New York Times Magazine article in 1970, those for whom a aggot is that homosexual gentleman who's just left the room...
...And what of the law...
...I am unqualified to make ex cathedra pronouncements about the underlying causes for anti-homosexual attitudes...
...and a man who can't handle them has no business in that job...
...And just as clearly it is not a "mental illness," in the sense in which we should use the term...
...It is, in relation to what is considered normal, simply a "deviation...
...Simon was a hero, not incidentally because he avoided all sex...
...The results are analogous: in Spain, Jews practiced secretly (the Judaizers) and kept their faith...
...But homosexuality, the late Dr...
...to call them mentally ill is to hide that fact, and to give people an opportunity for smug, condescending tolerance...
...I offer here no answers to many pertinent questions, having intended primarily to show how harshly homosexuals have been treated in western history and how awkward is their lot today...
...Then the Lord rained on Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire from out of heaven...
...Our society dreads homosexuality with the same intensity as the theological societies of old dreaded heresy and witchcraft...
...But most homosexuals do not think that, though our liberals would have us believe it is so because the homosexuals cannot recognize their own illness...
...That makes me think of a saying that I used to hear from my old friend and colleague on the Jackson County Court...
...Dr...
...Nor, after looking at copies of the major homosexual journal, the Los Angeles Advocate, can one feel very sanguine about the manifestations of the so-called "new homosexuality...
...For a choice must be made: If every man is all of man, this black sheep must be only a pebble or must be me...
...Herberg speaks, I believe, more for the conservative position today than does Mr...
...He does say the same thing about "exclusive heterosexuality" and reminds us of the inanity of statutory prohibitions against sodomy...
...homosexuals were regularly given up to the flames, although homosexual priests, oddly enough, were treated more leniently than laymen...
...It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality and a crime and cruelty too...
...And so homosexuality becomes a "mental disease," the new twin of witchcraft (in Schroeder's term), and no more real than witchcraft because both exist in the mind of the believer and not in the object of study...
...and a source of corruption in society...
...it is an abomination...
...Lot valued the dignity of his male guests more highly than that of his female children...
...Victimized in the past, and sometimes now, the Negro is today recognized as a fully human being with an unconditional "right" to his brown skin...
...8) Homosexuality must "constitute an impediment to certain kinds of employment," because homosexuals are "undesirable" in certain fields...
...Most Americans have only so much compassion and only so much ability to understand those perceived to be radical different...
...When we reflect on the tolerance granted to sexual heterodoxy in many eastern lands-among the Arabs, the ancient Chinese, the medieval Japanese, and others - we recognize that it is primarily in western societies that homosexuality is considered a major problem...
...Szasz imaginatively points out, is now considered a form of mental illness by American psychiatric opinion, which is the brainchild of the liberal mentality...
...by 1640, homosexuals in Portugal were by statute treated iike heretics...
...And if Gide's words represent special pleading from an acknowledged homosexual, so be it...
...The other approach, condescending tolerance, differs specifically from Her-berg's in stressing the idea of "sickness" almost to the exclusion of other aspects...
...Spanish Jews were expelled in 1492 though they had risen high in Spain...
...Karl Menninger's The Vital Balance in addition to Szasz's book...
...we cannot accurately determine much about anti-homosexuality by studying the ancients...
...But I would hazard a guess and suggest, with the libertarian Theodore Schroeder (1864-1953), that Judeo-Christian sex-suppression may result from unresolved sexual cravings, and that erotic hallucinations which produce tear ;and shame and modesty are historically most often amen by rigorous suppression of eroticism...
...Paul's epistle to Timothy (1:10) refers to "them that defile themselves with mankind...
...II Nothing gets closer to the heart of American society's problem of accomo-dating tradition to radical innovation, and nothing unnerves Middle America more-or more thoroughly stimulates the imagination of the so-called New Left - than things sexual...
...In medieval laws sodomy was also repeatedly mentioned together with heresy, and the punishment was the same for both...
...they too must be completely bad...
...or scourging (flogging;, and the gal-eys...
...Scapegoats do not suffer because they have committed evil acts, but because they are seen as "enemies within...
...Bring them out to us, that we may know them," said the lecherous men of Sodom...
...In Esquire magazine, Malcolm Muggeridge, that journal's urbane, witty book reviewer, managed some time ago to rub Oscar Wilde's nose again in his mess...
...Freud's most explicit remark on homosexuality is reported in Joseph Wortis' book, Fragments of an Analysis with Freud: "No psychoanalyst has ever claimed," Freud is quoted as saying, "that homosexuals cannot be perfectly decent people...
...Witches were supposed to have a characteristic passion for carnality, that is, for sex not aiming at procreation but at pleasure...
...Abby Mann exaggerates, but nevertheless makes a telling point: "It's easier to be accepted by our society as a murderer than as a homosexual...
...they shall be put to death, their blood is upon them...
...In sum, psychiatric opinion about homosexuals is not a strictly scientific proposition, but a social prejudice masquerading as medicine...
...Plutarch writes in the Life of Lycurgus: "Their lovers and favorers, too, had a share in the young boy's honor or disgrace...
...only do nothing to these men, for they have come under the shelter of my roof.' " From this story in Genesis 19 it is obvious that homosexuality was a serious offense in Biblical times...
...Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminates, nor abusers of themselves with mankind...
...and from the liberals, condescending "tolerance...
...The state's interest took precedence...
...Menninger, widely recognized as the most liberal and progressive modern psychiatrist, sees homosexuality as a symptom of illness which must be treated...
...At present, to be so stigmatized is to be thrown out of society and, were it up to those doing the name-calling, into the clutches of the $50-an-hour headshrinker...
...In Leviticus 18:22-23, for instance, He said: "You shall not lie with a man as with a woman...
...God says nothing about female homosexuality...
...Those in the "middle" can grin and bear a Black Power movement, or put up with an Indian seizure of Alcatraz, or even contemplate the consequences of eighteen-year-olds voting...
...But the laws were often harsh, homosexual acts often specifically proscribed...
...The pain and sorrow many homosexuals endure is more a reflection of societal sexism, and the double-life that many gay people live out of fear of ostracism or punishment, than a function of "un-naturalness...
...English-speaking nations also neatly connected heresy and homosexuality through a single word used for both: buggery...
...And it is their right, perhaps their obligation to themselves, to see a psychiatrist if they believe they are sick...
...As a symbol of darkness, the concept of witchcraft, and as a phenomenon, the Inquisition, give adequate testimony to that picture...
...The Left, alcne among Americans as a sociopolitical "type, has shown that an improved attitude toward homosexuals is possible for non-pays...
...Briefly stated, Dr...
...Herberg that if a man is "homosexual, he is deviant, he is 'sick,' he is pathological...
...and it is part of the rhetoric of the radical Left, perhaps the most honest part of that rhetoric...
...However, these opinions represent a mentality alien to responsible conservatism...
...Lindner saw the sex-repression of contemporary American society as the fruit of centuries of such repression, and he recognized that "our society's attitude toward sex is a travesty on human nature...
...though National Review did publish early in 1972, to its great credit, a quite humane article on a homosexual lounge at Columbia University by the young novelist, D. Keith Mano...
...If Communists are the modern secular incarnations of the Devil, then they too are without redeeming features...
...To be stigmatized as a heretic or bugger in the fourteenth century was to be cast out of society...
...The conservative must speak and act for himself, the radical for himself, the Chicano and Negro and Indian for himself, the woman for herself...
...But an assault on traditional, sexual values is intolerable...
...And how little things change in the minds of authoritarians: The National Socialists had their final solution to the Jewish Problem-the ovens...
...Vehement essays in the magazines, pamphlets, and newsletters of the extreme Right, of course, reflect the most uncompromising and relentlously antagonistic attitudes toward the "morally degenerate" homosexuals...
...Lord Alfred Douglass, snows how the most civilized western nation, traditionally most tolerant of dissenters, dean with the unfortunate pederast Wilde...
...Menninger, is only "rationalizing...
...Were Congress to pass a statute barring from immigration persons afflicted with the mental disease called "Witchraft," we would be vastly amused...
...Thus did God deal with the Sodomites, who had come to Lot's house demanding that he surrender his two visitors, who turned out to be disguised angels...
...Mano's...
...This is a kind of medical witch-hunting, doctors persecuting patients for their alleged medical heresies...
...how you can concern yourself with such purely conventional problems, what is a neurosis and what is not a neurosis, what is pathological or not pathological - all mere words - fights about words...
...I recollect, as an instance, an article a few years ago by Will Her-berg in the most respected popular conservative journal, National Review...
...God tested the men of Sodom and sent two angels in the form of attractive men...
...But "Lot went out the door to the men, shut the door after him and said, 'I beg you, my brothers, do not act so wickedly...
...Furthermore, he is in hot water if he tries to emigrate to America...
...Atheneus (XIII, 81) says: "Sophocles loved boys, as Euripides loved women...
...Those opposed to queer-baiting can take little comfort from the 1971 court ruling in Dallas that said Texas' sodomy statute is an unconstitutional invasion of privacy...
...meaning a Bulgarian, because the Bulgarians were considered religiously heretical...
...Thus, the question of whether or not homosexuality is an illness is in part a pseudo-problem...
...2) The Bible condemns homosexuality as "aberrant," instructing Dr...
...And as Women's Liberationists might point out, the Sodom story also makes apparent the abysmal devaluation of women in the ethics of the ancient Hebrews...
...Since the common feeling as late as the 1950s in this country was that homoGreat American Series .. .the President gets a lot of hot potatoes from every direction...
...Here again, Dr...
...Psychoanalysis does not undertake to judge people in any case...
...It reminds me of Dr...
...The medieval attitude, which, as Thomas Szasz points out in The Manufacture of Maaness, made homosexuality a twin of witchcraft lasted up to the twentieth century in western countries...
...How little things change among psychiatrists...
...Ellis' insistence on defining "sick" as exclusivity and "healthy" as bi-sexuality might give us pause...
...IV To argue as some conservatives do is to be needlessly harsh to a group hounded for millennia, and to "conserve" only the depressing and repressing legacies of our less happy past...
...The overriding tendency of modern psychiatry, its constant critic Szasz shows, is to brand as sick that which is merely unconventional...
...The ruling left a loophole, which Dallas and Houston quickly filled, as will other cities, allowing the cities themselves to prohibit sodomy in public places, and to define "public place" so broadly that only the bedroom is out of bounds...
...In the specific case under discussion, that of Michael Clive Boutilier in 1967, psychiatric evidence was required in court, and the psychiatrist felt no duty to protect his subject's privacy...
...Herberg's "Case for Heterosexuality" was this: 1) "Homosexuality (is) a perversion in the individual...
...Romans 1:27 teaches that God punished men who left "the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another...
...I'll say that is absolutely true...
...And so, like many other Christian nations, Britain emulated the Bible and proscribed only male homosexuality...
...so must the homosexual, aided by those heterosexuals of all persuasions politically, who do not feel threatened by the subject and can see the injustice of what is yet done to gays in our country...
...here, the dominant view is that homosexuality is a disease to be treated and cured...
...Does society gain or lose more when such sex laws as do exist in most of our fifty states are relaxed...
...While the episode in Sodom is the earliest account of the entrapment of homosexuals, and the remarks in Genesis the first explicit condemnation of homosexuality, that occasion was not the last of either...
...It is clear that an exclusive homosexual is neurotically afraid of heterosexuality, or is fearfully fixated on a homosexual level of behavior, or is obsessed with the idea of homosexuality, or is compulsively attached to homosexual activity, or is otherwise neurotically (or perhaps psy-chotically) homosexual...
...a homosexual in Lisbon was scourged and sentenced to ten years as a galley slave...
...But the mental disease called homosexuality, the mental disease created by liberal psychiatry, is today's witchcraft, and the flames have been replaced by compulsory servitude on the couch or in a mental hospital...
...The European Middle Ages were in many ways far less grim than the designation "Dark Ages" would have us believe, but the standard picture of those years as unenlightened derives at least partly from fact...
...Homosexuality is considered a crime by many moderns and a disease by most...
...As late as 1723...
...If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination...
...The homosexual, however, has neither this status nor the right to his sexual proclivities and practices...
...Blatancy for blatancy's sake will lead to little but more repression and tension...
...he is a defective object, a man "afflicted" with a disease to which, as Szasz puts it, he has no more right than the heterosexual has to being cursed with the Black Plague...
...Lindner told us accurately, is widely detested, not a happy part of our culture...
...in America, homosexuals "practice" homosexuality, the laws notwithstanding...
...among others...
...It must get the help of those liberals who talk endlessly about opening society, about bringing about conditions wherein true equality is possible...
...As short a time ago as 1895, Oscar Wilde was mined...
...Of this, "there is no question...
...Not enough, for instance, to seriously accent the homosexuals de-mands lor comoiete equality - not only under law...
...they must be homosexuals...
...To be stigmatized as a heretic or bugger in fourteenth-century England was to be cast out of society...
...I Kings 22:46 tells how Jehosaphat took the rest of the Sodomites out of the land...
...to be a witch meant to sleep with the devil...
...Szasz is a most helpful guide to understanding...
...So Mr...
...When New York's Governor Nelson Rockefeller advocated the enforced mental hospitalization of drug addicts, and both former Justice Abe Fortas and Justice William 0. Douglas suggested the same, might we not worry about the day when some zealous liberal will suggest the same for homosexuals...
...So long as the concept of the "psychopathic personality" is afloat-so long as the 1189 psychiatrists who responded to Ralph Ginzburg's ques-tionaire in 1964, for his Fact magazine, and, without so much as five-minutes' consultation with the Senator from Arizona, branded Barry Goldwater a psychopathic personality, are considered other than unethical quacks-just so long will the liberal mentality have at its disposal a tool to use against their sick homosexual brethren...
...Peripheral, possibly, but certainly not lacking in importance...
...During the centuries of witch-hunting, the Church agglutinated the two notions of religious deviance and sexual offense...
...Twelve homosexuals were ournt in that .year alone Thus, the Spanish Inquisition found the time and energy to burn homosexuals as well as religious heretics...
...Uncle Sam is a lay analyst, however, and so his punishment is liberal and humane: compulsory submission to treatment...
...To my knowledge, the Socialist Workers' party is the only American non-homosexual political group to declare its symnathy with the goals of Gay Liberation...
...Paul's epistle to the Corinthians (I, 6:9) says: 'Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God...
...Evidently, homosexual feelings were considered acceptable and apparently, the Greeks and Romans did practice homosexuality to some degree...
...But it will not gain this support if it ties itself to ludicrous forms of outrageous behavior...
...The Bible explicitly condemned homosexuality...
...In thirteenth-century Spain, the penalty for homosexuality was castration and execution by stoning...
...Pursuit of the ascetic ideal, which resulted in misogyny, might conceivably have led to an acceptance of homosexuality as a convenient, if unworthy, alternative - but it did not...
...6) Although the author "does not want to heap abuse upon the homosexual, who is often more to be pitied than blamed, or to reproach him for his aberrancy," he does just that, lapsing into the ad personam mode: "pathological, deviant, sickness, sin, vice, perversion" are words he employs while not heaping abuse...
...Nevertheless, the major stumbling-blocks to homosexual liberation come not from the Left, but from conservatives and liberals...
...and even when the notions of courtly, chivalric love took their place in western Christianity, it was not a breakthrough for women, who found their pedestals rather cold and not very much fun, or for homosexuals, who were still anathema...
...God, knowing nothing of modern psychiatry, smote the Sodomites...
...is still in working order...
...The sin of heresy eclipsed all contradictory, personal characteristics, just as the teachings of God and the Church eclipsed all contradictory empirical observations...
...Nor will it gain such support if it marries itself to a host of destructive movements such as the residue of the Bomber Left...
...According to this hypothesis, the results of such sex-sunpression have been, the Churchmen's celibacy the traditional prohibitions against birth control which enables people to enjoy sex without brocreatng;, and the medieval hysteria about sexual unorthodoxy...
...When the men of Sodom were entrapped by God's plain-clothesmen, the rain of fire commenced...
...and He overthrew those cities and all the valley and all the inhabitants of the cities...
...Earlier, Pope Nicholas V had empowered the Inquisition to deal with homosexuality and in 1451 it was made the subject of a special inquest...
...Jefferson's friend Rush felt that Negroes were suffering from congenital leprosy, and with time, treatment, and luck, they would get back to their "natural whiteness...
...When our legislators and judges discriminate against homosexuals in the belief that they are applying the findings of modern liberal psychiatric science to the making of policy for the nation's welfare, they make a monstrous blunder...
...Tis better to marry than to burn," said Paul, who thought remaining pure was even better...
...By virtue of a 1967 decision of the Warren Supreme Court, a homosexual applicant for citizenship may be excluded by the government because, as the Court reminds us in citing the Chinese Exclusion Case of 1889, the "Congress has plenary power to make rules for the admission of aliens and to exclude those who possess those characteristics which Congress has forbidden...
...God in His wisdom added other warnings to the rather plain lesson in Genesis...
...Yesterday's coolie immigrant is today's homosexual seeking entry into this country...
...Herodotus (I, 135) tells us that "the Persians, taught by the Greeks, learned to sleep with boys...
...Many questions remain as to homo-sexuality's "cause...
...To argue in the rhetoric of liberal psychiatry is equally grim, in fact more so, since the liberal argument is the dominant mode of expressing anti-homosexuality...
...Benjamin Rush, the father of American psychiatry...
...Behold, I have two daughters who have not known man...
...In other words, one may like it, but to be stuck on it is abnormal or deviant...
...Negroes have lived blameless lives-and been lynched...
...To say, as some do, that many homosexuals have risen high in science, government, the arts, live good lives, and so forth, is irrelevant...
...Even the manifestations of our currently most fashionable cultural form, the film, contribute to this morass...
...so it must be considered a disease and eradicated accordingly...
...Even the Negro is better off...
...The homosexual is served ill by such travesties as The Boys in the Band and Some of My Best Friends Are-., which may be a homosexual's nightmare, and, for the liberal pursuer of the "in" and the "kicky," a dream come true...
...Boutilier, a Canadian resident in the United States from 1955, who applied for citizenship in 1963, and whose record showed a sodomy arrest in New York in 1959, was banished...
...the modern totali-tarians of psychiatry have their final solution to the homosexual matter: -enforced therapy...
...It is fruitless to observe that the homosexual population is by and large decent, even beneficial to America, so long as the device of the shrill cry "Mental Illness...
...Furthermore, it works from still another side, the Communist side...
...Once considered the most heinous of crimes, homosexuality, as Dr...
...Fundamentally, the modern psychiatric therapist confuses the social role of "disease" and the medical definition of the word...
...In 1479, Ferdinand and Isabella, those noted humanitarian rulers of Castile and Aragon, the patrons of Columbus and the expellers of the Jews from Spain, changed that to "burning alive and confiscation...
...Freud referred to the "unhonored title of perversion," not "unhonorable," meaning perhaps that he doubted the value judgment of those who despised homosexuality...
...these I cannot deal with for lack of special training...
...The championing of Women's Liberation and Gay Liberation by leftists is but a manifestation of their own judgment that, many of the sexual aspects of our culture are in need of re-evaluation, that precisely such an evaluation will be violently resisted by non-leftists, and that therefore there is mnuch noliticai capital to be gained by exploiting such movements...
...He said, "Harry, if you can't stand the heat you better get out of the kitchen...
...Wilde's De Profundis an extended love letter to his "Bosie...
...heresy and homosexuality became one and the same...
...It must get the aid of those conservatives who mean what they preach about liberty and individual freedom, about doing one's own thing...
...Long ago, Dante's Divine Comedy placed inverts in the most scorching part of Hell...
...To be a heretic meant to worship the devil...
...inhibiting and repressing all forms of natural sexual appetites...
...It is the psychiatrist's purpose in life to practice therapy, to correct, to treat...
...Menninger even writes that "prostitution and homosexuality rank high in the kingdom of evils...
...so says the Bible by omission and implication...
...III The homosexual is blackmail-prone, hence "unsuitable" for certain positions...
...Make of all this what we will...
...Clearly it is not a disease like diabetes- diagnosable, with visible physical symptoms, and treatable...
...4) History shows that the Greeks did not approve of ft...
...In his "Introduction to The Wolfenden Report," Dr...
...5) Freud, "the most telling witness," called homosexuality a "perversion...
...Judges 1:22-30 has a similar message...
...How very much like the God of the Bible was Queen Victoria, who, when shown an anti-homosexuality bill prepared in Parliament containing a provision mentioning lesbians, refused to believe that such people existed...
...As Szasz insists, the homosexual is the model psychiatric scapegoat...
...For instance, among the most knowledgeable and humane of liberal psychologists was Robert Lindner, who wrote in Must You Conform?: "Homosexuality is a form of rebellion against society (which Lindner in other areas heartily approved, calling it "creative protest, productive revolt") which can be treated and should be treated and hence eradicated...
...By the tenth century, woman's subjection as a chattel-slave was virtually complete...
...The Roman Catholic Church until the late Middle Ages opposed homosexuality not only (or even primarily) because it was abnormal or unnatural, but also because it satisfied carnal lust and yielded bodily pleasure...
...Woman is thought fit to be offered to Lot's neighbors, but unsuited to be considered in this regard...
...That question may perhaps be peripheral just now, given the more pressing plights of our society at present...
...Then Albert Ellis, one of the most fashionable of all psychoanalysts practicing today, takes a leaf from Dante and confirms Gide by writing in his American Sexual Tragedy that there is nothing wrong with homosexuality as long as it is not exclusive homosexuality...
...It still remains, however, a matter of academic controversy as to just how much homosexuality was tolerated in Greece and Rome, although the record is less ambiguous for various times and places in the East...
...As we all know, the gap between law and practice is frequently wide...
...In Valencia...
...He, like the Jew in anti-Semitic medieval Europe, is denied recognition as a human being in his authentic identity and selfhood-and for the same reasons: each undermines the beliefs and values of the dominant group...
...To deserve Dr...
...Her-berg's "sympathy and help," the homosexual must "recognize his own abnormality as a sickness, albeit incurable" (sic...
...The question of what to do now is hardly irrelevant to those who are concerned with the enhancement of individual liberties within the context of a viable, cohesive society...
...We might also look into the varied career of the late Senator Joseph McCarthy, who, among his unfortunate activities', traded on the public fear of sexual deviation by hinting at links between queerness and Redness...
...3) "Natural Law" proclaims the family to be the "basic cell of society" and heterosexuality the "normative structure of being...
...A person acknowledged as a homosexual, in any case, can at present be denied citizenship...
...Gide wrote in Corydon: "In homosexuality as in heterosexuality, there are all shades and degrees, from Platonic love to lust, from self-denial to sadism, from healthy joy to moroseness, from natural development to all the refinements of vice...
...Certainly there are homosexuals who think they are sick...
...Where are the men who came to you tonight...
...The Church fathers condemned sexual pleasure, glorifying the ascetic ideal derived from Platonism, which had crept into Christianity via Saint Paul...
...Despite its virtues, the Advocate confirms much of what anti-homosexual thinkers say, providing its own bludgeon with which queer-baiters can whonk homosexuals on the head...
...One was fined by the magistrates because the lad he loved cried out effeminately as he was fighting...
...If the American homosexual revolution succeeds, it must do so without rending the fabric of the dominant heterosexual society...
...Where do the individual's rights and those of society conflict, and how do we resolve those conflicts ? By writing this article in The Alternative, with its particular readership of largely younger people-conservatives, liberals, libertarians- I have hoped to bring some measure of understanding to an abysmal historical and contemporary situation, and to encourage some discussion and perhaps some degree of improvement in the attitudes of my fellows...
...In Spain from 1780 to 1820...
...Previously, the Court and Congress expressed their biases against colored peoples, anarchists, and the like...
...Harry S Truman sexuals were totally wicked, the association of sexual and political deviation came easily...
...And Uncle Sam tests his people too, in similar ways...
...Should the laws in a decent society interfere with private, consen-tual sexual activities in private by mature individuals...
...As Sartre put it: "The homosexual must remain an object, a flower, an insect, and inhabitant of ancient Sodom or the planet Uranus, an automaton that hops about in the limelight, anything you like except my fellow-man, except my image, except myself...
...And Andre Gide, in Corydon (1911), reminded us that homosexuals have often been victims, but few have been martyrs, because most recant under fire...
...liberals canjind so much to sympathize with...
...A way of ridiculing the homosexual, such condescension is also a way to rake in the bread, to profit indirectly from homosexuality's unpleasant situation in society...
...A homosexual who fails to realize that he is "sick," writes Dr...
...The Judeo-Christian experiences offer much more in the way of solid evidence...
...I exempt from that generalization Sigmund Freud and some of his followers...
...And it works in reverse...
...and to be a bugger meant - well, the inference is clear...
Vol. 6 • February 1973 • No. 5
