A significant portion of society today holds the belief that homosexuality is a normal form of sexual behavior different from, but equal to, that of heterosexuality. Many religious leaders, public officials, educators, social and mental health agencies—including those at the highest level of government, departments of psychiatry and psychology, and mental health clinics—have been taken in by a widespread sexual egalitarianism and by accusations of being undemocratic or prejudiced if they do not accept certain assertions that are thrust upon them, as if they were deprived of all intellectual capacity to judge and reason.
This revolutionary change in our sexual mores and customs has been ushered in by a single act of considerable consequence: The removal of homosexuality from the category of aberrancy by the American Psychiatric Association in 1973. It is, furthermore, a fateful consequence of our disregard for established psychoanalytic knowledge of human sexual behavior.
This act was naively perceived by many psychiatrists as the "simple" elimination of a scientific diagnosis in order to correct injustices. In reality, it created injustices for the homosexual and his family, as it belied the truth and prevented the homosexual from seeking and receiving help. At the social, group, and community level, it proved to be the opening phase of a two-phase sexual radicalization; the second phase being the raising of homosexuality to the level of an alternative lifestyle-an acceptable psychosexual institution-alongside heterosexuality as a prevailing norm of behavior. The motivating force behind this movement was the wish to protect the homosexual against injustices and persecution. This could have been legitimately effected by the demand for equal rights for the homosexual, a demand arising from the humanitarian philosophy so deeply embedded in our humanistic science. Instead, the false step of removing homosexuality from our manual was substituted. This amounted to a full approval of homosexuality and an encouragement to aberrancy by those who should have known better, both in the scientific sense and in the sense of the social consequences of such removal. To many American psychiatrists, this action remains a chilling reminder that if scientific principles are not fought for they can be lost—a disillusioning warning that unless we make no exceptions to science, we are subject to the snares of political factionalism and to the propagation of untruths to an unsuspecting and uninformed public, to the rest of the medical profession, and to the behavioral sciences.
The devastating clinical fallout from this decision was yet to follow. Those who would prefer to retain homosexuality as a valid diagnosis have been essentially silenced in lectures, meetings, and publications; a silencing that originates both within our association and from other sources as well. Political parties and religious leaders have been utilized to reinforce this silence. The press has been influenced in addition to the electronic media. Television and movies promote homosexuality as an alternative lifestyle and censor movies that might show homosexuality as a disorder. Homosexual sex education has entered our schools and colleges; pro-gay activists—homosexual or otherwise—portray their way of life as normal and as "American as apple pie," while intimidating those with different views. In essence, this movement has accomplished what every other society, with rare exceptions, would have trembled to tamper with: a revision of the basic code and concept of life and biology, that men and women normally mate with those of the opposite sex and not with each other.
This psychiatric nonsense and social recklessness bring with it many individual tragedies, as men and women who no longer appreciate their own appropriate sexual roles create confusion in the very young for generations to come. Gender identity disturbance is bound to increase, and more true homosexual deviations result as parents distort the maleness or femaleness of their infants and children.
Currently, homosexuals who are in therapy have developed tremendous resistance, which retards their progress, while others are dissuaded even from seeking appropriate help. Other medical specialists, such as pediatricians and internists, are baffled by psychiatry's folly. Residents in psychiatry have very little interest in going into an area of psychiatric research where they will be attacked, belittled, demeaned, and where their knowledge of sexual development will cease to grow. Above all, however, it is the individual homosexual wishing to change who suffers the most.
Young men and women with relatively minor sexual fears are led with equanimity by some psychiatrists and non-medical counselors into a self-despising pattern and lifestyle. Adolescents, nearly all of whom experience some degree of uncertainty as to sexual identity, are discouraged from assuming that one form of gender identity is preferable to another. Those persons who already have a homosexual problem are discouraged from finding their way out of self-destructive fantasy—discouraged from learning to accept themselves as male or female, discouraged from following those often painful but necessary courses that allow people to function as reasonable and participating individuals in a cooperating society.
After all, homosexuality cannot create a society or keep one going for very long. It operates against the cohesive elements of society. The sexes are driven in opposite directions, and no society can long endure when either the child is neglected or the sexes war with each other. Those who reinforce the disintegrating elements in our society will get no thanks from future generations.
Individuals who adamantly insist that homosexuality is an alternative lifestyle have not been stopped by appeals to tradition, enlightened self-interest, or even the established findings of psychoanalysis. Threats about what would happen to society do not have much effect-no one considers himself society's guardian. Average citizens say they don't quite know what these social interests are, and after all, aren't personal decisions about sex a private matter? The answer to that question, contrary to popular opinion, is no.
Psychoanalysis reveals that sexual behavior is not an arbitrary set of rules set down by no-one-knows-who, for purposes which no one understands. Our sexual patterns are a product of our biological past, a result of humanity's collective experience in its long biological and social development. They make possible the cooperative coexistence of human beings with one another. At the individual level, these patterns create a balance between the demands of sexual instinct and the external realities surrounding each of us. Not all cultures survive—the majority have not—and anthropologists tell us that serious flaws in sexual codes and institutions have undoubtedly played a significant role in many a culture's demise. When masses of people think similarly about long-standing customs, their collective behavior will, in the last analysis, have a profound impact on the whole of society.
Scientists, psychologists, psychiatrists, political leaders, public officials, and others with vested interests, ransack literature for bits of fact and theory that can be pieced together into a pro-homosexual or bisexual concept of nature, humanity, and society. Some individuals say that homosexuals are health, society is sick, and that science should cure society. Others raise false or outdated scientific issues to do battle with traditional values.
Many of our values could use some change, but polemical pseudo-science and genetics without corroboration is not the way. No society has accepted preferential homosexuality. Nowhere is homosexuality, or so-called "bisexuality," a desired end in itself. Nowhere do parents say, "It's all the same to me if my child is heterosexual or homosexual." Nowhere are homosexuals more than a small minority at the present time. Nowhere does homosexuality per se place one in an enviable position.
Some pro-homosexual proponents within the behavioral sciences state that mental illness is simply a product of social definition, and that sexual behavior considered normal in one society may be deviant in another. Examination of the facts shows that this is not true of all illness and all behavior. Some behaviors are universally deviant and every society considers them destructive. Incest, rape, and psychopathic (apparently unmotivated) violence are considered taboo in all societies. So is predominant or exclusive homosexuality or even bisexuality. While homosexuals can and should be protected by all the laws of society, homosexuality should not be encouraged.
The forces allied against heterosexuality are formidable and unrelenting. Charges of being "undemocratic," "cruel and inhuman," or "irresponsible, homophobic, and prejudiced," are leveled at those who would question the normality of homosexuality. These accusations are then reinforced by the media and motion pictures, and render the ordinary citizen who disapproves of such practices (as well as faint-hearted members of the psychiatric and psychological professions) mute before their onslaught.
The counteraction for such forces is the knowledge that heterosexuality has self-evident, adaptive value. Man is not only a sexual animal, but a care-bonding, group-bonding, and child-rearing animal. The male-female design is taught to the child from birth and culturally ingrained through the marital order. The male-female design is thus perpetually maintained and it is only overwhelming fear or man's false pride and misdirected individual enterprise that can disturb or divert it.
All of this is enough "to make the angels weep." I borrow the phrase from one of William Shakespeare's bitter comedies, Measure for Measure. One of my patients brought the quote to my attention some time ago, as he himself mused about his conditions (He is a homosexual and a distinguished scholar, but he is learning about the dynamic forces behind his homosexuality and how to gain control of them.) Here's the entire quote:
But man, proud man
Dress'd in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he most assur'd,
His glassy essence like an angry ape
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As makes the angels weep.
Charles W. Socarides, M.D., is clinical processor of psychiatry at Albert Einstein College of Medicine/Montefiore Medical Center in New York. He is president Of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality. This article first appeared in The Washington Times.
This article was printed in Good News (September/October 1994).