The Daily Agenda for Thursday, January 21

Jim Burroway

January 21st, 2016

TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:

From California Scene, Fall 1973, page 36.

From California Scene, Fall 1973, page 36.

The Clubhouse was located within walking distance of Pasadena City College and the California Institute of Technology (and it was within a half mile of the Fuller Theological Seminary, where future anti-gay activists Paul Cameron and George Rekers would teach at the seminary’s School of Psychology a few years later). I can’t tell if the original building is the same one as the one standing at that address today. But if it is, the Clubhouse’s address now looks like it’s occupied by a vintage lighting store.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
50 YEARS AGO: Time Magazine’s “The Homosexual In America”: 1966. An relatively small, unsigned two-page article which, given that it appeared in a popular magazine, shows us how gay people really were viewed in the U.S. in the mid-1960s:

It used to be “the abominable crime not to be mentioned.” Today it is not only mentioned: it is freely discussed and widely analyzed. Yet the general attitude is, if anything, more uncertain than before. Beset by inner conflicts, the homosexual is unsure of his position in society, ambivalent about his attitudes and identity — but he gains a certain amount of security through the fact that society is equally ambivalent about him.

In the second paragraph, Time provides some examples of that ambivalence that straight society had toward gay people:

The latest Rock Hudson movie explicitly jokes about it, Doubleday Book Shops run smirking ads for The Gay Cookbook, and newsstands make room for “beefcake” magazines of male nudes.

It’s hard to know whether Time indulged in some gay-baiting with Rock Hudson, but that line almost certainly raised a few eyebrows in Hollywood. The article went on:

But increasingly, deviates are out in the open, particularly in fashion and the arts. Women and homosexual men work together designing, marketing, retailing, and wrapping it all up in fashion magazines. The interior decorator and the stockbroker’s wife conspire over curtains. And the symbiosis is not limited to working hours. For many a woman with a busy or absent husband, the presentable homosexual is in demand as an escort — witty, pretty, catty, and no problem to keep at arm’s length. …

On Broadway, it would be difficult to find a production without homosexuals playing important parts, either onstage or off. And in Hollywood, says Broadway Producer David Merrick, “you have to scrape them off the ceiling.” … [I]n the theater, dance and music world, deviates are so widespread that the sometimes seem to be running a kind of closed shop.

As the article continues, the ugliness grows. Time cited a Los Angeles psychiatrist who declared homosexuals “failed artists, and their special creative gift a myth.” Time held gay people responsible for plays depicting “the degradation of women and the derision of normal sex. … They represent a kind of inverted romance, since homosexual situations as such can never be made romantic for normal audiences.” And Time projected its obsessions with sex onto gay people:

Even in ordinary conversation, most homosexuals will sooner or later attack the ‘things that normal men take seriously.’ It does not mean that homosexuals do not and cannot talk seriously; but there is often a subtle sea change in the conversation: sex (unspoken) pervades the atmosphere.

It was at this point when Time turned to the notorious psychologist of the 1950s, Edmund Bergler, who, though dead for four years, supplied the following from a book he wrote ten years earlier:

The late Dr. Edmund Bergler found certain traits present in all homosexuals, including inner depression and guilt, irrational jealousy and a megalomaniac conviction that homosexual trends are universal. Though Bergler conceded that homosexuals are not responsible for their inner conflicts, he found that the conflicts “sap so much of their inner energy that the shell is a mixture of superciliousness, face aggression and whimpering. Like all psychic masochists, they are subservient when confronted by a stronger person, merciless when in power, unscrupulous about trampling on a weaker person.”

It was all there: gay people were “not like everybody else. They were “anxiously camouflaged,” “catty,” “megalomaniacal,” “supercilious,” “conspiring,” “wimpy,” “camp,” “psychic masochists,” “irrationally jealous,” “beset by inner depression and guilt,” “pathetic,” suffering from “a disabling fear of the opposite sex,” trapped in “a case of arrested development,” “subservient around strangers,” “merciless around those weaker than them,” “antagonistic toward heterosexuals,” “mocking of heterosexuals,” “inferior to heterosexuals” and, yes, conspiring over curtains while also nursing their “constant tendency to prowl or ‘cruise’ in search of new partners” while “refus(ing) to accept the full responsibilities of life.” And Time’s concluding remarks were nearly indistinguishable from what we regularly hear today from the likes of Peter LaBarbera, Bryan Fischer, Scott Lively, or the minions at the Family “Research” Council:

Lack of procreation or of marriage vows is not the issue; even Roman Catholic authorities hold that an illicit heterosexual affair has a degree of “authentication,” while a homosexual relationship involves only “negation.” Roman Catholic thought generally agrees that homosexuality is of and in itself wrong because, as New York’s Msgr. Thomas McGovern says, it is “inordinate, having no direction toward a proper aim.” Even in purely nonreligious terms, homosexuality represents a misuse of sexual faculty and, in the worlds of one Catholic educator, of “human construction.” It is a pathetic little second-rate substitute for reality, a pitiable flight from life. As such it deserves fairness, compassion, understanding and, when possible treatment. But it deserves no encouragement, no glamorization, no rationalization, no fake status as minority martyrdom, no sophistry about simple differences in taste — and, above all, no pretense that it is anything but a pernicious sickness.

The gay community’s reaction was biting. An unsigned commentary in the Daughters of Bilitis’ The Ladder (possibly by pioneering activist Barbara Gittings (see Jul 31), who was the magazine’s editor at the time) read, in part:

In its final frenzied paragraph TIME shows its Catholic petticoats, TIME rolls religious, psychiatric, and plain bourgeois prejudice into one big mudball which it slings about, hoping to blacken homosexuality forever… TIME calls homosexuality “a pathetic little second-rate substitute for reality, 11 Ditto for TIME’s essay on the subject.

The Ladder also quoted from a New York psychologist, Fritz Fluckiger, who had spoken at a DOB meeting: “They are famous for having a large research staff — and indeed, they have found every single cliche you can think of, to put in that essay.”

The following month, Gittings’s partner, Kay Lahusen (see Jan 5), writing as Kay Tobin, quoted Dr. Isadore Ruben, publisher of Sexology magazine, who said that Time ordinarily prides itself in being up-to-date on whatever it covers. “But if this is so, then I am forced to conclude that if they are not ignorant, the editors of this essay are intellectually dishonest, motivated by prejudice, and guilty of deliberate omission and distortion.” That same issue also published three letters which had been sent to Time’s editor that the magazine declined to publish. Naturally, it was the letter from Frank Kameny (see May 21, founder of the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C) which was the most forceful:

Instead of a mature, fair, objective assessment of the issue of homosexuality, divorced from ancient prejudices, pre- (sic) and misconceptions, and intolerances, we have a venomous, petulant polemic, suitable for a second-rate conservative publication.

From its stereotyping of “the homosexual” in the same invalid fashion as that in which others type “the Negro” or “the Jew,” to its choice as a major “authority” of a man (Bergler) whose views are discredited and disavowed even by his own professional colleagues, TIME has remained in the millenia-old intellectual and emotional rut on this question.

Instead of making a skeptical examination of the claims of modern psychiatry and finding that they are based upon shabby, slipshod science, including poor sampling techniques, built-in conclusions, and armchair theorizing about the nature of homosexuality, TIME swallows these claims hook, line, and sinker.

…The concluding three sentences are an unwarrantedly vicious attack upon a sincere effort to improve the status of a maligned and persecuted group of people and to gain for them the dignity to which all human beings have the right to aspire. Those sentences are the voice of a closed mind, of a mind which clearly has pre-judged, is not open to change, and is therefore in the most fundamental sense, prejudiced.

[Sources: Unsigned. “The homosexual in America” Time (January 21, 1966): 40-41. Available online with subscription here.

Unsigned. Column: “Cross-currents.” The Ladder 10, no. 6 (March 1966): 18.

Kay Tobin. “A rebuke for TIME’s pernicious prejudice.” The Ladder 10, no. 7 (April 1966): 20-22.

Franklin E. Kameny. From “Letters TIME didn’t print.” The Ladder 10, no. 7 (April 1966): 22-23.]

If you know of something that belongs on the agenda, please send it here. Don’t forget to include the basics: who, what, when, where, and URL (if available).

And feel free to consider this your open thread for the day. What’s happening in your world?

Ben in oakland

January 21st, 2016

Kameny’s letter finds a distinct echo in what I recently wrote in the biography of my bio-family. It’s a pleasure to post it here.

Everyone knows about Freud’s Oedipus complex, in which a child’s identification with the same-sex parent and the successful resolution of the child’s desire for sexual relations with the opposite-sex parent is a key psychological experience that is necessary for the development of a mature sexuality and personality. It’s all very complicated, mostly because of its high psychoanalytic psychobabble content, and is of course predicated on Freud’s extensive experience with hysterical Jewish women in an emphatically anti-Semitic, sexually repressive era fixated on gender and sex. But like many religious ideas, it has some value as a metaphor, and in Agathon’s sense of the word, it’s entertaining.

Unfortunately, Oedipus has been the vehicle for psychoanalysis to claim that gay people are pathologically immature by definition because they allegedly haven’t jumped through the appropriate hoops of jiggery-pokery and psychoanalytic argle-bargle– in other words, we aren’t heterosexual. (For a small fee, of course, some psychoanalysts will be happy to straighten out that dilemma, with a spectacular success rate rocketing towards zero). Of course, it didn’t occur to them that perhaps they just didn’t understand the situation, and were in fact putting the cart well before the horse manure.

One of psychiatry’s (now mostly former) causes for a boy to come out gay was the idea that it it was a weak or absent father and a strong and dominant mother (notice the sexist bias) that were messing with the natural (and highly mythical in all ways) Oedipal primal drama. They made this statement with a certainty that was absolutely supported by a complete lack of evidence, no studies, and a whole lot of assumptions about gay men AND heterosexual men, sex, gender, and sexuality. Because it ignored the existence of bisexuals, a known phenomenon, it was very much like driving said cart with one wheel and no horse, although the cart has plenty of the manure. Like any religious statement, it must be so because they thought it was, and believing it was foundational to everything else that they thought. And since everything else they thought must be true, well, quod est demonstrandum.

In my late twenties and into thirties, I began reading a large number of books about homosexuality, psychology, behavioral theory, transactional analysis, ontological philosophers of life and perception like Carlos Castaneda and Tom Robbins, and what later became known as queer theory. All of this was in addition to my already strong grounding in sociology and social psychology, mixing well with the intellectual ferment of ’70‘s, when so many certainties were questioned. I came up with a theory I called “Reverse Oedipus” as it applied to gay men. Interestingly enough, a number of gay therapists came up with the same idea the late 80’s, though they considered it a refutation of Oedipus, not a reversal of it.

To the extent that the Freudian Oedipal Complex is a real “thing”, I think it goes for more than double for the reverse. And it explains the otherwise mysterious “weak or absent father” and the “strong, dominant mother” dynamic without resorting to the argle-bargle of classic Freud. This is what I actually think is the case: a gay boy is born, one who is and will be primarily gay his whole life. Not a bisexual boy— who might have a mass of homosexual experiences, but still identify and be identified as heterosexual— but a gay one. (I met a lot of those faux-mo’s when I was single and dating. Often with wives or girlfriends at home, they were forever prowling gay dating websites, pretending that they were looking to realize their “true” natures. It was just necessary to find the “right” man. Weasels all). The boy doesn’t have those “sexual feelings” towards his mother, per classic Freud, but rather, towards his father. It doesn’t take too long for the father to recognize that this boy is quite different at the very least from the larger mass of “normal” boys, and in ways he cannot himself differentiate consciously. Or, possibly, he merely recognizes that the boy is fundamentally different from himself, or perhaps even all too similar, in ways he would prefer not to contemplate, let alone understand.

So what happens? Dad withdraws. If he is a kind and loving man, he does it with kindness, grace and love at best, and at least avoids as much as possible causing harm to his children. If he is not a kind and loving man, or if his fears and ignorance come into play, he creates difference and distance, if not hostility. (I think this is what happened with both my brother, Dave, and with me. But I will return to Dave’s story later). The gay boy may never understand why his father withdraws from him, only that he does. And thus the weak, absent father is created, not as a cause in Freudian mythology, but as an effect in human reality.

Unfortunately, if dad’s fears, ignorance, prejudices, anger, sexual issues, and bad experiences dominate him, dad may well reject the gay boy past healing. Long ago, I knew a young man who had been raped repeatedly by his father until he was big enough to fight him off. My friend told me that his father’s stated reason was that he was raping his son to show him what happened to faggots. That dad could come up with that Swiss cheese of a rationale is a good indication how deeply and viciously the obvious was walled out of his thought processes. From the father’s point of view, however dubiously, it could be considered an act of love– if you ignore the forcible rape and Thoroughly Hetero Dad getting off on it.

And where does “strong, dominant Mother” come into this? If dad has rejected or distanced himself from the child, mothers, being mothers, generally will not. So the actual definition of “strong, dominant mother” is “parent who didn’t distance herself or reject the gay child, but did what parents are supposed to do.” It funny, or at least ironic, that one of the sneering invectives frequently hurled at straight men who are dominated by their mothers is “mama’s boy”, a man who has allowed his masculinity to be compromised by a woman. What is sneeringly directed at gay men is that their masculinity has also been compromised by a woman. They are “too close” to their mothers, ruined by their mothers. And the proof? They are not heterosexual, not like REAL men, even the “mama’s boys”. And they treat their mothers with love and respect. It’s another example of the double standard often applied to gay people.

Here’s a joke that was old when Methuselah’s gay uncle first told it. “My mother made me a homosexual.”…”Do you think if I gave her the yarn, she’d make me one, too?”

It’s all about Eve, all over again. “The woman gave me the apple, and I did eat of it.”

It always amazes me, but actually never does, that Homobigotry has such a corrosive effect on people. But then, I also think that homobigotry has its deepest roots in good, old-fashioned misogyny, which also has corrosive effects on people, men and women alike, though in different ways. Gay men are “bad” because they allow other men to treat them like women, at least in the view of anti-gay and/or misogyinistic men, giving up the privileges, status, and the wholly imaginary superiority of being male, and thus threatening all of male-dom. Such a delicate, fragile bloom, is masculinity. Lesbians, on the other hand, are HAWT! And it doesn’t matter what women do in any case, because they aren’t men. The simplicity of the logic is, well, simple, or at least, simple-minded.

Jake Hunter

January 22nd, 2016

You know, the writing in this Time article reminds me of the language utilized a couple decades prier to describe some other group of people. I just can’t seem to put my finger on it, oh well, probably not important. I’m sure that the people of 1966 just didn’t have any examples of people being dehumanized and harmed by so called “experts” to call upon. Perhaps that Kameny fellow alluded to such things in his response, but I didn’t read it, so I wouldn’t know, to many words.

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