Homosexuality: Nature or Nurture? - Part 4 of 5 - "Treating" Homosexuals Before 1973

PART 2 (page 25 of 34)
Homosexuality: Nature or Nurture? (Part 4 of 5)
Before 1973 - Where Did the Mental Health Community Stand?
The Stonewall Riots - 1969
Widespread Discrimination Against Gays Developed Only In The 20th Century

The Difficult History of How Society and
The Medical Community Has Viewed Homosexuality Up To 1973

As a distinct concept, homosexuality is relatively recent. [See below paragraphs entitled - Widespread Discrimination Against Gays Developed Only In The 20th Century and Peaked From The 1930s to the 1960s] David Halperin points out in "One Hundred Years of Homosexuality" (and that I go into more detail about on page 15 of this website) that the term itself first appeared in German (Homosexualität) in a pamphlet published in Leipzig, Germany in 1869; it entered the English language two decades later. That some human beings engage in sexual activity with others of the same sex has, of course, been noted since antiquity. Historically, however, the focus was on the acts themselves rather than on the actors. The historian John Boswell, of Yale, has noted that during the Middle Ages "same-sex sex" was regarded as a sin, but those who committed that sin were not defined as constituting a type of people different from others. Between the sixteenth and the eighteenth century same-sex sex became a crime as well as a sin, but again, those who committed such crimes were not categorized as a class of human being. This changed in the nineteenth century, when modern medicine and particularly the science of psychiatry came to view homosexuality as a form of mental illness. By the 1940s and even up to 1973 homosexuality was discussed as an aspect of psychopathic, paranoid, and schizoid personality disorders. (1) As Homosexuality: A Report by the Committee on Public Health of the New York Academy of Medicine asserts in the early 1960s:

Homosexuality is indeed an illness . . . [it] fulfills all the requirements to place it in the category of illness. In a strict sense it is a symptom of illness.

The problem with the homosexual, American psychologists and psychiatrists argued way back in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s and up to 1973, (ironically, the years of my growing up, coming of age and young adulthood) was that he or she had become fixated at an immature, incomplete level of psychosexual development, never completing the psychic journey to mature heterosexuality. This failure to mature was a form of neurosis, of emotional or psychic sickness. The homosexual's erotic and emotional drives toward his or her own sex were a matter of "arrested development." The source of this arrested development was to be found in unresolved conflicts with psychologically unhealthy parents in dysfunctional family units. Click here for more details regarding "unhealthy mothers and fathers". Certain common themes consistently emerged in the psychiatric literature and rapidly moved from there into the popular culture by way of novels, plays, films and non-academic magazine articles: homosexuals were immature, emotionally arrested and neurotic; unstable, unhappy and potentially dangerous to society. They were doomed to live tragic lives because their affliction was global - that is, it affected every part of their personality. As psychiatrist Edmund Bergler wrote:

In objective reality, [the homosexual] is a diseased person. He just won't admit to that . . . He is diseased in his personality. . . . Homosexuality is a neurotic distortion of the whole personality . . .there are no healthy homosexuals . . . . . the homosexual is an emotionally sick person. . . . Every homosexual is . . .a psychic masochist. (2)

The Elephant in the Room
But the major problem with all of the above conclusions of psychologists and psychiatrists during the 1940s and up to 1973 was that every study of homosexual men published, used as subjects only individuals who had either sought out treatment because they were unhappy about being homosexual or who had been referred from the courts following conviction for sex crimes. While the majority of therapists and theorists of the time accepted the validity of such a research model without question, a few began to challenge the methodological integrity of studies purporting to describe all members of a class only by those whose inner conflicts drove them to seek psychological intervention or to commit antisocial acts that landed them in court. What sort of picture would one get of heterosexuals, these therapeutic mavericks asked, if the descriptive sampling were limited to those whose sexual problems required professional counseling and criminal sex offenders? (2)

"Treating" Homosexuals during the 1940s, the 1950s, the 1960s and up to 1973
Having defined homosexuality as a pathology, psychiatrists and other doctors made bold attempts to "treat" it. James Harrison, a psychologist who produced the 1992 documentary film "Changing Our Minds", notes that the medical profession viewed homosexuality with such abhorrence that virtually any proposed treatment seemed defensible. Lesbians were forced to submit to hysterectomies and estrogen injections, although it became clear that neither of these had any effect on their sexual orientation. Gay men were subjected to similar abuses. "Changing Our Minds" incorporates a film clip from the late 1940s, now slightly muddy, of a young gay man undergoing a transorbital lobotomy. We see a small device like an ice pick inserted through the eye socket, above the eyeball and into the brain. The pick is moved back and forth, reducing the prefrontal lobe to a hemorrhaging pulp. Harrison's documentary also includes a grainy black-and-white clip from a 1950s educational film produced by the U.S. Navy. A gay man lies in a hospital bed. Doctors strap him down and attach electrodes to his head. "We're going to help you get better," says a male voice in the background. When the power is turned on, the body of the gay man jerks violently, and he begins to scream. Doctors also tried castration and various kinds of aversion therapy. None of these could be shown to change the sexual orientation of the people involved. (1)

The Laws Back In The 60s
As David Carter writes in his book “Stonewall-The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution,” at the end of the 1960s homosexual sex was still illegal in every state but Illinois. It was a crime punishable by castration in seven states. No laws — federal, state or local — protected gay people from being denied jobs or housing. If a homosexual character appeared in a movie, his life ended with either murder or suicide.

Thrown Out Of Their Homes They Often Had To Live In The Streets
The younger gay men — and scattered women — who acted up at the Stonewall on those early summer nights in 1969 had little in common with their contemporaries in the front-page political movements of the time [Black Civil Rights and the Anti-War Movement]. They often lived on the streets, having been thrown out of their blue-collar homes by their families before they finished high school. They migrated to the [Greenwich] Village [New York City] because they’d heard it was one American neighborhood where it was safe to be who they were.(3)

Stonewall Inn-September 1969

The Stonewall Riots - For The First Time, The Gay Community Fights Back
The Stonewall riots were a series of spontaneous, violent demonstrations against a police raid that took place in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, at the Stonewall Inn, in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City. They are frequently cited as the first instance in American history when people in the homosexual community fought back against a government-sponsored system that persecuted sexual minorities, and they have become the defining event that marked the start of the gay rights movement in the United States and around the world.

. . . . After the Stonewall riots, gays and lesbians in New York City faced gender, class, and generational obstacles to becoming a cohesive community. Within six months, two gay activist organizations were formed in New York, concentrating on confrontational tactics, and three newspapers were established to promote rights for gays and lesbians. Within a few years, gay rights organizations were founded across the U.S. and the world. On June 28, 1970, the first Gay Pride marches took place in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York commemorating the anniversary of the riots. Similar marches were organized in other cities. Today, Gay Pride events are held annually throughout the world toward the end of June to mark the Stonewall riots. Click Here to continue reading all this entry about the Stonewall Riots from Wikipedia from where this information and photo were taken.

Institutional Discrimination Against Gays Developed Only In The 20th Century and Peaked From The 1930s to the 1960s
. . . . Institutional discrimination against same-sex sexual behavior is relatively new. [Religious and cultural discrimination against homosexual sexual behavior has been rampant ironically only since the advent of Christianity-See Box Below] Discrimination against GLBT people seems so ubiquitous it is hard to imagine it was any other way; however, while there have been occasional examples of persecution, it had never really been enfranchised into the culture until relatively recently. In the now-famous 2003 Supreme Court sodomy case John Geddes Lawrence and Tyron Garner v. the State of Texas ten professors of history filed an amicus brief in support of the petitioners. (4) In it they assert:

The government policy of classifying and discriminating against certain citizens on the basis of their homosexual status is an unprecedented project of the twentieth century . . . . Sodomy laws that exclusively targeted same sex couples, such as the statute enacted in 1973 in Texas . . . were a development of the last third of the twentieth century and reflect this historically unprecedented concern to classify and penalize homosexuals as a subordinate class of citizens . . . . and peaked from the 1930s to the 1960s. Gay men and women were labeled "deviants," "degenerates," and "sex criminals" by the medical profession, government officials, and the mass media.

One clue is that the term homosexuality was first coined in 1869 [as explained above]. The timing was no accident; the end of the nineteenth century was the Victorian Era, a time of sexual repression for people of all orientations. At the same time, science was on the rise. Not only were traditional sciences leading the way into a brave new future of cameras and telegraphs, but the new sciences of sociology and psychology were also created. People now believed everything could be explained through science, including human behavior. Indeed, psychology sought to explain human sexuality as a medical issue, with homosexuality as an illness. (5) For example, perhaps the most influential psychiatrist to date was Sigmund Freud. Freud believed homosexuality resulted from problems in a person's development, (6) with homosexuality as the result of an "Oedipal complex," "penis envy," or "anal fixation." (7) Homosexuality began to be seen as pathological, with the client needing to be cure, or stopped, at all costs. Same-gender sexual behavior became an illness for the first time.

This medical model became the dominant view of sexuality in America. Indeed, one could argue the terms homosexual, heterosexual, and bisexual were developed by Europeans to be used like phyla to divide and classify humans. Far from benign, this model has been used to divide and discriminate against certain people ever since. (8)

According to Louis Crompton's narrative tour de force, Homosexuality and Civilization, in the Middle Ages [600-1500] fierce laws were passed, at clerical prompting, that led to the burning, beheading, drowning, hanging and castration of male "sodomites" who, through the broadest possible interpretation of the Sodom story and other biblical texts, were blamed for such disasters as plagues, earthquakes, floods, famines, and even defeat in battle. Lesbian acts, too, were condemned, and women were executed. It is a relief to turn from these atrocities and the intense fear and hatred that bred them to the contemporaneous civilizations of China and Japan, which demonstrate that, beyond the domain of the three Abrahamic religions [Christianity, Judaism and Islamism], some-sex relations could be recognized and on occasion honored in the post-classical world.

In Europe, the unity of the Middle Ages gave way to the national variety of the Renaissance [1350-1600], but prejudice remained strong. In Catholic states, executions now reached their peak. In Italy, cities like Venice and Florence inaugurated "sodomy police" to hunt down victims; in Spain, the Inquisitions of Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia energetically aided the civic authorities; and in France, men and women who did not enjoy aristocratic privileges were routinely burned or hanged. (9)

What It Was Like To Be Gay in a Nazi German Concentration Camp-1940

To Be Both Gay and A Priest - A Man of Prayer

I read this story in John McNeill’s “Taking a Chance on God“, pages 8-11: McNeill got the story from Heinz Heger. This is what McNeill wrote:

“[Here is an] eyewitness account of a gay priest who was beaten to death in a German concentration camp during World War II because he refused to stop praying or to express contempt for himself. The story is recounted by Heinz Heger in his book “The Men With the Pink Triangle“, in which he recalls what took place in the special concentration camp for gay men in Sachsenhausen (Sachsenhausen was a “level 3″ camp where prisoners were deliberately worked to death):

source: queeringthechurch.com

Toward the end of February, 1940, a priest arrived in our block, a man some 60 years of age, tall and with distinguished features. We later discovered that he came from Sudetenland, from an aristocratic German family. He found the torment of the arrival procedure especially trying, particularly the long wait naked and barefoot outside the block.

When his tonsure was discovered after the shower, the SS corporal in charge took up a razor and said “I’ll go to work on this one myself, and extend his tonsure a bit.” And he shaved the priest’s head with the razor, taking little trouble to avoid cutting the scalp. Quite the contrary.

The priest returned to the day-room of our lock up with his head cut open and blood streaming down. His face was ashen and his eyes stared uncomprehendingly into the distance. He sat down on a bench, folded his hands in his lap and said softly, more to himself than to anyone else: “And yet man is good, he is a creature of God!” I was sitting beside him, and said softly but firmly: “Not all men; there are also beasts in human form, whom the devil must have made.”

The priest paid no attention to my words, he just prayed silently, merely moving his lips. I was deeply moved, even though I was by then already numbed by all the suffering I had seen, and indeed experienced myself. But I had always had a great respect for priests, so that his silent prayer, this mute appeal to God, whom he called upon for help and strength in his bodily pain and mental torment, went straight to my heart.

Our block Capo, however, a repulsive and brutal “green”, must have reported the priest’s praying to the SS, for our block-sergeant suddenly burst into the day-room accompanied by a second NCO, seizing the terrified priest from the bench and punching and insulting him. The priest bore the beating and abuse without complaint, and just stared at the two SS men with wide, astonished eyes. This must simply have made them angrier, for they now took one of the benches and tied the priest to it.

They started to beat him indiscriminately with their sticks, on his stomach, his belly and his sexual organs. They seemed to get more and more ecstatic, and gloated: “We’ll drive the praying out of you! You bum-fucker! bum-fucker!” The priest collapsed into unconsciousness, was shaken awake and then fell unconscious again. Finally the two SS sadists ceased their blows and left the day-room, though not without scornfully calling back to the man they had now destroyed: “OK, you randy old rat-bag, you can piss with your arse-hole in future.”

The priest just rattled and groaned. We released him and laid him on his bed. He tried to raise his hand in thanks, but he hadn’t the strength, and his voice gave out when he tried to say “thank you.” He just lay without stirring, his eyes open, each movement contorting his face with pain.

I felt I was witnessing the crucifixion of Christ in modern guise. Instead of Roman soldiers, Hitler’s SS thugs, and a bench instead of a cross. The torment of the Saviour, however, was scarcely greater than that inflicted on one of his representatives nineteen hundred years later here in Sachsenhausen.

The next morning, when we marched to the parade ground, we had almost to carry the priest, who seemed about to collapse again from pain and weakness. When our block senior reported to the SS block sergeant, the latter came over to the priest and shouted “You filthy queer, you filthy swine, say what you are!” The priest was supposed to repeat the insults, but no sound came from the lips of the broken man. The SS man angrily fell on him and was about to start beating him once again.

Suddenly the unimaginable happened, something that is still inexplicable to me and that I could only see as a miracle, the finger of God. From the overcast sky, a sudden ray of sunshine that illumined the priest’s battered face. Out of the thousands of assembled prisoners, only him, and at the very moment when he was going to be beaten again.

There was a remarkable silence, and all present stared up fixedly at the sky, astonished by what had happened. The SS sergeant himself looked up at the clouds in wonder for a few seconds, then let his hand, raised for a beating, sink slowly to his side, and walked wordlessly away to take up his position at the end of his ranks. The priest bowed his head and murmured with a dying voice: ”Thank you Lord... I know that my time has come.”

He was still with us for the evening parade. But we no longer needed to carry him, we laid him down at the end of the line with the other dead of the day, so that our numbers should be complete for the roll-call – no matter whether living or dead.

We gays and lesbians have a model and a patron in this anonymous priest who was martyred because he dared to be both gay and a man of prayer. (10)