Excuse Me, Gay is Not Good

But I do not help them by telling them
they are O.K. when they are not O.K.

Nor do I endorse their “new claim
to self-definition and self-respect.”

In point of fact, many of
my patients had character; they had an education; they were respected ad
men and actuaries and actors. But they were still in pain-for one
reason and one reason alone. They were caught up in this mysterious
compulsion to have sex with other men. They were not free. They were not
happy. And they wanted to see if they could change.

Over the
years, I found that those of my patients who really wanted to change
could do so, by attaining the insight that comes with a good
psychoanalysis. Others found other therapies that helped them get to the
bottom of their compulsions, all of which involved high motivation and
hard work. Difficult as their therapeutic trips were, hundreds and
thousands of homosexuals changed their ways. Many of my own formerly
homosexual patients-about a third of them-are married today and happily
so, with children. One-third may not sound like a very good average. But
it is just about the same success rate you will find at the best
treatment centers for alcoholics, like Hazelden in Minnesota and the
Betty Ford Clinic in California.

Another third of my patients
remain homosexual but not part of the gay scene. Now, after therapy,
they still have same-sex sex, but they have more control over their
impulses because now they understand the roots of their need for
same-sex sex. Some of these are even beginning to turn on to the
opposite sex. I add this third to my own success rate-so that I can tell
people in all honesty that my batting average is .667 out of more than a
thousand “at bats.”

Of course, I could bat .997 if I told all my
patients in pain that their homosexuality was “a special call” and “a
liberation.” That would endear me to everyone, but it would not help
them. It would be a lie-despite recent pieces of pseudo-science
bolstering the fantasy that gays are “born that way.”

The media put its
immediate blessing on this “research,” but we were oversold. Now we are
getting reports, even in such gay publications as The Journal of
Homosexuality, that the gay-gene studies and the gay-brain studies do
not stand up to critical analysis. (The author of one so-called
“gay-gene theory” is under investigation by the National Institutes of
Health for scientific fraud.)

CAUSES OF HOMOSEXUAL DISORDER

I was not surprised to hear this.
My long clinical experience and a sizable body of psychoanalysis
research tell me that most [homosexuals]are reacting, at an unconscious level, to something
amiss with their earliest upbringing- over-controlling mothers and
abdicating fathers. Through long observation I have also learned that
the supposedly liberated homosexual is never really free. In his
multiple, same-sex adventures, even the most effeminate gay was looking
to incorporate the manhood of others, because he was in a compulsive,
never-ending search for the masculinity that was never allowed to build
and grow in early childhood…

Once
my patients have achieved an insight into these dynamics-and realized
there is no moral fault involved in their longtime and mysterious
need-they have moved rather quickly on the road to recovery. Their
consequent gratitude to me is overwhelming. And why shouldn’t it be?
They were formerly caught up in compulsions they could not understand,
compulsions they could not control. Now they are in charge of their own
lives.

Their former promiscuity may have looked a lot like
“liberation.” But it was not true freedom. It was a kind of slavery. And
it was not a lifestyle. With the onset of AIDS, as the playwright and
gay militant Larry Kramer said in a 1993 interview, it turned out to be a
death style. I have had some patients tell me, “Doctor, if I weren’t in
therapy, I’d be dead.”

[ In addition, child and youth sexual abuse is a major cause of homosexuality. A 1992 study of 1000 homosexuals found that 37% had been abused sexually by an older male. Socarides, Homosexuality: A Freedom Too Far , p. 88)

IN WAR, FIRST CASUALTY IS TRUTH

Testimonials from my recovered patients
make me feel my work is worthwhile-despite regular demands from the gay
rights community for my silence. What would they have me do? Pack my
bags, find a new profession, lock up a lifetime of research and
analysis, hide my truth under a bushel? It is not my psychoanalytic duty
to tell people they are marvelous when they are out of control, much
less ask disingenuous rhetorical questions like, “What kind of God would
afflict people with an ‘objective disorder’ in the disposition of their
hearts?”

Giving God the credit for their gayness is a persistent
refrain in much gay literature today, and I am saddened to see people
of evident good will become unwitting parties to the blasphemy. Gays
ascribe their condition to God, but he should not have to take that rap,
any more than he should be blamed for the existence of other man-made
maladies-like war, for instance, which has proven to be very unhealthy
for humans and for all other living things. God does not make war. Men
do.

And, when homosexuality takes on all the aspects of a
political movement, it, too, becomes a war, the kind of war in which the
first casualty is truth, and the spoils turn out to be our own
children. An exaggeration? Well, what are we to think when militant
homosexuals seek to lower the age of consensual sexual intercourse
between homosexual men and young boys to the age of 14 (as they did in
Hawaii in 1993) or 16 (as they tried to do in England in 1994)? In the
Washington March for Gay Pride in 1993, they chanted, “We’re here. We’re
queer. And we’re coming after your children.”

What more do we need to know?
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