Brokeback Mountain: Our Community's Common Bond > Brokeback Mountain Open Forum
The Question of Time: What Was Life Like in 1963?
Jeff Wrangler:
--- Quote from: latjoreme on March 01, 2007, 07:34:57 pm ---This whole passage -- from the "bad case of acne" to the "mothers babied them" -- infuriates me in so many ways I won't even begin to list them.
>:( >:( >:(
--- End quote ---
Just remind yourself that article was published over 40 years ago. But that was also shortly after a couple of fictional ranch kids came together on top of a mountain in Wyoming. Goes far to illustrate the attitudes that were pervasive back in those days.
Tommydreamer:
Go Sherrif these are great posts! Your patience to retype all the text is greatly appreciated.
Many Thanks,
Your Historian Friend
Sheriff Roland:
disclaimer: this is part of an article published in 1965 in LIFE magazine, a very popular magazine of it's time. It is not a recent article!
Scientists search for the answers to a touchy and puzzling question: WHY? by Ernest Havemann (part 3 of 4)_____________________________________________________________________
On the one hand, the homosexual’s mother kept him utterly dependent on her, unable to make decisions. On the other, she pampered him, catered to his every whim and smothered him with affection. Often she openly preferred him to his father, confided in him and, in Dr. Bieber’s words, ‘acted out a romance’ which had obvious sexual overtones. In some cases she liked to have him sleep in her bedroom, even after he had reached adolescence. All in all, she treated him with an ‘extraordinary intimacy which made it clear to him that he was ‘the most significant individual in her life’ – far more important to her than the husband whom he had replaced as her ‘love object.’
Even with such a mother, Dr. Bieber says, a boy can grow up to normal adulthood if he has a warm affectionate father to set an example of masculinity and counteract the mother’s influence. But the typical father of the homosexual, far from liking and supporting the son, turned out to be totally uninterested in the boy or actively hostile. Often the father was jealous and given to disparagement and ridicule. The boy feared his father and often intensively hated him. Babied and demasculinized by his mother, despised by his father, he arrived at adolescence ‘beset by feeling of inadequacy, impotence and self-contempt’ - and was an eager recruit to the ‘less threatening atmosphere’ of the homosexual world. Not one of the 106 homosexuals studied, Dr. Bieber reported, had a relationship with either mother or father that could by any stretch of the imagination be called normal.
In Dr. Bieber’s view of course, homosexuals are psychologically sick, the emotionally disturbed offspring of emotionally disturbed parents. He believes strongly that the homosexual society in ‘neither healthy nor happy’ and that the very term ‘gar world’ is only a flippant and rather pathetic attempt to cover up deep and chronic feelings of pathological depression. Most analysts, psychiatrists and psychologists tend to agree. (A well-known psychologist and sexologist once began an address to the Mattachine Society with the comment: “I used to think that all homosexuals were neurotic.” His audience greeted his apparent change of heart with applause – but he immediately chilled them by adding: “I now believe that homosexuals in most instances are borderline psychotics.”)
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Most of the speculation about the mental state of homosexuals, however, comes from therapists who have treated homosexual patients – and thus involves the possibility of a built-in bias which worries some of the experts. One skeptic, Analyst van den Haag, was once told by a colleague, “All my homosexual patients, you know, are quite sick.” “Ah yes” said Dr. van den Haag, but so are all of me heterosexual patients.”
Seeking information about the great majority of homosexuals who have never visited a therapist, a Los Angeles psychologist named Dr. Evelyn Hooker once manages to find 30 such men, then matched them as nearly as she could by age, intelligence and education, with 30 other men. She gave both groups a series of personality test and submitted the results to a panel of trained scorers – who could find no significant differences between the two groups. This may only prove that personality tests are unreliable, as many scientists suspect, or it may indicate that homosexuals can be just as healthy as anybody else.
Freud did not believe that homosexuals were necessarily sick: in a famous letter to a mother of a homosexual who had asked him for help, he wrote, ‘homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness.’ Not did that noted anti-Freudian, Dr Kinsey, regard all homosexuals as psychologically sick. From his interviews with many hundreds of confirmed and part-time homosexuals, Dr. Kinsey concluded that homosexual conduct was simply too widespread, in our own society and others, to be considered neurotic. A new report by his Institute for Sex Research, to be published this fall, will state that many homosexuals ‘are able to lead useful, well-adjusted lives.’
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Shuggy:
One thing, the LIFE article couldn't spell Wolfenden. (UK report arising from the arrest and imprisonment of Peter Wildeblood, Lord Montague of Beaulieu and one other in 1957. Wildeblood wrote a book called "Against the Law" in 1959, which led to the Report. It took them another 10 years to make consent, adult [21] and in private [no more than two people] a defence, though the charge might still be brought. Full decrimininalistion wasn't till the 90s, I think, and repealing the infamous Section 28 against "promoting" homosexuality not until about 2003)
I checked the spelling against the report itself, and then I thought you'd like to see some of it.
From the last page, obviously they had a big drive on in 1954, the year they got Alan Turing.
Sheriff Roland:
disclaimer: this is part of an article published in 1965 in LIFE magazine, a very popular magazine of it's time. It is not a recent article!
Scientists search for the answers to a touchy and puzzling question: WHY? by Ernest Havemann (last of 4)____________________________________________________________________________
How many homosexuals are there in America? Nobody can say for sure. The closest thing to a census was the 1948 Kinsey report, which was based on interviews with 5,000 men. Kinsey estimated that four men in 100 are exclusively homosexual all their adult lives. This would mean that there are currently about 2.3 million confirmed homosexuals over the age of 18 in the U.S. Kinsey also believed that an equal number of men are exclusively homosexual for a period of three years or more at some time in their lives. Dr. Kinsey’s is the highest of all the responsible estimates and is possibly exaggerated, as has been noted, by the eagerness of homosexual men to volunteer to the study. Dr. Bieber believes that the number of confirmed homosexuals is closer to 2% - or about 1.2 million Americans over the age of 18.
There are also women homosexuals, of course, but the number is much smaller – by the estimate of the Institute for Sex Research, perhaps only a third or a quarter as high as the figure for men. One reason, some analysts have suggested, is that it is far easier for a woman who is afraid of men to perform adequately in marriage than it is for a man who is afraid of women. At any rate, women homosexuals are not nearly so numerous, promiscuous or conspicuous as their male counterpart, and the various studies have largely ignored them.
Has there been an increase in homosexuality? To any observant person walking around cities like New York and Los Angeles, it would certainly seem so. Many psychiatrists and social scientists agree. Dr. Abraham Kardiner, who teaches psychiatry at Emory University says that the increase in the last quarter century has been enormous. But there are no figures to prove a rise in homosexuality and it may be more apparent than real, reflecting simply a more open discussion and practice of homosexuality in keeping with the general sexual frankness of our times. The Institute for Sex Research, whose studies now cover a period of nearly 25 years, doubts that the proportion of homosexuals has increased at all.
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Can society do something about homosexuality? Not a great deal. Freud felt that most homosexuals could not be changed even through prolonged psychoanalysis. Dr. Bieber’s attitude is considerably more optimistic: he found that 27% of the homosexuals in his study led normal sex lives after analysis. But even 27% is a low figure and it would be impossible to provide analysis for all the homosexuals in the U.S. anyway.
The laws against homosexual acts have certainly not stopped the confirmed practitioners. As Dr. Gebhard and many other observers have pointed out, sexual behavior is one of the most compulsive of all human traits, and the man who is the grips of homosexuality is likely to practice it regardless of risks or penalties. This fall’s new report by the Institute for Sex Research, which is based on a study of men who were in prison for various sex crimes, will contain some absolutely remarkable figures on the irrepressible drives of the homosexual. The prisoners convicted of advances to boys under 12, the report will show had committed homosexual acts with an average of 19 different partners before they were caught, those convicted of advances to boys between 12 and 15, an average of 45 different partners, those convicted of homosexual acts with older youths and adults, close to 200 times. Moreover, the worst way in the world to try and cure a homosexual is to send him to a prison, where, as in all place when men are gathered without the companionship of women, homosexuality is a commonplace. (The Institute for Sex Research says that 70% of all long-term prisoners in the U.S. become practicing homosexuals). Law officials and psychiatrists who have tried to make international comparisons do not believe that homosexuality is any more wide-spread in places like France, the Netherlands and Sweden, where it is not punishable under the law, than in other nations like ours where it is considered a crime.
Most people who have studied homosexuality believe that the laws against it are what Freud once called them, ‘a great injustice’ and ‘cruelty’ – unjustly penalizing the few who are unlucky to be caught. Indeed some observers think that the legal penalties and social stigma which threatens the homosexual’s life may cause him more emotional disturbance than homosexuality itself – and even some defiant and thrill seeking men may take up homosexuality for the very reason that it is illegal, just as people who have never drunk before began drinking during Prohibition. But certainly society’s powerful disapproval, if not necessarily the law’s, serves to deter at least some men who are wavering between the two worlds.
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Some well meaning people feel that homosexuality could be reduced if our society were not so blatantly so sexual in general – that is, if we protected our growing boys from the stimulation of sexy movies, books, magazines and outright pornography. But this theory ignores the urgency of the adolescent’s sexual drive. “When a boy reaches puberty,” says Dr. Gebhard, “his hormones keep him far more stimulated from the inside than he could possibly be stimulated by anything he sees or hears.” About the only effective way to discourage homosexuality at that crucial age,” Dr. Gebhard believes, would be “to encourage heterosexuality.” But such an idea would be utterly at odds with our culture and our moral code – and therefore it seems inevitable that a considerable number of boys in every generation will continue to experiment with homosexuality, as in the past, and that some of them who were born or grew up with a predisposition will adopt it as a permanent way of life.
Many optimistic students of our society believe that we may someday eliminate poverty, slums and even the common cold – but the problem of homosexuality seems to be more akin to death and taxes. Even if every present-day American with the slightest trace of homosexuality could be deported tomorrow and forever banished, Dr. Gebhard believes, there would probably be just as many homosexual men in the U.S. a few generations hence as there are now.
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