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 2 of 4)_____________________________________________________________________
Yet homosexual experience, like a vaccination, may take or may not. Some boys seem to be so susceptible that a single experience sets them in a lifetime pattern. Others engage in considerable experimentation yet never really take up the homosexual way of life. All in all, the number who do become confirmed homosexuals is quite small. What distinguishes these men from the others?
Dr. Gebbard, who takes a common-sensical rather than psychoanalytical view of the problem, is convinced by the case histories in his files that ‘mere chance often plays an almost frightening part.’ A bad case of acne, a stammer or unusual shyness may make a boy so unwanted in the world of boy-meets-girl that he quickly embraces the other world. (Many a homosexual affair, another expert points out, is an alliance between two men who both consider themselves ‘social cripples’.) In other cases, says Dr. Gebbard, social pressures prove crucial. Some boys feel so guilty about any kind of homosexual feelings or acts that they feel forever ostracized from the rest of society and can only cling to the gay world. Some come under the community’s suspicion or are actually caught, them, after they have been branded as homosexuals, they find it impossible to get a date with a girl and cannot return to the standard pattern of sexual and social life. But over and beyond the influences of happenstance and society, says Dr. Gebbard, there seems to be little question that some boys are predisposed to homosexuality. All medical and psychiatric authorities agree.
Our great-grandfathers, when they dared think about the problem at all, believed that homosexuality was inherited… some men were just born ‘queer,’ with a woman’s disposition in a man’s body, they constituted a third sex,’ which was an aberration of nature. This view was based largely on the mistaken notion, still held by many people, that all homosexuals have effeminate, ‘swishy’ manners and would like nothing better, if only they could get away with it, than to dress like woman, pluck their eyebrows and use lipstick. In actual fact, there are many effeminate men who are not homosexual at all – and indeed the Institution for Sex Research has even found that some transvestites, men who like to dress in women’s clothes, are happily married and lead perfectly normal sex lives. On the other hand, says the Institute, fully 85% or more of homosexuals look and act much like other men and cannot be spotted for certain even by the experts. Often the only signs are a very subtle tendency to over-meticulous grooming, plus the failure to cast the ordinary man’s customary admiring glance at every pretty girl who walks by.
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Modern tests of physical characteristics and glandular secretions have shown no recognizable differences between homosexuals and other men yet out great-grandfathers may have been partly right at that. Franz Kallman, a German analyst, once manages 40 men, all homosexuals who had identical twin brothers. In every case, the twin also turned out to be a homosexual even though the brothers had never confided in each other and had sometimes grown up apart from each other – so possibly there is some kind of inborn pattern of glandular activity or brain function not yet recognizable by any test thus far developed which predestines some men for homosexuality.
The psychoanalysts who have observed and treated many homosexual patients over the years believe that homosexuality represents a form of arrested development. Most children, though born with an indiscriminate impulse towards affection that does not distinguish between men and women, or even between human beings and other animals soon learn to concentrate it on another human being of the opposite sex. Some do not. Sigmund Freud, the founder of analysis, theorized that this could happen in a number of ways, closely related to the stages of growth through which the analysts believe every child must pass.
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In the earlier years, through what analysts call the narcissistic period, the child’s emotions and interests are totally centered around his own magical and adored self. If he does not completely outgrow this infantile stage said Freud, he may only be able to love a person as much like himself as possible, hence a person of the same sex. A little later in what the analysts call the Oedipus phase, the baby boy becomes aware of other people and promptly falls in love with the closest one at hand, his mother. If the strange conflicts of this period are nor resolved, Freud believed the boy may grow up wanting to be exactly like his mother – in other words to play a female role in life. Or he may become so frightened by his feeling towards his mother and by what he conceives to be his father’s jealousy as to remain afraid of women all his life. (A common cause of homosexuality , Analyst Sandor Rado once declared is ‘hidden but incapacitating fear of the opposite sex …”)
Freud thought that the tendencies towards arrested development were inborn: some boys simply had less pgychological drive than others or were by nature ‘passive’ and inclines to identify with the feminine – rather than the ‘active’ and inclines to identify with the masculine. But ever since the 1962 publication of the famous study headed by Dr. Irving Bieber, modern analysts have put the blame less on heredity than on childhood experiences.
Dr Bieber and his research committee, studying the case histories of 106 homosexuals who had been treated by members of the Society of Medical Psychoanalysts, found that a remarkable proportion of them had been reared by mothers who babied them all through their childhood. Typically the homosexual’s mother regarded him as her favorite, her pride and joy, who must be protected at all costs from the hazards of growing up. She discouraged him from forming friendships with other boys on the ground that none of them was good enough for him, and jealously protected him from girls who might show an interest. Regarding him as frail and easily hurt, she kept him from the natural rough play of childhood.
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