A Discussion: Are Homosexuals Sick?

One of the crucial issues in the public discussion about homosexuality is whether or not the condition is a mental illness. To try to find out, TIME asked eight experts on homosexuality --including two admitted homosexuals --to discuss the subject at a symposium in New York City. The participants: Robin Fox, British-born anthropologist at Rutgers University; John Gagnon, sociologist at the State University of New York; Lionel Tiger, a Canadian sociologist also at Rutgers; Wardell Pomeroy, a psychologist who co-authored the Kinsey reports on men and on women and who is now a psychotherapist; Dr. Charles Socarides, a psychoanalyst who has seen scores of homosexuals in therapy and is associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in The Bronx; the Rev. Robert Weeks, an Episcopal priest who has arranged for the meetings of a homosexual discussion group to take place at his Manhattan church; Dick Leitsch, a homosexual who is executive director of the Mattachine Society of New York; and Franklin Kameny, an astronomer and homosexual who is founder-president of the Mattachine Society of Washington.

Kameny: All the homosexuals whom you have explored in depth were patients or others in clinical circumstances. So how do you know that all the ones who wouldn't come near you are sick and suffer from severe anxieties?

Socarides: We do hear, from people who are in treatment, about their friends in homosexual life and some of these also come to us. They see around them a complete disaster to their lives. They see that the most meaningful human relationship is denied them--the male-female relationship.

Tiger: There is a lack of a tragic sense here. All people have problems. I have all kinds of anxieties; everybody I know has anxieties. Some of them are severe; some of them are not severe. Often they are severe at different stages of the life cycle and for different reasons. To pick on homosexuals in this particular way, as on Communists or Moslems in another, is to shortchange their option for their own personal destiny.

Socarides: By God, they should live in the homosexual world if they want to! No one is arguing that point; no one is trying to say that a homosexual should be forced to seek help. Everybody is now saying that the homosexual needs compassion and understanding, the way the neurotic does or anybody else suffering from any illness. That is true. I agree with that.

Weeks: I think that historically the church has had a very hypocritical view of homosexuality. Instead of accepting the totality of sexuality, the church is still a little uncomfortable with the total sexual response; it still insists that people conform to a certain type of sexual behavior.

Fox: I was talking to a very pretty American girl recently who said that her first reaction to European males was one of considerable shock because the kind of touching behavior, the kind of behavior between males, was something that she would have been horrified to see in the men she had grown up with. This strikes me as a very American attitude, because of its rigidity, because of its absolute exclusiveness, because of its treatment of this as something horrible and beyond the pale.

Gagnon: There is no explanation for this attitude unless you want to take Ken Tynan's explanation, which is that people think that people ought to be alike, and anyone who didn't get wife, have spear and carry shield was bad juju, and you threw him out of the crowd.

Leitsch: It has always struck me that one of the primary reasons for the American attitude toward homosexuality is that we are so close to our agrarian background. When America was first settled, we had a hell of a big country to fill up, and we had to fill it up in a hurry. We have never been big enough to be decadent before.

Fox: Yes, America has to learn to be decadent gracefully, I think.

Weeks: I just finished counseling a person who was addicted to the men's room in Grand Central Station. He knows he is going to get busted by the cops; yet he has to go there every day. I think I did succeed in getting him to cease going to the Grand Central men's room, perhaps in favor of gay bars. This is a tremendous therapeutic gain for this particular man. But he is sick; he does need help. However, I don't think Dr. Socarides is talking about people like another acquaintance of mine, a man who has been "married" to another homosexual for fifteen years. Both of them are very happy and very much in love. They asked me to bless their marriage, and I am going to do it.

Pomeroy: I think they are beautiful. I don't think they are sick at all.

Socarides: In medicine we are taught that sickness is the failure of function. For example, a gall bladder is pathological precisely when it ceases to function or its functioning is impaired. A human being is sick when he fails to function in his appropriate gender identity, which is appropriate to his anatomy. A homosexual who has no other choice is sick in this particular way. Is the man who goes to the "tearooms" any more or less sick than the two men in this "married" relationship? No. I think they are all the same. However, I think that perhaps the element of masochism or self-punitive behavior is greater in the man who will go openly, publicly, and endanger himself in this particular way.

Fox: You seem to say that the anxieties provoke a homosexual into seeking a partner of the same sex. Isn't it possible that he prefers such a partner, and that this provokes anxieties?

Socarides: If his actions are a matter of preference, then he would not be considered a true obligatory homosexual.

Gagnon: I am troubled here by the sense of intellectual and historical narrowness. We should not get hung up on the 20th century nuclear family as the natural order of man, living in the suburbs and having three kids, or on the kind of Viennese-Jewish comparison that Freud really created. All of a sudden, I find a new penisology--that somehow the shape of the penis and of the vagina dictate the shape of human character. I have a minimum definition of mental health. You don't end up in a psychiatrist's office or in the hands of the police, you stay out of jail, you keep a job, you pay your taxes, and you don't worry people too much. That is called mental health. Nobody ever gets out of it alive. There is no way to succeed.

Socarides: It is a very bitter definition. Freud's test was a person's ability to have a healthy sexual relationship with a person of the opposite sex and to enjoy his work.

Fox: A psychoanalyst says that we are destined to heterosexual union, and anything that deviates from this must by definition be sick. This is nonsense even in animal terms. Animal communities can tolerate quite a lot of homosexual relationships. The beautiful paradigm of this is geese. Two male geese can form a bond that is exactly like the bond between males and females. They function as a male-female pair; and geese, as far as I can see, are a very successful species.

So far as the two "married" individuals are concerned, they are engaged in what to them is a meaningful and satisfying relationship. What I would define as a sick person in sexual terms would be someone who could not go through the full sequence of sexual activity, from seeing and admiring to following, speaking, touching, and genital contact. A rapist, a person who makes obscene telephone calls--these seem to me sick people, and I don't think it matters a damn whether the other person is of the same sex or not.

Socarides: The homosexuals who come to our offices tell us: "We are alone, we are despairing, we cannot join the homosexual society--this would be giving up. We like what they are doing, but we will not join them in terms of calling ourselves normal. We are giving up our heritage, our very lives. We know how we suffer. Only you will know how we suffer, because we will tell only you how we suffer." As a physician, I am bothered by this, because I deal with the suffering of human beings.

Pomeroy: I am not speaking facetiously, but I think it would be best to say that all homosexuals are sick, that all heterosexuals are sick, that the population is sick. Let us get rid of this term and look at people as people. I have heard psychiatrists perfectly soberly say that 95% of all the population in the U.S. is mentally ill.

Gagnon: The issue is that the society can afford it and the homosexuals cannot. The society can afford 4% of its population to be homosexuals and treat them as it wishes, as it does the 10% who are black. The homosexual pays a terrible price for the way the society runs itself. This is central to the daily life of the homosexual. Can he get a job? Can he do this? Can he do that? If we took the law off the books tomorrow, the homosexual would still pay a very high price.

Kameny: One of the major problems we have to face is the consequences of these attitudes, which are poisonous to the individual's self-esteem and self-confidence. The individual is brainwashed into a sense of his own inferiority, just as other minorities are. When we are told "You are sick," and "You are mentally ill," that finishes the destruction.

Pomeroy: If I were to base my judgment of homosexuals, both male and female, on the people who come to me in my practice, I think I would agree that they are sick, that they are upset in many, many different ways. But I had 20 years of research experience prior to this, in which I found literally hundreds of people who would never go to a therapist. They don't want help. They are happy homosexuals.

Socarides: I guess some of you feel that obligatory homosexuality is not an illness, that homosexuality should be proposed as a normal form of sexuality to all individuals. I think that this would be a disaster. A little boy might go next door to the Y and an older man might say to him, "Look, this is normal, my son. Just join me in this." If you sell this bill of goods to the nation, you are doing irreparable harm, and there will be a tremendous backlash against the homosexual.

Fox: I went through the English school system, which everybody knows is a homosexual system in the very fullest sense. Speaking as an obligatory heterosexual on behalf of myself and the other 90%, we went through it, we enjoyed it, we came out the other end, and we are fine. Some people have strayed about somewhere in the middle. This notion, therefore, that if you catch somebody and tell him that homosexuality is normal and practice it with him, he is necessarily going to get stuck in it, is absolutely nonsense. And I cite my three daughters as evidence.

Socarides: The only place to get the material that will tell us the truth about what the homosexual suffers is in-depth analysis. Sociologists, anthropologists, even psychologists do not tell us what is going on in the basic psyche of the homosexual. I believe we should change the laws. I believe that homosexuals have been persecuted. The homosexual must be seen as a full-fledged citizen in a free society and must be given all the rights and prerogatives that all other citizens enjoy, neither more nor less. I think, however, that we must do one other thing. It must be declared that homosexuality is a form of emotional illness, which can be treated, that these people can be helped.

Kameny: With that, you will surely destroy us.

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