Dr. Leo J. Zeff, Berkeley clinical psychologist.

Believing that such a discussion should start from the Lesbian's selfestimate, the D.O.B. gave all present copies of opinions of four Lesbians on the "reason for it all." The first felt that but for guilt proceeding from stereotyping labels, most people would be neither homo nor hetero, just sexual. The second, rejecting innateness, parenatal desire for a boy, sheltered adolescence or seduction as causes of her Lesbianism, suggested a combination of some genetic influence with lack of strong father. The third followed Kinsey's view that the human mammal is capable of response to any sufficient stimulus, with preference determined purely by the accident of which sex one first finds as a partner,

and the conditioning affects of that experience and social attitudes toward it, and she stressed the nonsexual, love, side of Lesbian relationships. The fourth listed factors often considered as causes of Lesbianism, and asked why other women subjected to these factors did not become Lesbian. She stressed the protest against male domination and the standardized feminine role.

Miss Lyon opened by noting the scarcity of material on Lesbians in our culture and attributed any current increase to women's flight from maternity and emphasis on education and social status and to a general breakdown in moral and family structure.

Dr. Zeff asked why the question, "Why the Lesbian?" Do we think we learn the real meaning of an experience by studying causation? Before we can define all those distinct categories, we must understand "people." The Lesbian is a person, so why all the fuss about justification?

Dr. Beach, a biologically-oriented psychologist, said it would be as useful to ask, "Why the heterosexual?" Deploring dichotomous classifications, he said we should study behavior instead of classifying individuals. Causation, he said, seems to be multiple, and certainly constitutional in part, a dynamic interraction of factors, with too many variables at present to make much of it. Disagreeing with Kinsey, he felt first experiences probably aren't as critical as often supposed.

Dr. Reider, gratified at finding no argument against the existence of a biological sexual drive, said the chief problem, probably psychopathological, is what causes a specific choice of object. But how do we distinguish psychopathology from developmental psychology? Does data about a single Lesbian tell us anything meaningful about the general condition? He doubted that statistical differences between male and female homosexuals would represent any fundamental difference, and said he'd noticed more aggression in male than in female homosexuals: "Lesbians seem to slug each other less."

Dr. Beach insisted that procreation was the function of sex activity, with built-in safeguards, at least in lower animals where sexual activity is almost exclusively oriented toward procreation. (This was not the impression this reader got from. Patterns of Sexual Behavior, which Dr. Beach co-authored with anthropologist, Dr. Clellan S. Ford. There we find, p. 134, "Inversion of the sexual role is common among animals of several species other than Homo Sapiens, and it is particularly frequent in infrahuman primates." And, on p. 139, "Male mammals of many species below the primates will, under certain circumstances, attempt to mate with members of their

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