JUNE 1981 HIGH GEAR Page 11

Psychiatric treatment of homosexuality

Golden eggs from gay geese

By R. Woodward Here are two questions which have the same answer.

If you like making everyone else conform to the standards you have been raised on, if you like playing the role of police officer but want to show off how smart and subtle you are and want to make a lot more money than police officers usually do, what occupation should you pursue?

If you have become an atheist or agnostic but still are eager to be playing the role of minister, priest, or rabbi, what should you do?

appetites.

In satisfying their appetites, psychiatrists tend to be more subtle than police and clergy-and also tend to be more pretentious and more touchy about being contradicted.

Psychiatrists like to suppose that their conclusions and decisions are more objective, more "scientific," less culturally biased, and less subject to local pressures than the conclusions and decisions of police and clergy.

As compared, for example, to Officer O'Reilly gleefully applying his night-stick, a psychiatrist The answer to both of these is more likely to have hurt feelquestions is become a psychi-ings if you suggest that what is atrist.

If you are a psychiatrist, you get to take over the functions of police and clergy while still claiming to be a physician and a scientist.

(Since psychiatric theorists have been arguing for many decades that there are psychological reasons for practically everything a person does, they should not object to having a few hypotheses expressed as to what psychological motives cause an individual to become a psychiatrist).

Psychiatrists, like other human beings in general, and like police and clergy in particular, have appetites for power and prestige and look for ways to satisfy these

being done to your head is being done to make you conform to popular social standards rather than for any other observable

reason.

Psychiatrists like to suppose that their main function is to diagnose and treat "mental illnesses," and cure them whenever possible.

In defining various human conditions as being "mental illnesses," psychiatrists like to insist that they merely discover illnesses which already exist. They like to insist that it is only the terminology to describe the "illnesses" that they invent, not the illnesses themselves.

Something that you will seldom find mentioned in psychiat-

ric writings is the fact that the more conditions that can be defined as mental illnesses, the more power and prestige psychiatrists can have.

By claiming that something which has been regarded as a sin or a crime is actually a "mental illness," psychiatrists suggest that they are the ones who should control it.

Psychiatry and homosexuality The word "homosexuality" and the idea that homosexuality is a "mental illness" are psychiatric inventions.

The word "homosexual" did not exist before it was coined by a Hungarian psychiatrist named Karoly Maria Benkert. Benkert first used the word in print in a pamphlet written in German, entitled "Das Homosexualitat," which he published in 1869 under the pseudonym of Kertbeny.

He made up the word by taking the classic Greek prefix homo, meaning "same," and attaching it to the Latin word sexualls, meaning "sexual."

(The first use of the word "homosexual'' in English recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary is the quotation of a note to Chapter I of Studies in Psychology by Havelock Ellis, published in 1897. Says Ellis's note, "Homosexual' is a barbarously hybrid word, and I claim no responsibility for it.")

Jerry Falwell's pet dogs

Most of Jerry Falwell's book Listen, America! is so dull that the only people likely to bother to read it all the way through are a few conscientious reviewers.

It does, however, contain one pearl of great price.

People who enjoy collecting examples of unintentional selfparody are likely to experience sheer ecstasy upon reading a certain paragraph on page 78.

The enjoyment and edification that this paragraph provides will probably not be limited to connoisseurs.

How Falwell's pious and humane mask slips off will be readily apparent to any literate person in America or Western Europe, as well as readily apparent to any illiterate person in America or Western Europe who I can find someone to read the paragraph out loud.

Apparently with no inkling that he has done so, Falwell reveals by his choice of imagery that he regards human beings who are poorer and less powerful than he is as being equivalents to his pet dogs.

What is revealing is not what he says, but how he says it.

He could have said any number of vivid things which would have illustrated his point just as effectively. He could have said, for example, that people ,can be just as healthy living on Sardines as on caviar.

"It is time for our welfare program to be examined and much of it done away with. People will not starve to death, although their standard of living may not be sustained. We have two dogs at our home. They are big, beautiful Irish setters. The fellow who gave them to us is a dear friend who owns a supermarket. When he gave me the dogs, he told me what kind of meat they had to have and where I could buy it. The more he talked, the more I realized that I could not afford to keep the dogs, but when he left, I went up to the store and bought a big bag of brown nuggets, dumped them into two pans, and put them outside for the dogs. Sure enough, at first they would

what

she wants

not eat them, but four days later they did. They did not eat luxuriously, but they did eat."

With the phrase "brown nuggets" located as it is within a passage describing how Falwell wants poor people to be fed, many readers will draw their own conclusions from the fact that the phrase could be used just as easily to describe a pile of turds.

Marie Antoinette has been frowned upon for having expressed a glib and callous attitude towards the poor when she was told one time that many of them were without bread. The worst, however, that she has been quoted as saying is, "let them eat cake."

-R. Woodward

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The reluctance of many psychiatrists to stop regarding all gays as being mentally ill, has been the reluctance to give up what has long been one of American psychiatry's greatest investments.

In talking about what the word a new medical sounding word for he has invented signifies, Benthem, psychiatry gave itself a kert says in his pamphlet, "In vested interest in them just as addition to the normal sexual psychiatry was starting to urge in men and women, Nature develop as an industry. in her sovereign mood has endowed at birth certain male and female individuals with the homosexual urge, thus placing them in a sexual bondage which renders them physically and psychically incapable--even with the best intention--of normal erection. This urge creates in advance a direct horror of the opposite sex, and the victim of this passion finds it impossible to suppress the feelings which individuals of his own sex exert upon him."

Benkert's pamphlet is very hard to get a hold of, and this quotation from it was found in Homosexuality: A History by Vernon Bullough. Bullough gives no indication that anything has been lost in the translation.

By defining erotic contacts between members of the same sex and the urge to have such contacts as being the effects of "mental illness" and by inventing

Saying that millions of Americans (with various personalities). are all suffering from a mental disease means that psychiatrists should control what happens to them.

"Treating" homosexuality, and regularly suggesting to people that it might be "cured" (after only a few years of ongoing analysis, if you are lucky), has always been one of American psychiatry's greatest sources of revenue.

Next Month: A discussion of American psychiatry's double trauma, vehement rejection by many gays and the realization that having become a psychiatrist does not make you completely immune to self-delusion.

Bring slowly to a boil

If you heat the kettle slowly enough, it's been said, frogs die in lazy comfort. They just fall asleep.

Do you feel a little drowsy?

The Bible shouters are stoking up the fires. Especially here in Washington, D.C. This is the hot core which sends out heat across the country. It's where a change in national law can cook us all together.

Gay Rights National Lobby is at the center, rallying our friends in Congress to help put out the fires. We've had success-expanding support and co-sponsor-

ship of gay/lesbian civil rights bills. generating thousands of letters to Congress, fighting anti-gay bills such as the "McDonald Resolution" and the "Family Protection Act," and bringing together coalitions with other groups who also feel the danger. In

the Advocate, October 16, 1980, you can find an independent evaluation of our work: "On an absurdly low budget, GRNL is producing miracles. Imagine what they could do if we really supported them."

We ask again for your real support. The heat's on right now and we truly need your contributions. Please wake up. Let's not go like frogs.

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