The Open Mind

A REVIEW OF THREE PROGRAMS

In lato 1956 and early 1957 television station WRCA-TV in New York City presented three panel discussions on various phases of homosexuality on the program "The Opon Mind".

These three programs were tape recorded by members of the Mattachine Society in New York and presented at the Mattachine convention last September in San Francisco.

The following review of this significant step in the growth of American television is by THE LADDER's Los Angeles correspondent, Sten Russell. -ED.

I--"Introduction of Problem of Homosexuality"

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Aug. 4, 1956.

Panel consisted of Florence Kelley, attorney; R.W. Laidlaw, psychologist; Dr. (Dean) August Swift, clergyman, and the moderator. Mr. Laidlaw said that homosexuality was not a clinical entity but covered a broad range of human experience...that it was a continuum wherein one might find persons ranging all the way from those being almost completely heterosexual to those completely homosexual... that there was an estimated 4% of the male population who were exclusively homosexual. He said that an estimated 37%-50% of the male population had had at least one homosexual experience during adolescence or afterwards.

Miss Kelley felt that the 37%-50% statistics quoted above didn't prove much, that such rare experiences only signified experimentation. Taking the matter from the legal end, Miss Kelley said that New York was less primitive than some other states but that the law still did nowhere reflect the extended knowledge and understanding gained on the matter by psychiatry.

Laidlaw stated that there were constitutional factors (predisposition to homosexual experience), environmental factors and psychological factors involved in the causes of homosexual behavior.

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