Rigid
gender beliefs usually flourish in fundamentalist, religious communities where
any information or alternative explanations that might challenge implicit and
explicit assumptions are unwelcome. When entering the realms of gender and
sexuality, it is not unusual to encounter another form of binary thinking:
“morality tales” about whether certain kinds of thoughts, feelings, or
behaviors are “good or bad” or, in some cases, whether they are “good or evil”
[14–16]. The good/bad binary is not confined to religion alone, as the language
of morality is inevitably found, for example, in theories about the “causes” of
homosexuality.
For much of Western history, official pronouncements on the
meanings of same-sex behaviors were primarily the province of religions, many
of which deemed homosexuality to be morally “bad” [36]. However, as 19th
century Western culture shifted power from religious to secular authority,
same-sex behaviors, like other “sins,” received increased scrutiny from the
law, medicine, psychiatry, sexology, and human rights activism. Eventually,
religious categories like demonic possession, drunkenness, and sodomy
were transformed into the scientific categories of insanity, alcoholism,
and homosexuality.
Thus,
the modern history of homosexuality usually begins in the mid-19th century,
most notably with the writings of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs [21]. Trained in law,
theology, and history, he might be considered an early gay rights advocate who
wrote a series of political tracts criticizing German laws criminalizing same
sex relationships between men. He hypothesized that some men were born with a
woman’s spirit trapped in their bodies and that these men constituted a third
sex he named urnings. He also defined a woman who we would today
call a lesbian as urningin, a man’s spirit trapped in the body of a
woman.
Freud
saw expressions of adult homosexual behavior as caused by “arrested”
psychosexual development, a theory of immaturity. Toward the end of his life,
Freud wrote “Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be
ashamed of, no vice, no degradation; it cannot be classified as an illness; we
consider it to be a variation of the sexual function, produced by a certain arrest
of sexual development” [39], (p. 423). This belief made him pessimistic about
efforts to change a homosexual orientation to a heterosexual one: “In general,
to undertake to convert a fully developed homosexual into a heterosexual does
not offer much more prospect of success than the reverse, except that for good
practical reasons the latter is never attempted”
As psychiatrists, physicians, and psychologists tried to
“cure” homosexuality, sex researchers of the mid-20th century instead studied a
wider spectrum of individuals that included non-patient populations.
Psychiatrists and other clinicians drew conclusions from a skewed sample of
patients seeking treatment for homosexuality or other difficulties and then
wrote up their findings of this self-selected group as case reports. Some
theories about homosexuality were based on studies of prison populations.
Sexologists, on the other hand, did field studies in which they went out and
recruited large numbers of non-patient subjects in the general population.
The most important research in this area was that of Alfred
Kinsey and his collaborators, published in two headline-generating reports
[22,23]. The Kinsey reports, surveying thousands of people who were not
psychiatric patients, found homosexuality to be more common in the general
population than was generally believed, although his now-famous “10%” statistic
is today believed to be closer to 1%–4% [46]. This finding was sharply at odds
with psychiatric claims of the time that homosexuality was extremely rare in
the general population. Ford and Beach’s [47] study of diverse cultures and of
animal behaviors, confirmed Kinsey’s view that homosexuality was more common
than psychiatry maintained and that it was found regularly in nature. In the
late 1950s, Evelyn Hooker [24], a psychologist, published a study Behav.
Sci. 2015, 5 570 in
which she compared psychological test results of 30 gay men with 30
heterosexual controls, none of whom were psychiatric patients. Her study found
no more signs of psychological disturbances in the gay male group, a finding
that refuted psychiatric beliefs of her time that all gay men had severe
psychological disturbances.
[I]f homosexuality was no
longer considered an illness, and if one did not literally accept biblical
prohibitions against it, and if gay people are able and prepared to function as
productive citizens, then what is wrong with being gay? Additionally, if there
is nothing wrong with being gay, what moral and legal principles should the
larger society endorse in helping gay people openly live their lives?
The result, in many countries,
eventually led, among other things, to (1) the repeal of sodomy laws that
criminalized homosexuality; (2) the enactment of laws protecting the human
rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people in society and
the workplace; (3) the ability of LGBT personnel to serve openly in the
military; (4) marriage equality and civil unions in an ever growing number of
countries; (5) the facilitation of gay parents’ adoption rights; (6) the easing
of gay spouses’ rights of inheritance; and (7) an ever increasing number of religious
denominations that would allow openly gay people to serve as clergy.
