Times do change and a post at Talk About Equality looks at an article from Time Magazine published 45 years ago when I was 14 years old. Reading the original piece which can be found here, it explains why so many gays my age and older did everything possible to not be gay and bought much more easily into the religious brainwashing that the Christianists and Catholic and Mormon Churches still shamelessly disseminate caring nothing about the severe damage they do to young LGBT individuals. Thankfully, medical and mental health knowledge has moved on and the views of homosexuality being a "sickness" have died - that is outside of the money grubbing, control seeking and guilt/hate merchants of the religious right. This change in understanding of sexual orientation to me explains why so many gays and lesbians who once married and tried to be straight have come out after failing to achieve the impossible. I know, because I am one of the many. I do not actively recall reading the article, but since we subscribed to Time at home for many years, it is likely I did see it and read it. Here are highlights from the Talk About Equality piece followed by the batshitery that passed as legitimate knowledge 45 years ago:*
45 years ago this week, Time Magazine published a 2-page essay titled “The Homosexual in America.” As you would imagine, the ideas presented in the article would now be considered arcane, but in order to understand the strides we have made as individuals and as a community – we must consider our history. We cannot move forward without understanding how far we have come in a relatively very-short period of time.
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This article was written when my father was 20 years old and certainly these ideas were part of the norm opinion of Americans at that time. In reading this essay, one must do one’s best in trying to understand society’s impressions of homosexuality at the time. We were hated, but we were starting to become visible. It’s clear in the article that we had become noticed – specifically within the artistic fields.
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We are alive now, at a time when our voices are being heard, when our friends and family have become increasingly supportive and embracing of who we are. We live in a time where our actions can create more and more change. I ask you all to go read the whole article and show it to others. Tell your friends and family just how far we have come and encourage them to make change in their own communities.
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The following are highlights from the 1966 article that some may find shocking give the changed knowledge of today outside of reactionary religious and societal groups (warning: it reads like something Scott Lively or Peter LaBarbera might write):
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IT used to be "the abominable crime not to be mentioned." Today it is not only mentioned; it is freely discussed and widely analyzed. Yet the general attitude toward homosexuality is, if anything, more uncertain than before. Beset by inner conflicts, the homosexual is unsure of his position in society, ambivalent about his attitudes and identity—but he gains a certain amount of security through the fact that society is equally ambivalent about him. A vast majority of people retain a deep loathing toward him, but there is a growing mixture of tolerance, empathy or apathy.
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Homosexuals are present in every walk of life, on any social level, often anxiously camouflaged; the camouflage will sometimes even include a wife and children, and psychoanalysts are busy treating wives who have suddenly discovered a husband's homosexuality. But increasingly, deviates are out in the open, particularly in fashion and the arts.
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The notion that the arts are dominated by a kind of homosexual mafia—or "Homintern," as it has been called—is sometimes exaggerated, particularly by spiteful failures looking for scapegoats. But in the theater, dance and music world, deviates are so widespread that they sometimes seem to be running a kind of closed shop. Art Critic Harold Rosenberg reports a "banding together of homosexual painters and their nonpainting auxiliaries."
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[T]his raises the question of whether there is such a thing as a discernible homosexual type. Some authorities, notably Research Psychologist Evelyn Hooker of U.C.L.A., deny it—against what seems to be the opinion of most psychiatrists. The late Dr. Edmund Bergler found certain traits present in all homosexuals, including inner depression and guilt, irrational jealousy and a megalomaniac conviction that homosexual trends are universal. Though Bergler conceded that homosexuals are not responsible for their inner conflicts, he found that these conflicts "sap so much of their inner energy that the shell is a mixture of superciliousness, fake aggression and whimpering. Like all psychic masochists, they are subservient when confronted by a stronger person, merciless when in power, unscrupulous about trampling on a weaker person."
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The once widespread view that homosexuality is caused by heredity, or by some derangement of hormones, has been generally discarded. The consensus is that it is caused psychically, through a disabling fear of the opposite sex. The origins of this fear lie in the homosexual's parents. The mother—either domineering and contemptuous of the father, or feeling rejected by him—makes her son a substitute for her husband, with a close-binding, overprotective relationship. Thus, she unconsciously demasculinizes him.
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Who in their right mind raised in a conservative area under conservative religious influences would not have been traumatized to realize that they were gay? Needless to say, I contemplated suicide often in my teens and early 20's. Yet today this same poison continues to be peddled by self-congratulatory and false Christians.
