It's as if LGBTQ+ is now a real word, like YHWH, a New Covenant (minus the god bit). What was the real state of affairs that inspired this new/old ideology promising pansexual bliss?
Yes, McCarthyism and the firing of 15,000 teachers in the US. Up there in infamy with Stalin's show trials of the 1930s. In Canada, there was no equivalent red/ lavender scare (despite endless documentaries on TVO interviewing once oppressed, now liberated happy 'normal' Canadian gays).
Yes, the usual arrests for public acting out, public mischief/ indecency (which continue to this day, more high tech, so more discrete for law enforcement). The 1950s, especially in the US, was nasty for anyone who didn't believe you could survive nuclear war by hiding under your desk at school and then scurrying home to your own personal bomb shelter.
Trudeau sr famously defended the bill decriminalizing homosexual acts by telling reporters that 'there's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.' The full quote includes when it's public it's a different matter.
Contrast this with Trudeau jr, who improves on daddy, embracing gay liberation, gaylib. Justin's love of gays and other outliers extends to special laws persecuting anyone who doesn't believe 'gay is good', including parents, Christian colleges. In the US, it even went after a Jewish private school. (Trump's new Supreme Court backed off.) It is the new gospel in schools starting in junior public.
Pre-Stonewall stars
In frustration with the fawning celebration of homosexuality in mainstream discourse, I have been reading the literature on homosexuality from the pre-Stonewall days. I was surprised to find there are many worthwhile books and articles analyzing homosexuality. Clearly it had become mainstream since the 19th c, despite the sensationalism of Oscar Wilde.
As for persecution, it certainly didn't stop Andre Gide from snapping up a Nobel prize in literature, clearly the 'gay Nobel', for his 'fearless love of truth and keen psychological insight', i.e., his eloquent elaboration of the basics of gay liberation in Corydon. Gide was less pushy (in public) than Wilde and was never criticized or arrested, though his sex life was very busy.
Both were brilliant writers, openly gay when it was scandalous. Wilde was the blackguard, shouting his disgust with society in the courts in what remains the most eloquent expose of not so much the beauty, etc of gaydom, but just how irresponsible even a brilliant and beloved cultural figure can be. And to the detriment of all his 'tribe', who suffered for the next century from Wilde's reckless actions, even as homosexuals like E.M. Forster quietly went about writing great literature, being good citizens, plus all the less pretty activities that Wilde loved to a fault.
Gide was not impressed, writing coolly in his dairies about pimping in Tangiers for Wilde and his lover Douglas, who was more a spoiled aristo brat than a beauty (as Wilde found out soon enough). Classic gay soap opera. At this point in his life, Wilde had done literally everything. It's as if he was writing the last chapter, transforming his reality into the fairytale world he loved so much, a denouement for his The Happy Prince and Other Tales published in 1888. More classic gay ennui with the world. How to keep chugging along when you're getting old and less able to cavort.
Late 19th c homophile writers like Edward Carpenter, whose theory was 'inverts are a third sex', promoted homosexuality much as the gay movement and mainstream media does today, complete with socialist commune. The argument is: gays have been misunderstood. They suffer only because they face hostility and discrimination. They are harmless and should have our sympathy and support. And Hirschfield in Weimar Germany promoted lgbtq a century ago at his Institute of Sexology.
But even Carpenter was not happy with the effeminate, demonstrative gay. He wanted gays to emulate Walt Whitman, to see all men as brothers, lovers. I was always suspicious of Whitman, who did not fight in the civil war (good for him!), but spent months tending to dying soldiers of both sides, holding their hands, embracing, kissing, 'loving' them as they lay dying. Was that Florence Nightingale or a lecherous gay preying on innocent, desperate men?
There is no homosexuality
What really shocked me was the explanation by most sexologists, which was in contradiction to Freud's bisexuality and repression (see Cleckley below). Gay men are not having male-male sex, but are just reenacting the male-female hetero sex, with one partner flipping into the fantasy role of female, the other being the 'man' in the sense of the active role. But it is all fantasy, so ultimately unsatisfying. Hence, promiscuity. Always looking for the special (hetero) guy who will love the object as if he were a woman.
Hence, the gay chatter addressing other gays as 'she'. Hence, the gay gossip sharing details about a 'conquest' of a real man, etc. Hence, also the very solid fact that intense male friendships don't explode into passionate gay sex, despite that being the plot of THE Hollywood gay film, Brokeback Mountain.* Nice fantasy but definitely not reality, and if it very occasionally happens, it ends in disaster for everyone. The plot is one straight guy in a dull marriage, the other gay, who grooms his friend, gets laid, but the straight one breaks with the neurotic relation and the gay ends up murdered. Not a good recommendation to gaylibbers for how to find happiness.
The 'new' lgbtq theory emphasizing gender roles as determining your sex is just obfuscation. A step towards declaring an end to male-female duality, as if it is some kind of prison which nature/ god/ man is using to tyrannize woman-and-gays. End duality and the entire male playfield opens up, so the theory goes.
The revolution starts
WWI was a kind of boon to homosexuality. Manly virtues, vested in violent slaughter, wiped out a generation. Gay pacifism didn't look so bad after all. Europe never really recovered. Except loser Germany and the Soviet Union. Irving Kaufman's 1926 Masculine women! Feminine men! Which is the rooster? Which is the hen? It's hard to tell 'em apart today was a hit. Even the Soviet Union experimented with a new sexuality in the 1920s.
Anomaly, a (homosexual) British doctor, wrote Invert in 1927. It was a bestseller and he updated it in 1948. Anomaly's position is that homosexuals ideally should aim for celibacy or at the very least, discretion. It is, after all, a sin. They should not be persecuted, but have to behave responsibly to earn the respect of the straight world. No free ride. Not celebrated. It's no longer in the Toronto public library, not even on Amazon, long discarded in an age of gay liberation, where year zero is 1969. My sources here are several reviews at Internet Archive.
Contrast this with another bestseller of the 1920s, Rene Guyon's Sexual Freedom, volume 2 of 10 volumes (which is in the public library). Guyon was out to dump the 'old sexual regime', along with Wilhelm Reich and Magnus Hirschfeld. Guyon develops a sexology supposedly founded on natural law, 'going beyond dogmas'.
His theory is that anything can be a legitimate object of sexual arousal, that fetishes were perfectly normal and should be celebrated. All sex acts (except outright rape) are equally valid and should not be prosecuted. A kind of slash-and-burn of anything remotely sacred in the sex act. It's strictly mechanical. Love, like the soul, were part of the old regime. Freud's Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis (1920), where he casually states that all humans are bisexual, was clearly Guyon's inspiration along with the Marquis de Sade.
So the protagonists were in place. Conservatives like Anomaly and Cleckley vs Freud and Guyon. Things came to a head in WWII, which witnessed the genocide of gays in Germany, but for the Allies (except the Soviet Union), the explosion of gay sex as part of the loose wartime morals. WWII court martials of homosexuals increased 9x, from 48 to 324 from 1939 to 1944. In Britain, in 1954, John Gielgud was arrested in a public toilet and the sensational Montague Case opened, the trial of three upper class men whose private carousing with soldiers was exposed. Everyone was embarrassed.
The defends only wanted 'in private' removed from law, not to legalize public displays, not to encourage homosexuality. They criticized what was already the practice of psychiatrists to 'sentimentalize homosexuality, to downplay pedophilia.' but they were still found guilty, though only one guy 'fell', the young writer Peter Wildeblood, who wrote Against the law about his time in jail, a follow-up the next year A way of life, and went on to be a producer at BBC and CBC.
The Wolfenden Report followed the pathetic Inquisition in 1957, and went all out, declaring 'all gay is good', but it had to wait till US-Canada caught up in the late 1960s. London now vies with New York, Paris and Berlin for 'gay capital'.
So homosexuality was more or less acceptable even when it was being persecuted. The vaunted Stonewall was just acquiescence to what was already in place, like the sudden removal of marijuana from the narcotics list.
The really nasty hangover from the war was in the US, where homosexuality became the plaything of redneck politicians on the one hand, and pseudo-science with Kinsey's subversive Male sexual behavior in 1948. Kinsey was rightly criticized by Cleckley. The questions were crude and leading. A 12 yr old boys' mutual masturbation thinking of girls = transsexual giving head in an alley. The answers were all ... worthless.
Kinsey admits as much in a caveat. The sampling technique was to grab anyone who would like to talk about sex that the interviewers could find. Boasting, exaggeration, lying, depending on the mood of the interviewee, many of whom were openly gay and eager to project their fantasies to a real scientist!
The title should be What men Would Like to Think about Their Own Male Sexual Behavior'. It was a direct continuation of Guyon's mechanistic theory of sex, and Guyon's hit was republished in 1948 as Kinsey's sensational work hit the stands. All this in the supposedly dead 1950s in oppressive US.
The 'father of psychopathy', Hervey Cleckley, who treated many homosexuals, saw homosexuality as distorted sexuality. A disability in love. Something to be discouraged. If possible, healed; if not then Freud's 'tolerable unhappiness', which is all any of us can hope for anyway. Vs Guyon and Kinsey celebrating all sex as good (except rape). No illness. Full steam ahead. Social peace and good will. Guess who won?
Anti-Freud vs anti-gay
Cleckley's insightful criique of gaydom Franco bucked the gaylib tide with I am Michael
Hervey Cleckley, in Caricature of Love (1951, 1957 full text here) argues that all sex is hetero, even gay sex, but there, as a fantasy relation. I.e., the opposite of the idea made popular by Freud, that all people are bisexual and all males have some homosexual attraction if only unconsciously. That was always suspect to me. I taught Freud and explained this but 'unconsciously' I knew it was nonsense.
No. Cleckley got it right. The homosexual life style is a fantasy world of mirrors, shallow and brittle. Fetishistic by definition, as the sex object (if he is a homosexual) is despised. He must dress up, be transformed into the equally despised female for the duration of the male-male assignation. Maybe even physically transformed into a transwoman.
All sexual outliers live in a fantasy world, denying the obvious male-female nature of ... everything living, while forced to reenact it to find any sexual pleasure. In animals, when there is male-male sexual activity, it is always supporting the hetero mating reproductive cycle. In the case of baboons, the weaker male allies with one or more of the females for mutual protection against the alpha m. No confusion.
If we want to use nature for examples of homosexuality, we can infer a similar subordinate social role for homosexuality in humans. not only in scientific and personal terms, but in social, moral, and political terms as well. There are lots of things a nonreproductive male (drones for bees) can do. Work, play, education, health, culture ...
But there is a negative side to homosexuality. Its bad reputation. Much like Zionists put the onus for anti-semitism entirely on goy shoulders, gaylib insists 'homophobia' is solely the fault of straight bigotry, that homosexuality is nature and perfectly healthy. Squeaky clean. Yet on all measures of mental health, homosexuals come out badly – depression, suicide, drug abuse ...
If we start with 'all sex is hetero', what we see in homosexuality is a tortuous mimicry of heterosexuality. A quest for the opposite polarity -- but a quest in barren fields. A man who has lost both hands may, with his feet or toes, learn to write or play a musical instrument. An artificial leg is 'chosen' by a person who lost his real leg. Get the picture?
Cleckley is convinced that homosexuality is a neurosis. Someone whose attachment with his mother was malevolent for whatever reason. An overprotective or humiliating mother during the crucial years in sexual development can paralyze the boy, making normal relations with women problematic. Two thirds of gays experienced child abuse, and it can be mental as well as physical, the mother as much as the father. Science has yet to show anything remotely genetic about homosexuality.
Given his raging hormones by age 13, the boy is forced to 'attach' (like a duckling) either by revulsion against sister-mother, or by grooming by an older brother-father, to the only alternative, his boyhood friend, however wrong, horrifying that is to him. Beginning the cycle of love-hate-love-hate that makes life at best a rollercoaster, at worst, a living hell. A boy raped has hate and fear built into sex. If he is groomed into homosexuality then that becomes his sexuality, unless he resists.
There are many roads to homosexuality. It's wrong to either condemn or approve of it in general. But its dark side never goes away. Psychiatrist Walter Alvarez author of Homosexuality (1967), was very supportive of civil rights for gays in the 1950-60s, even writing a 'Dear Abby' column for One, the homophile journal. He spoke at Mattachine Society meetings. At one, he surveyed the audience. Most looked normal, 10% were effeminate, 10% mentally disturbed.
That could be the 'gay scene' in a nutshell, most being gay from neuroses, some worse than others, with a small but noisy effeminate/ trans Gay Pride crowd getting all the attention. Perhaps rightly, as those are the bread-and-butter homosexuals, the ones truly 'born that way'.
The cure that dares not speak its name
So are some of those 80% redeemable, Alvarez was no doubt asking himself? The tragedy is that now it is illegal to even talk about 'conversion therapy', which got a bad name as a result of American evangelical rednecks in the south forcing their kids to stop being gay or else. Of course a rebellious teen forced to do anything will ... rebel. There are many feel-good films exposing the conversion centres and the treatments, mostly fraudulent. But where the mainstream openly serves the gay agenda, it is very difficult to know what a balanced view might be or to hear about genuine successes.
But just as the mature gay dream is to score the straight man, the immature, unsure gay dream is to be straight, to be Clark Gable and live happily ever after. Loud condemnation now greets the very idea of a gay wanting to be straight and willing to do something about it. But it is indeed possible. British-American poet Stephen Spender politely withdrew from his 1930s circle of gay poets, including Auden and Isherwood, married and had a family. Not easy and not for all. But in a truly free, democratic society, the option should be there. The whole question in Canada is moot, as Trudeau jr made the first law passed in 2022 the anti-conversion law.
The success stories documented in the 1950-60s were subjects who really wanted to change, and who found really good therapists in a supportive environment. There were different therapeutic approaches in the 1950-60s, using chemical emetics, electroshock, or estrogen, treatments that are still widely used for addiction and depression. A 1960 study by Czech psychiatrist Kurt Freund found half of the patients had some improvement. It was followed up 5 years later. 25% more or less were permanently straight, apparently happily married.
Another case is documented at the British Medical Journal in 1962, when the positive interest in the therapy was at its high. I.e., before Stonewall. But convicted pedophiles forced by the courts to undergo the unpleasant, unwanted treatment, had no effect for both aversion and estrogen. Vs If voluntary - 25%.
Freund conducted his treatment in communist Czechoslovakia, publishing his findings in Homosexuality in man in east Germany in 1962. He left Czechoslovakia in 1968 and worked at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto. Interestingly, influenced by the already gay positive atmosphere in the West, he eventually rejected these experiments despite having had some success.
He wasn't able to reverse engineer a complete conversion, but he was able to bring half the patients to some normal straight sexual arousal and activity. I.e., half became bisexual. Is Freund's glass of water half empty or half full? He successfully lobbied the Czechoslovakian and east German governments to decriminalize homosexuality in 1962. No fanfare. He still considered homosexuality a pathology, but advised his patients to make peace with their sexual orientation, and focused his work on pedophiles as the more serious problem.
Franco - gay in my art and straight in my life
The best (only?) 'cure' is religion. Michael Glatze was a glamor boy gay activist in the 1970s, happy living as a couple, suddenly lost interest in the movement, and converted to the very pentecostal Christianity that was the object of his campaigning. James Franco pushed the film project of Glatze's remarkable journey, and starred in the 2015 film I am Michael. The gay crowd was not happy and the docudrama disappeared, panned as 'boring'. i.e., not following the right script, pressing the right buttons. We've all heard Mormon jokes about horny young missionaries sowing wild oats in France, returning to shock therapy. Much more fun than boring stories of religion actually creating a real, live, unsexy miracle.
His earlier The broken tower (2011) about Hart Crane, this time a tormented gay poet, had made Franco the sweetheart of the gay crowd. Clearly he admires gay culture, and Glatze's story must have hit him viscerally. When pressed on are-you-gay?, he shot back: In the twenties and thirties, they used to define homosexuality by how you acted and not by whom you slept with. Sailors would fuck guys all the time, but as long as they behaved in masculine ways, they weren't considered gay. Well, I like to think that I'm gay in my art and straight in my life. I.e., I can only wish the same for you guys.
If gay is so good, then why would a survey of gay couples find only 2% wanted a gay son? Many gays as they age feel bitter, that they've living an erzatz life, have missed out on so much. Hatred of women, no family, shallow friends or no friends. How can anyone not see the second rate nature of this lifestyle? Before it was the love you dare not admit to. Now it's the disability you dare not admit is a disability. To feel indifferent to beauty that most people relish. Not to experience the innocent, balanced, spiritual intimacy of normal sex. To lust after the impossible, like Sisyphus carrying his rock each day, the same old – forever. A life sentence of mindless rutting.
If you have a disability, you don't whine and complain about discrimination. OK, you can do that a bit, but then you have to do something to make it better. Become straight? If only. Spend your life cruising, chalking up scores, Sisyphus-style? Why not channel some or all that sexual energy into studies, creativity? Put your suffering to work. Maybe even figure out why you are what you are. There are many ways out of the prison.
And pederasty is very much a gay fantasy, which is perhaps the subtext to Franco's cool riposte to PinkNews (not to mention Freund's career switch). The Boy Scouts and Catholic priests scandals must have shaken Franco, whose charitable work is with mentally disturbed children (Art of Elysium). Gay child molesters finally brought down the Boy Scouts, and blackened the church forever for many devout Catholics. Not harmful? Not into little boys? In a US study, 10% of convicted child molesters were gay vs 5% gays in the population. So if you're gay, you're twice as likely to be a molester. Not part of Kinsey's upbeat 'survey'.
Willful perversity?
What I like about this era of theorizing is that it was a genuine debate, truly exploring the nitty-gritty honestly, not tip-toeing and afraid to expose the ugly side of psychiatric experience treating neurotics who just happened to be homosexual. Cleckley has some racy tales of wild acting out of variations on the gay quest for the opposite polarity. Freund did his experiments but eventually rejected them, despite his successes. Others keep at it.
And many (possibly gay) guys simply fight off the attempt to add sex to their play with other boys, who never seem to get Freud's definition of friendship as instincts-inhibited-in-aims. Freund and others have shown you can at least make it to bisexuality, which is a big improvement over hating women. Glatze is the poster child for religious conversion. Thank you, James and Michael for your courage in challenging gaylib.
Imagine the agony of a normal looking guy, attractive to girls, but not attracted to them. On the contrary, he is terrified of them, prefers to be alone with his fantasies, look for the slightest approval from the jock in the room. Willful perversity? No. Unwillful perversity. From the outside, he looks pathetic, stupid. On the inside, tortured. Trapped for whatever reason, 'his wires crossed', as Tab Hunter puts it in his memoirs about the 1950-60s. He had no use for gay liberation, preferring a quasi-closet, as closed as possible. Why ruin you private life with gossip, not to mention public life, especially the catty gay sniping and craving for a real man?
What happened after Auschwitz for both Jews and gays was that it was their turn now to dictate the world order, be it in Palestine or in gay capitals like San Francisco, New York, London. So we have Israel as the Jews' revenge for Hitler. And we have gay liberation dominating the 'collective West' in its Gay Pride Months and Politically Correct discourse, not to mention hormone replacement 'therapy' for kiddies who 'decide' they're not who they are. That's willful perversity.
Sincere warnings from Anomaly, Cleckley, Freund, Walter Alvarez and many more were lost in the easy, new atmosphere of the 1960s love-in, where newly 'liberated' women and gays were encouraged to act out their fantasies with men, reaching an apotheosis in the 1970s, floating in an ocean of fantasy, fueled by drugs.
The result of a decade, 10 riotous years, of gay promiscuity? AIDS. But that was blamed on a monkey virus, not the airline steward, patient zero, who brought it to hundreds of sex partners in the US and elsewhere. No worries. Science solved that. Just like penicillin for syphilis and gonorrhea, which didn't actually solve anything.
(Gay) British journalist Douglas Murphy's The madness of crowds (2019 full text here) comes to the same conclusion. The gay lifestyle is socially destructive. Desire is unlimited, so if there are no limits, promiscuity, chaos become the new norms. Vs a society based on the family with the gay as an acceptable complement.
Murphy too advocates at least the option of conversion. Now all gay counseling is automatically 'supportive', not challenging, open, probing, looking for childhood traumas that can be healed. Murphy quotes a detransitioner: to say I was born in the wrong body was a very egocentric view of things. Now I look at what I need to do to be content in my body, not change it.
Murphy was determined to watch a censored film that promoted voluntary conversion, but it was cancelled at the last minute under lgbtq pressure. He finally watched Voices of the silenced (2018), now available on Youtube, as did I. Not a great film, but then it was made more or less underground. Again, success stories few but real. One quote that struck me: This whole manhood thing feels a lot better than sex with men. How sad that the mechanical faux sex of gays is celebrated more than genuine male-male friendship and connection, which is open to gays who can keep from spoiling it. Bromances like The Shawshank Redemption, even adventure films like Top Gun, tales of friendship and male bonding, have much more to say about maleness than Call me by your name.
Joe Nicolosi's Reparative Therapy of Male Homosexuality: A New Clinical Approach (1991) describes homosexuality as 'gender identity deficit' caused by alienation from, and perceived rejection by, formative individuals of the subject's gender which interrupts normal masculine or feminine identification process. Adaptation to gender trauma during formative years could alienate a child from their 'fundamental nature'. His goal was to restore 'that which functions in accordance with its biological design.' He had successes from gays tired of being prisoners to a treadmill of empty, dangerous sex. So much so that California banned all conversion therapy forcing Nicolosi's patients to stop normal psychiatric treatment. At the same time boys who think they might be girls are treated with hormones and 'affirmed' and prepared for the knife.
And the bottom-line cure? Self-awareness, if you're stuck being gay, laugh at your fetishes, see them as coping mechanisms, taking the neurotic, addictive edge away. The obsessive nature of gay sex just makes it another addiction. For predatory gays, less sex is better for everyone concerned. When the fetishes, addictions lose their power, with some cognitive therapy, you can change. Surely that's worth it, whether you just bring the addiction under control or actually free yourself from it.
Become a little less gay.
xxx
*The gay roles played by straight stars, burnishing their acting careers.
See also Essays on Gaylib and Feminism ebook by Eric Walberg
