aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Thursday, December 29, 2005
A dinosaur dies
A runaway still in Hbg, PA in 1973, I went to a psychiatry clinic and cried, “I’m a homosexual, please fix me.” The psychiatrist answered, “Why do you think you need fixing?”
Dumb luck Good fortune had me sitting with a founder of New York City’s Identity House, an organization set up in 1971 to find therapists who knew even then that homosexuality was a normal, healthy human expression, not a “neurotic adaptation.”
A well-known psychiatrist who championed the latter view in a half-dozen books and as a frequent guest on news and talks shows died this week.
His name was Charles Socarides, and his main contribution to the psychoanalytic literature was to assert that fathers induced homosexuality in their own sons in the first months of a baby’s life. His own son, Richard, of course, turned out to be gay - not only gay, but the Clinton administration’s liaison to the gay community. His father’s views long predate his own son’s emotional development, so the irony is exquisite, if not at all unique. (The number of passionate anti-gay activists with gay offspring - from Phyllis Shlafly to Alan Keyes - is almost surreally long.) [...] All but fringe psychiatrists and psychologists disown Socarides’ theories today - but they have political salience because of the Christian right’s control of the Republican party. In fact, it’s important to note that Socarides’ work, among other psychoanalysts, is the intellectual basis of the “Christian” “ex-gay” movement - one of those rare moments when Christians have had to rely on the atheism of Freud. By all intellectual means necessary, I guess.
Socarides, author of “Homosexuality: A Freedom Too Far,” was free to marry four times (and divorce three). In my recent post, Yeah, that’ll help, James Dobson quotes an acolyte on how to keep your son from becoming a homosexual:
Meanwhile, the boy’s father has to do his part. He needs to mirror and affirm his son’s maleness. He can play rough-and-tumble games with his son, in ways that are decidedly different from the games he would play with a little girl. He can help his son learn to throw and catch a ball. He can teach him to pound a square wooden peg into a square hole in a pegboard. He can even take his son with him into the shower, where the boy cannot help but notice that Dad has a penis, just like his, only bigger.
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