OUR STRUGGLE
From
its very first day the debate over homosexuality in modern society has
been a struggle between the homophile movement and the religious
establishment. The other institutions of Western society —
the psychiatric and medical professions, the political parties, the
mass media, the state — have never had an independent
position but have simply split on the issue, some taking one side, some
the other.
In my
judgment this is the only framework for conceptualizing the history of
the past 127 years — since Karl Heinrich Ulrichs published
his first two pamphlets, Vindex and Inclusa, in January and February of
1864. It is not the schema in which most activists, or the followers of
Michel Foucault, place the events of that century and a quarter, but it
is nonetheless correct.
Why are so many, even committed activists, unable to see this simple
truth? First of all, there are enough homosexuals who cannot admit,
even to themselves, that the god whom they worship has rejected them
and exiled them from his kingdom — and after 2500 years is
not likely to reverse his judgment and recall them. And how could he do
so? Would he suddenly inform the media that he was holding a press
conference at St. Catherine's Monastery on Mount Sinai to announce a
major shift in policy? Barring that unlikely event, what argument would
convince the pious that the condemnation which Judaism and Christianity
have voiced since the first day of their existence has lost its
validity?
But even
the unbelievers have been hesitant to face this bitter truth, perhaps
fearing that to point the accusing finger would make the innocent
Church cry even more bitterly for punishment. It cannot be denied that
some within the religious establishment have supported the campaign for
gay rights — but their motives are more than questionable.
The dialogue within the churches over “gay
theology” has most often been in reality a monologue between
those one-fourth out of the closet and those three-fourths out of it.
The sincere combatants on both sides are well justified in seeing these
innovators as collaborationists of the sort whom the French, after the
Liberation, put up against a wall and shot. However, for purposes of
propaganda the publicists of our movement have often preferred to place
the blame on an abstract “prejudice” or
“intolerance” that everyone could interpret as he
wished.
Another, far
more widely held belief is the notion that about 1880 psychiatrists
“discovered” that “homosexuality was a
mental illness”. Foucault cites a paper by Carl Friedrich
Otto Westphal, “Die contraire Sexualempfindung:
Symptom eines neuropathischen (psychopathischen) Zustandes”,
Archiv für Psychiatrie, 2; 73-108 (1869),
but with three separate mistakes that prove he never held a copy of the
work in his hands. In fact, anyone who reads the paper to the end would
find that Westphal in no way claimed that all homosexual activity
resulted from mental illness, but only that there were isolated
individuals who engaged in it because of their abnormal mental state.
And this abnormality he recognized, not by virtue of his own
examination of his first patient, a lesbian admitted to the psychiatric
division of the Charité (the Allgemeine Krankenhaus
in Berlin) in May 1864, but as a consequence of reading Ulrichs'
pamphlets. Not one of the pioneer medical writers on homosexuality
“discovered” the phenomenon by virtue of his own
observation and reasoning; every one of them — Westphal in
Prussia, Krafft-Ebing in Austria, Bergh in Denmark — had
acquired his insight from Ulrichs.
Moreover, once medical authors began to discuss the matter, those who
voiced sympathy or at least neutrality were able to meet homosexuals in
everyday life, in their homes and places of work, and to conclude that
these were sane, lucid individuals who had nothing in common with the
catatonics and schizophrenics whom the physicians had from their days
in medical school observed in clinics and insane asylums. That is why,
less than a year and a half after Westphal's death, on 8 June 1891, the
pupils of Griesinger and Westphal at the Charité debated the
subject of homosexuality at a meeting of the Berlin Society for
Psychiatry and Nervous Diseases. Led by Friedrich Jolly, Westphal's
successor as head of the psychiatric division of the
Charité, as Professor of Psychiatry at the University of
Berlin, and as editor of Archiv fur Psychiatrie, they decided
unanimously that homosexuality could not be regarded as mental illness
on four grounds:
1.
There is no clouding of the consciousness or disturbance of the
rational mind;
2.
There is no irresistible impulse;
3. The subject has no delusion as to the character of his own sexual
organs or those of the partner;
4. The subject is aware that his sexual orientation differs from that
of the majority of the population.
In short, there
is no ground on which a court of law could rule that a homosexual
subject is not sane and competent, legally and morally responsible for
his actions. The discussion was subsequently reported by Paul Kronthal
in Neurologisches Centralblatt, 10: 378-379 (1891), but has been
forgotten even more completely than Westphal's original paper. The
Foucauldians in their fathomless ignorance have certainly never heard
of it.
The debate
over whether “homosexuality is a disease” during
the ensuing hundred years has therefore been a classic instance of
intellectual shadow-boxing. Close semantic analysis of scores of
psychoanalytic texts reveals that when the analysts angrily insist that
“homosexuality is a disease”, they in fact mean
depravity. That is why they never objected to any law or administrative
decision that deprived homosexuals of rights and liberties, but were
indignant when in 1957 the Wolfenden Report recommended repeal of the
archaic sodomy laws. Only then did they feel compelled to inform the
public that homosexuality was “a serious disease”
— for which ostracism and punishment are the best if not the
only therapy. The attempt to maintain the definition of homosexuality
as mental illness is simply a denial of the legitimacy of homosexual
activity — a repackaging of the moral condemnation in a
medical or scientific container that will make it more saleable to the
enlightened society of the late twentieth century. The psychoanalysts
were and are aware that they are not “curing”
anyone; they are merely siding with the religious establishment and
perpetuating the Judeo-Christian taboo in a new guise.
An honest confrontation with our opponents demands the unabashed
recognition of the theological source of the hostility to us and of the
continuing institutional basis of our oppression in contemporary
Western society. Dishonest evasions can lead only to a dead end, not to
the emancipation from medieval superstition and intolerance that is the
aim of our struggle.
Warren Johansson
15 June 1991