The oppressed, as they find their strength, may see there are two truths—usually unrelated—that their cause embodies. The first is the morality of their oppressed state and the factual falsifications told by one side (or the other) in order to remove (or maintain) an oppression; the first truth will be that the oppression is evil (or good). The oppressed are always the victims of definitions.
The second truth—the search for reality (scientific method)—we can put aside for the moment while we touch on the first—one’s conviction that one’s cause is righteous. The homosexual’s stance is made more honorable, or at least more poignant, by the public’s cruelty. In fact, there would be no diagnosis of homosexuality— only the myriad forms of homosexual behavior would be recognized—if the bigotry of the righteous did not force the belief (shared even by homosexuals) that a distinct essence—homosexuality—exists.
Some of society’s hatred for sexuality is unwarranted because unprovoked, such as its concern over which orifices of which sex are used. This hatred is mostly our cultural heritage. But another part, having little to do with the homosexual act of intercourse, the homosexual (usually male) provokes by conscious design; he contributes—he even enjoys contributing—to his own oppression. For multiple, complicated reasons, many homosexuals are committed to clowning, mimicry, caricature, whenever an audience—heterosexual or homosexual—is present. An ingredient of these performances is sarcasm—hostility—in which there is a joke: “When I seem to be making fun of myself, I am actually making fun of the straight world—with the additional bonus that they are too dumb even to know what I am doing to them.”
Although it is true the public does not know quite what is being done to it, it cannot help but sense that it is being toyed with; so it gets angry and charges its tormentor like a bull. That attack may damage the homosexual, but even as he is hurt, he also feels superior, because he is not a bull—a blind, stupid animal. Rather, he is an aesthete—a tweaker, not a charger.
Many homosexuals learned these and other methods of coping from the skirmishes lost in childhood to their parents. Some homosexuals are defeated mostly by their blackmailing mothers, with their fathers simply supplying a passive idiocy; that could hardly encourage a son to emulate such a father. Others, brutalized by rage-blurred fathers, run away and hide themselves inside the guise of their wretched mothers’ mannerisms. (These two examples are not meant to explain the origins of homosexual behavior, although I do think factors like these, plus many more, can contribute.) In any case, there is plenty of cause for revenge, which, I believe, energizes aspects of many homosexuals’ behavior, erotic and otherwise. And thus, in order to salvage a sense of value from foci of despair, they must strike back at all who have qualities like the old enemies of their childhood. These mechanisms, though in different forms and degrees, may be found in nonhomosexuals as well; masochism is not the domain only of homosexuals. Once again, I do not offer these ideas as full explanations.
Three mechanisms used by homosexuals that provoke volleys of hatred fired at them by the straights are:
1. Homosexuals transfer hatred directed originally at parents onto parent surrogates in society—and the surrogates strike back.
2. Homosexuals, taught self-hatred in childhood, persist in attracting punishment because in part they agree with the cruel straight society; they provoke attack in order to be humiliated.
3. Homosexuals can threaten the heterosexual stance of the militant straight, bullying him with insight into his own homosexual or effeminate potentials. To prove himself, the heterosexual may retaliate.
These dynamics of hostility are, I believe, characteristic of male more than of female homosexuality. For instance, one does not see much mimicry in the masculine behavior of females,* but it is an essential part of the effeminacy of males. It is generally believed that female homosexuality has for millennia been ignored by cultures because women were beneath each society’s contempt—and concern. That may not be all; women homosexuals, less openly raucous and hostile toward their oppressors than most homosexual men, draw down on themselves little attack. Or at least that was the case until recently.
To return from our detour: the first truth, then, is the immorality of oppression. The second truth, less important in the crises of the oppressed, is, I believe, nonetheless also a social cause that, over the long haul, has its own rightful importance. It is the scientific method, a beautifully constructed set of rules—and a dependable conscience for each researcher and his own corruptible conscience—that guides the effort to find facts. It (though not necessarily a particular scientist) represents a larger truth: that honesty has long-term social value for mankind and must be protected, encouraged, and taught and its methodology forever refined. The process of
•Is this related to the female's knowing she is a female like her mother?
diagnosis in medicine—a process of detection—is a piece of this scientific method. And so we look for etiology.
In the search for the multiple causes of homosexual behavior, data can be found demonstrating that, for many homosexuals, their preferences in object choice and some of their essential, habitual nonerotic behavior (such as the effeminacy of male homosexuals) were developed as the result of trauma and frustration during childhood. These observations also hold for most heterosexuals, though the traumas and frustrations are of different sorts and intensities.
If one divides humans into two types, heterosexuals and others, as is the custom, we can sort the two in the following idiosyncratic manner (rather as Freud did): the sexual habits of most humans, including most who prefer homosexual relations, are heterosexual. (Heterosexuality may of course also contain homosexuality.) The erotic neuroses—the obvious perversions and even most variations of overt heterosexuality, such as compulsive promiscuity, use of pornography, preference for prostitutes, and adult masturbation—are heterosexual distortions, compromises, filled nonetheless with excitement, that allow one to give up certain desires if only others can be salvaged. If it makes the oppressed minorities more comfortable, we can all be given a diagnosis; such a pronouncement would certainly not often distort the case. Everyone has his own style or distinctive fantasy that he daydreams or stages with objects; everyone is entitled to a category.
But why claim that heterosexuality is mankind’s preference? Many maintain that heterosexuality is the biologically natural state in man: first, because it is so in all other species, and second, because only it can prevent the species from dying out. Yet there is no direct evidence for this biological propensity in man other than the seemingly overwhelming fact that most people are, more or less, heterosexual. While there is no reason to deny there may be some such biological tendency, we know that psychological events can so often overthrow this latent heterosexuality that considering it biologically fixed is a weak foundation on which to build a theory or a society. Perhaps an even stronger force pressing toward heterosexuality in humans is the make-up of the family, which may have been invented, not because of biological heterosexuality, but for life-and-death realities that have plagued existence to the present. As personal safety and comfort increase, some sense that the next casualty after God may be the family.
In saying that the family is more effective in promoting heterosexuality than any biological urge, I mean the following. Every child knows that he is the product of an inevitably heterosexual act that is intimate, exciting, mysterious, astonishing, profound, dangerous, forbidden, and terribly desirable; and every family—even those whose failure produces severe disorder in the child immersed in it—unendingly blankets its offspring with messages that the ideal would be a heterosexual family. However restrictive the myth of heterosexuality may be, however much sex militants hate it, and however bitter people are at how far its reality has fallen below perfection, heterosexuality with love—affection, respect, honesty, decreased selfishness, long-lasting erotic interest and lustful gratification, fidelity, joy in children, and creation of a unit larger and more original than the two people making it up—is the criterion. This is so not because it is ordained so by heaven, biology, or economic theory but because almost all members of our society accept it somewhere within themselves as the ideal that haunts them.