Page 2
University Daily Kansan
Friday, May 15, 1964
Contemporary Scene:
Homosexuality
(Editor's note: The following article was written by Robert Lindner, the author of "Must You Conform?" "The Fifty-Minute Hour," "Rebel Without a Cause," and "Prescription for Rebellion." The article was first published in Crux, an editorial news sheet sponsored by six campus church groups.)
Many people believe that since the close of World War I, at least sex attitudes and behavior reveal a radical and progressive change. Among the examples they usually employ to document this belief they offer the homosexual and what they describe as a novel and more healthy social disposition toward him.
No longer a pariah, a despised and castoff subman whose sexual proclivities are to be regarded with disgust and whose person is to be avoided, he is, so these enthusiasts tell us "accepted, tolerated and understood."
I, FOR ONE, DO not believe that we are in the midst of or have even begun to have a sexual revolution. The evidence that confronts me daily is all to the contrary. Despite the open sale of contraceptives, and the Bikini bathing suit, I and most of my colleagues in psychoanalysis still find the situation as regards sex repressive. Fundamental attitudes seem not to have altered significantly, certainly not since the middle of the nineteenth century. The same fears persist and the same fictions prevail.
For us and for all others who deal intimately with people, the popularization of sex and the appearance of liberalism in attitude and behavior represent little more than flourishing defenses, reaction formations, rationalizations, denials, against deeply embedded conflicts between the erotic instincts and the imperatives of a sex-denying culture.
WITH RESPECT TO homosexuality, I again differ from those who celebrate an era of sexual enlightenment. My difference . . . is founded on the observation that when the veneer of our contemporary system of defenses against the age-old conflict over sex is stripped away, there is to be discovered the same hostility for the invert and his way of life and the same abhorrence of him as a person that have been traditional in Western society.
That we now employ such terms as "sick" or "maladjusted" to the homosexual appears to me to make little difference so far as basic attitudes and feelings are concerned. As a matter of fact I suggest that precisely these designations reveal the ugly truth of our actual animus toward homosexuals and the sham of modern social-sexual pretensions . . .
THE DEFINITION OF homosexuality which appears most satisfactory . . . is the one which . . . considers homosexuality a term applicable only to those individuals who more or less chronically feel an urgent sexual desire toward and a sexual responsiveness to members of their own sex, and who seek gratification of this desire predominantly with members of their own sex. Now, this is a
definition which covers, as far as one can see, all the available psychological, biological, and social facts available to us about homosexuality.
It avoids confusing degree of fulfillment with degree of desire . . . It concentrates on those who harbor intrasex desires but eliminates those who obtain gratification of less specific sexuality through intrasex activity . . . It places inversion in the perspective where it belongs; as an attitude basic to the personality where in it resides, as a compulsion with all the urgency and driving energy that account for its persistence despite the obvious disadvantages of homosexuality as a way of life.
OF ALL THE ACTIVITIES of human beings those connected with the exercise of the sexual apparatus have been subject to the most intensive efforts at regulation. . Historically it is to be noted that the government of the erotic life is among the primary requisites for the establishment of human communities and that the chief business of most if not all of the agencies that dominate the collections of men we call societies is the control of the sexual instincts...
Various societies have had varying attitudes toward sex, ranging from almost unlimited permissiveness to absolute, uncompromising dominance over the functions and apparatus involved. Our own Western Christian Civilization (Toynbee's designation), basing itself on Judaic morality has tended toward the repressive side. It has stigmatized the erotic component of human nature as base and had traditionally regarded everything connected with the sexual instincts with abhorrence.
PERHAPS EVEN MORE than any previous great civilization, it can be viewed as sex-denying. As it crystallized into its present sociopolitical form it increased its regulatory demands over the erotic life, constraining it in ever-narrowing channels. Prohibition after prohibition has been piled upon that aspect of existence, culminating in the present tragic crisis wherein the instincts of men are in perpetual conflict with the imperatives of their society...
It is in the framework of the foregoing that homosexuality becomes understandable and its genetics clear. Given this picture of a sex-rejective, sex-repressive society, inversion must be, and I am personally convinced after intensive study of the problem and experience with homosexuals that it is a pattern of sex orientation adopted by certain individuals as their solution to the conflict between the urgency of the sexual instincts and the repressive efforts brought to bear upon sexual expression by the reigning sex morality.
The condition is, then, in essence, a reaction of nonconformity, a rebellion of the personality that seeks to find, and discovers a way in which to obtain expression for the confined erotic drives.
The People Say . . .
The Great Mid-Road
Editor:
After so much talk in the form of letters, laws, and pickets, for the down-trodden minorities, and against the nasty white, middle-class, Protestant, a tiny peep may be allowed in print in favor of that controversial ethnic. There is something in the white middle-class, Protestant creed that makes our position hard to defend verbally, against the onslaught of left and right wing fire. We do not speak out often—perhaps not often enough for our own good. We know that the best way is to listen. Just because we are not out yelling slogans for peace, or carrying banners for equality, does not mean we don't care about the basic freedoms of our country. We have long been the backbone of this country. Who minds the store while the Liberals picket and the Conservatives talk?
The middle path on which we walk, is often mistaken for indecision and lethargy. It need not be. There is some good in both sides of any argument—even if it comes
from the American Socialists or the John Birchers. We listen. Lately, much of the U.S. minority groups and backers have followed the lead of the McCarthy era—“if you aren't with us, you must be against us.” We, of the white, middle-class Protestants know where the power lies in this country. We know who is doing most of the work, while others have time to march and sing. While some try to win a point by heckling, pestering, badgering, and yelling at fellow Americans, we win our daily battles through sheer hard work. There is little reason for us to be attacked on the ground we are white or middle-class or Protestant; just as we believe there is no reason to attack any ethnic group on the grounds of its race, economic status, or regligion. We listen. And when the time is ripe, we move. We listen, but we are waiting to hear something.
Sincerely,
Constance Tanis
Palos Park, Ill. soph.
Steven Butler
Cedar Rapids, Iowa soph.
Dailij Hansan
111 Flint Hall
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©1964 HERBLOCK
THE WASHINGTON POST
"They're Still Circling Around ———"
BOOK REVIEWS
DECISION-MAKING IN THE WHITE HOUSE: THE OLIVE BRANCH OR THE ARROWS, by Theodore C. Sorensen (Columbia University Press, $3.50).
Apart from the fact that this is an exceptionally readable and sensible approach to the task of the presidency (and that is reason enough for reading this little book), there are two other reasons for regarding it as a volume worth reading and owning. The first is that the president who inspired the author is dead. The second is that the author has left government service, at least for the time being, and his services thereby are temporarily lost to the American people.
The book is based on the Gino Speranza Lectures for 1963, delivered at Columbia University April 18 and May 9 of last year. The late President Kennedy wrote the foreword for Sorensen.
The brief Kennedy administration was full of important decisions: Cuba, Berlin, the Deep South, taxation, steel, and unimportant decisions, as well, that may have significance not known at the time. For any matter could arise at a presidential press conference, and at one time Kennedy had to study a list of famous Indian chiefs to select a name for a nuclear submarine. The choice, Red Cloud, frightened the Navy, for the name had foreign policy implications.
IN THOUGHTFUL AND UNDERSTANDING pages Sorensen considers the task of decision-making, the political questions surrounding the job, the role of the cabinet, the role of special advisers, the need to both accept and reject advice, the special settings in which decisions must be made.
Sorensen took his lead from the Cardozo lectures on the judicial process, delivered 42 years before the Sorensen lectures. He asks how the president must choose, in time of crisis, between the olive branch of peace and the arrows, both of which are in the talons of the eagle on the presidential seal.
DECISION-MAKING IS AN ART, Sorensen says, not a science, an art requiring judgment more than calculation. He comments that the one quality which characterizes issues brought before the president is that of conflict.
He makes special note of the 1962 Cuban crisis, of the delay and the agonizing decision involved, a decision never as simple as the answers offered to all questions today by some aspirants for the presidency. He considers the many unofficial sources that shape decisions—the press, books, visitors, friends, pressure groups, and White House mail.
Sorensen notes that Kennedy had to judge whether nuclear testing should be resumed, whether to take military action in the Congo, whether the quarantine of Cuba would bring Soviet reprisal. He observes that political motivations must underscore many decisions, and that the person who cries "Politics!" does not understand the nature of the presidency.
* * *
MYTHS OF THE GREEKS AND ROMANS, by Michael Grant (Mentor, 95 cents).
In this work a noted classical scholar shows the impact mythology has had on creative minds through the centuries. This makes such a book of value not only to the student of classical literature but to the student of ideas, of history and anthropology.
Out to the student of interest, or for research purposes. Excellent photographs of great works of art accompany the text. Grant uses the stories of Oedipus, Antigone, Dionysus, Prometheus, the Argonautica, Orpheus and Eurydice, to name a few, to trace the origin of myths and their developments in subsequent ages.
The themes have constantly been restated; note the use by Eugene O'Neill and even John Updike of classical tales.