Homosexual Marriagesa

The sexual revolution has produced so many changes in our value systems, attitudes, and prejudices that the true nature of homosexuality has been in many ways obscured. Simultaneously, major changes in our concepts of human rights, minority rights, women's rights, political rights, discrimination against homosexuals has in some ways been intensified and in some ways been diminished. My focus here is on the psychoanalytic and psychologic aspect of this type of sexual behavior. However, I take the controversial position, not only in population at large but also in the psychiatric profession, that compulsive homosexuality is not a variation of normal human sexuality, but is a deviation resulting from factors that I shall elaborate below.

The analytic study of homosexuality started with Freud's 1905 paper ‘Three essays on the Theory of Sexuality.”¹ In this paper, he dispelled two conceptions which had surrounded homosexuality for centuries-namely that it was innate and that it was a form of degeneracy. He distinguished between the sexual instinct and the sexual object, viewing the former as an endowed characteristic of all human beings and the latter as an acquired characteristic of the sexual instinct. He hypothesized that some experience in childhood had a determining effect upon the direction taken by the homosexual's libido. In a 1915 note to the three essays, he noted that psychoanalytic research decidedly opposes any attempt at segregating homosexuals from the rest of mankind, as a group of special character. He noted that all human beings are capable of making a homosexual abject choice.

There have been numerous chemical, genetic, and somatic studies over the past century attempting to establish that homosexuality has an organic or nonpsychogenic origin. All have failed in this attempt. Rado wrote

…the human male and female do not inherit an organized neurohormonal machinery of courtship and mating. Nor do they inherit any organized component mechanism that would or