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The “orientation” in the title of Edwin C. Wood's “Evolutions of an Orientation Concerning the Nature of the Male Homosexualities” refers to his own “shifts” in understanding male homosexuality. This self-referential use of a noun more usually found bound up in the phrase sexual orientation, along with the dereification and pluralizaron of the term homosexuality, suggests possibilities of more capacious analytic understandings than the pathologizing views that were standard when Wood trained over 40 years ago. To some extent, that promise is fulfilled in this essay, in the satisfaction Wood comes to take in the three patients whose histories he offers in some detail: John, “openly recognized as gay and as a well-respected professional, happily living a productive and creative life with a successful, well-adjusted professional man”; Ronald, who resolves his sexual orientation in favor of homosexuality; and perhaps especially Frank, who accepts his “homosexual feelings.” “He felt at peace with it, and that seemed to allow me to feel greater acceptance and satisfaction with what we had achieved,” Wood writes, identifying his own “satisfaction” with Frank's acceptance. Gay readers of this essay—indeed, any readers who have embraced the decades'-old decision of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) to depathologize homosexuality—would be heartened by the change in orientation that Wood reports (this piece is far more about Wood, after all, than it is about his patients). Yet, there are many signs in this essay that the change reported is a very minimal one.
It is, for instance, disturbing to find so many pages of this essay devoted to outlining the pathologizing view of homosexuality that Wood first held, or to find him seeming still to value the “graphic and remarkable detail” of the “pioneering” work of Charles Socarides, one of the most vocal and public opponents to the depathologizing of homosexuality in the APA debates of the early 1970s. Against this pages-long