The Homosexualities

The editors' charge to me was to discuss what I was taught about homosexuality during my psychoanalytic education (very little) and how I now understand homosexuality. I did my psychoanalytic training at the Columbia University Institute for Training and Research concurrent with my psychiatric residency at Psychiatric Institute and graduated into a world where the burgeoning sex and gender social revolutions were to shape my thinking about homosexuality more than anything I learned during my training, with the single exception of Lionel Ovesey's work on pseudohomosexuality—more about that later.

Let me begin with what was happening in the world, before I turn more concretely to the evolution of my ideas about homosexuality. The way analysts now understand the homosexualities and masculinities and femininities was not born of brilliant insights we gleaned from interpreting our patients' dreams, fantasies, and sex acts as we sat behind our couches. Not long ago, Catherine R. Stimpson, dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at New York University, wrote an essay titled “Queers, Lesbians, Women, and Other Theoreticians” (presented at the Association on Psychoanalytic Medicine, February 6, 1996.) Her title says it all. The first analysts to reconsider homosexuality and gender did so on the basis of information and ideas that were initially garnered in the front lines of the sex and gender wars. The kickoff was the Stonewall Riot in Greenwich Village in 1969. A homosexual bar at the very epicenter of New York's gay subculture, Stonewall was usually protected against unannounced police raids because it was Mafia owned. The police, however, had the indiscretion to mount an unannounced raid the day after Judy Garland was buried, and a riot erupted (Heidenry, 1997, pp. 101-103). The twist within the twist is that the spontaneous riots against the police were led by drag queens in full regalia—so much for the automatic equation of masculine identifications with assert