Symposium on Homosexuality1

The subject of homosexuality is so vast and many-sided and affects so many areas of human life, both pathological and otherwise, that it is difficult to address an International Congress briefly on this theme. On reflection it occurred to me that there may be a way in which I can drastically limit the field of my discussion, and yet at the same time leave room to consider some of the more interesting and challenging issues emerging at the present time in relation to homosexuality. It may be remembered that at the Geneva Congress of 1955, as contributor to a panel, I attempted to outline the general theory of sexual perversion (Gillespie, 1956). In spite of its inevitable incompleteness, this presentation did not appear to arouse much adverse criticism, and I have therefore ventured to assume that it represents a fair statement of the views of many psycho-analysts. It was not, of course, within the scope of that paper on the general theory of perversions to deal in detail with any particular perversion. I thought, therefore, that for the purposes of this year's Symposium on homosexuality it might be interesting to review some of our knowledge and theories relating to homosexuality and to enquire whether or not they can be accommodated easily and naturally in our general theory of sexual perversion. Should the answer be that they are not compatible with the general theory, then we should need to consider two possibilities: first, that something is radically wrong with the general theory as I have formulated it; or alternatively that homosexuality is a different kind of state or behaviour-pattern from the other conditions that we consider to be sexual perversions. Were we to reach the second conclusion, then the old distinction which was once drawn between 'perversion' and 'inversion' might be justified. A third possibility must by no means be ignored, namely that what we call 'homosexuality' may be very far from homogeneous, so that