Some Notes and an Exercise With Regard to Male Homosexuality

The decision on homosexuality is made and the fires banked for the moment. It may therefore be easier to reflect more cooly now on issues raised heatedly in the preceding debate. Such issues include how one defines illness, whether the data available for a decision are sufficient — and what other information might be sought — and how one takes account of value judgments that may intrude on the neutral and scientific stance of psychodynamically oriented therapy and theory. Such judgments historically are temporal, and wax in accord with the moving tides of social opinion (Marmor 1974a and 1974b); the question is whether change involves a progressive freedom from bias, or simply an exchange of new for old.

There has been much development of these points (Anonymous 1973a, 1973b, and 1974). The present article will present some new, though hardly firm data, highlight some holes in our theory, and frame a theoretical exercise that those of us who hold to an analytic frame of reference might try to resolve. It is deliberately provocative in the sense that it urges examination of the bases on which a firm sense of conviction may rest.

A prior question in the study of an illness or a determination of its severity is knowledgeable definition of its natural course. Several years ago, because of my interest in this question, I combed the literature to discover the fate of the older homosexual. At the time, most analytically oriented psychiatrists subscribed to the idea that homosexuality was deviant — in the perjorative rather