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Howard Brown, former health administrator of New York City under the Lindsay administration, has written a book Janus-faced in its task; not only does it look to the past at the oppression of homosexuality and all the effects of that oppression—but it also clearly looks to the future and a new consciousness among both gays and straights. The author weaves his personal story throughout the text. Homosexual all his life, he underwent psychoanalysis—three times a week—in his early twenties. This experience, as well as many others, seems to have deepened his conviction that he, as well as other homosexuals, live in a society where the church, the law, and the psychiatric establishment are the enemy. The work is something of a political treatise, and consequently the reader easily identifies with the author in his fight against any cruel suppression of homosexuality at the hands of loving parents, spiritual pastors, or therapeutic psychiatrists.
But—the inevitable “but” in any work dealing with so complex an issue—the situation seems more complicated, at least to this observer, than the author portrays it. Yet I have a momentary hesitation in following upon this “but,” since too many psychoanalysts have mouthed an abbreviated party line in regard to homosexuality which in its brevity and unexamined orthodoxy can easily become a hindrance to the therapeutic goals that the profession imposes upon its practitioners. (The book is replete with examples.) Brown suggests that psychiatrists and analysts keep quiet for a while to hear what they may have previously been blocking out—providing, we might add, the needed receptivity upon which any solid knowledge is built.
Although this writing may violate the letter of Brown's injunction, I trust it does not violate its spirit; also, I hope that my apologetic comments will be understood as a necessary backdrop to my critical remarks.
The author's premise throughout the work is that most homosexual acts are not vehicles of unconscious c