In an era when no sensitive person would think of making a racial slur, and when ethnic bigotry is all but banished from the media, why are anti-gay comments and stereotypes still thriving? At the Fall Meeting of The American, the public forum “Homophobia: Analysis of a ‘Permissible’ Prejudice” will delve into the psychic and social bases of homophobia and discuss why homophobia is still common and is even considered a “family values” prejudice.
For the first time in recent history, a member of Congress — Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) — will speak at a meeting of The American. As one of three panelists, Frank will speak at the public forum along with Peter Gomes, Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church at Harvard University; Nancy Chodorow, a member of the American and Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley; and Ralph Roughton, past chair of the American Psychoanalytic Association's Committee on Issues of Homosexuality.
The public forum, sponsored by the APsaA's Committee on Public Information, Committee on Issues of Homosexuality, and Committee on Social Issues, together with the American Psychoanalytic Foundation, will be held Friday, December 18, 1998, from 11:00 a.m. to 1:30 p.m.
By analyzing homophobia using psychoanalytic tools and methods, forum participants will examine its roots in the human mind and will seek to understand the psychic causes behind homophobia's seeming normalcy. The forum is being presented by the American Psychoanalytic Association, which has had its own struggles with homosexual issues. Psychoanalytic theory had long held that homosexuality was a developmental problem. As a result, homosexuals were viewed as being mentally ill, and their sexuality was treated as an illness that needed resolution. Based on this theory, gays and lesbians were thought to be too “sick” to be trained in The American.
In recent years, openly gay and lesbian people have been accepted as candidates and as faculty. The American has made enormous strides in the past five years to open up discussion about homosexuality. The Association's hosting of this discussion, like its recent resolution that the state should not interfere with same-sex couples who choose to marry, shows the enormous change that has taken place.
The four panelists will bring unique insights to the forum. Frank has been an articulate advocate for an end to prejudice in our nation's public policies. At a meeting of the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association held in Chicago in August, Frank spoke in very clear terms about his moral vision for political change. He said that when it came to making medical care available to all, he could not think of any reason for gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered persons to focus only on AIDS. He said further that any special-interest group must be aware that monies are merely being taken from one health care program and given to another. He added, “If you were an audience concerned with breast cancer or Alzheimer's disease, I would say the same thing to you.”
Gomes has written extensively on the religious roots of prejudice, including homophobia. His work The Good Book: Reading the Bible with Mind and Heart dissects new biblical scholarship and presents his own thinking on these topics. He has contradicted the notion that homophobia's origin and basis are biblical.
Chodorow has discussed how psychoanalysis does not provide grounds for pathologizing homosexuality except by tying heterosexuality to a culturally normative, male-dominant gender differentiation. She has been a well known and influential psychoanalyst since writing one of the most important books in the last two decades, The Reproduction of Mothering, first published in 1978. In her recent work, she has extensively discussed issues of gender and sexuality.
Ralph Roughton is a training and supervising analyst at the Emory University Psychoanalytic Institute and one of its former directors. As chair of the APsaA's Committee on Issues of Homosexuality from 1992 to 1998, he led the effort to rid the Association of
anti-homosexual bias. Roughton has given papers on homosexuality and homophobia at the meetings of The American and the International Psychoanalytical Association and has been a popular guest speaker at institutes across the country.
The forum will be chaired by Paul Lynch, the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute's first openly gay candidate and chair of the Committee on Psychoanalysis of the Association of Gay and Lesbian Psychiatrists. He presented a paper, “Debasement in the Sphere of Homosexual Love as Understood Through Freud's Formulation of the Universal Tendency to Debasement,” at The American's meeting in December 1997, for which he shared the Karl A. Menninger Award for the best paper presented by a candidate.