GLR November-December 2022
not necessarily imply its pathologization. From the mid-19th century until today, homosexual researchers and heterosexual scientists sympathetic to the social plight of gay people, hoping to promote wider acceptance, have tried to prove the “natural,” biological, and unalterable quality of homosexuality. They have generally insisted that homosexuality is not a pathology but a natural biological variant. Particularly before World War II, there were a number of positive depictions of homosexuality in the medical literature. William J. Robinson was chief of the Department of Genito Urinary Diseases and Dermatology of the Bronx Hospital and a friend of Magnus Hirschfeld, a prominent German homosex ual sexologist. As editor of the American Journal of Urology and Sexology , Robinson frequently published items on homo sexuality, including a poignant letter in 1919 from an anony mous “invert” who wrote: “[It] is my belief that two men who love each other have as much right to live together as a man and a woman have. Also that it is as beautiful when looked at in the right light and far more equal! ... May I not have as high an ideal in my love towards men, as a man towards a woman? Higher no doubt, than most men have toward women!” Dr. Florence Beery, who also supported the biological model of congenital bisexuality, was even more enthusiastic in defending homosexuals, notably women. Writing in the Medico-Legal Journal of 1924, she enthused: “Homo-sexuals are keen, quick, intuitive, sensitive, exceptionally tactful and have a great deal of understanding. ... Contrary to the general impression, homosexuals are not necessarily morbid; they are generally fine, healthy specimens, well developed bodily, in tellectual, and generally with a very high standard of conduct.” She dismissed the search for cross-sexed anatomical traits and insisted that generally the “homo-genic woman” had a thor oughly feminine body. It was her temperament that was “ac tive, brave, originative, decisive,” Beery declared. “Such a woman is fitted for remarkable work in professional life or as a manageress of institutions, even as a ruler of a country.” Beery, like many other advocates of biological explanations for homosexuality, was vehemently opposed to the new psycho analytic views on the subject. § I N 1905, S IGMUND F REUD published his groundbreaking Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality , which introduced the notions of infantile sexuality, the oral, anal, and phallic stages of de velopment, the castration complex, and penis envy. Although Freud had not treated any inverts before this time, inversion was the subject of the critical first essay as well as the final section of the third essay, on the “Prevention of Inversion.” Freud ar gued that the “sexual aberrations” were not discreet degenera tive pathologies but represented fixations on universal, primitive, infantile stages of erotism. The newborn had the ca pacity to find any part of the body erotogenic and, furthermore, all children went through a phase of “latent homosexuality” until “normal” heterosexual object choice developed at puberty. While Freud was quite radical in suggesting the universality of homosexuality, he was still a man of his time, for he believed that only heterosexual, reproductive sexuality was normal and healthy. Homosexuality represented a form of arrested sexual development resulting from traumatic parent-child dynamics. November–December 2022
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