So … let’s go ahead and start with the disclaimer. Gay people are people. We do not love them any less or any more than any other humans, because they are gay. It doesn’t make them better or worse, or really anything else. So please do not infer anything that I’m not implying.
I was an actor once. I know plenty of people who are gay, and their being so has never been an issue for me. Never. So now that’s over with.
What homosexuality is, however, is undeniably, different, to the point of being abnormal. Gay people have an attraction to members of the same sex, which well over 90% of the population does not have, and which they would find particularly uncomfortable.
Given that it is a psychological and not a physical difference (gay people have the same parts and all that as straight people), absent political pressures, we would logically look at being gay as a psychiatric disorder, not a physical one, and begin looking for “treatments” of some kind, to correct the condition back to the norm.
Yet that never happens, religious reprogramming attempts notwithstanding. Certainly, there is no active wing of the psychiatric profession that, at least publicly, is doing any ongoing research into “curing” homosexuality.
Why, this piece wants to ask, is homosexuality the only psychological disorder not treated with the intent to bring the patient back into a mainstream psychological function?
Well, good question, boys and girls.
Quite often, when I think about a system that is not functioning as it should be, such as the tax laws, or a complex piece of old software, I ask the pointed question, “If we were to start over from scratch, would we do this the same way?”. That question is always answered, “Not a prayer.”
In other words, it is often a better errand to dismantle a system completely and reconstruct it using current knowledge and tools, than to keep picking at the edges of a dysfunctional operation.
I think we are there in this case. For centuries, gay people have been, as they say, pushed into the closet. Their practice is regarded as sinful in many faiths, to the point that they are, to this day, executed for being gay. That’s not a happy situation, and fear of “exposure” and execution is enough to push one into the metaphorical closet.
We still, even in slightly more civilized societies than, say, Iran, treat gay people a bit differently. We laugh at their stereotypes, their perceived effeminacy, flamboyance and love of show tunes and Cher. It’s not like executing them, but it is an acknowledgement nonetheless.
My point is that it had never really been even mainstream-tolerated to be gay, so the current hyper-acceptance of homosexuality as “normal” is the overreaction that, if we started over, wouldn’t necessarily be the approach. It is that situation, the bad history of their treatment, that eventually led the American Psychiatric Association in 1973 to remove homosexuality from its list of abnormal behaviors.
Well, not just that “situation”, but the collaborative pressure from multiple gay rights groups of the day, to the point where any psychiatric professionals — and remember, psychiatrists are MDs — who recognized homosexuality as an abnormality were kept off, or removed, from the Association’s internal research and advisory committee making the decision. In fact, they weren’t even allowed to present evidence to support their position. You toed the line, or you were no longer an APA advisor.
OK, I get it. The APA surely did not want to feel like it was perpetuating mistreatment of gay people, and were talked into believing that by normalizing the abnormal, they were protecting them.
But, you know, science. When a scientific body, which the APA theoretically is, takes or, in this case, changes a position it has held, it ought to put forth a scientific — not a political — rationale for doing so. Excluding the testimony of one side is about as unscientific an approach as can be considered.
That’s the APA. The rest of us, on the other hand?
I think we are caught. On the one hand, we all see the “emperor’s new clothes” aspect to it. We know that there is something abnormal about homosexuality even if the APA, the left and Hollywood keep trying to normalize it. We assume that gay people would rather be straight and not deal with its issues, no matter what they say. It’s a psychiatric disorder, and we get that.
But we also love our fellow man, and realize that to an extent, in the rest of their lives, gay people are indeed “normal.” They live their lives, same as us, and outside of liking show tunes a bit more than the rest of us, don’t innately cause any more issues for society. It’s just their attraction to the same sex. We still love them as fellow humans.
So we don’t want to be the one to write this piece, right? We don’t want to tell our good friend who is gay that they have a psychiatric disorder, especially one that doesn’t create a risk to us, and which doesn’t need to be cured to function normally in society, outside of the sexual attraction part.
Well, I’m in my seventies, and I no longer have a problem being the one to say stuff. It is time for some group of psychiatric professionals to do some actual scientific research into the causes and a possible remedy for homosexuality, even in the face of the APA, the left, Hollywood and whoever tells Joe Biden what to do.
I’m not talking about seances, and sage-dusting, and casting out demons. No exorcisms here. I’m talking about basic, unbiased scientific research into the root causes and potential corrective treatment of the psychiatric disorder of homosexuality.
What would that take? Funding (the NIH should be willing to fund this, or at least defend its unscientific position if not). Some university has to see this as something worth pursuing, if it can find a research team unbiased enough to do it.
But the fact remains — the psychiatric profession prides itself in being able to put names on just about every syndrome it can invent. But homosexuality is the only psychiatric disorder they refuse to treat, or even acknowledge as something to try to fix.
And it’s political. It’s about the left, about wokeness, about Hollywood. If there’s anything that should not collide with science, it is politics. We’re in year three of prima facie evidence of that.
But hey, what’s to lose? We’re not going to execute anyone.
Copyright 2014-2022 by Robert Sutton
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