Footnote 8 - Deviants

In a survey quoted by the sociologist J. L Simmons, in his book Deviants, it was established that homosexuals are subject to a considerably stronger rejection on the part of people than are alcoholics, compulsive gamblers, ex-convicts and former mental patients.

J C. Flugel, in his Man, Morals and Society, claims with respect to those who during infancy have strongly identified themselves with paternal or maternal figures of a particularly stern disposition, that as they grow up they will embrace conservative causes and will be fascinated by authoritarian regimes. The more authoritarian the lender, the more confidence he will awaken in them, and they will also feel very patriotic and loyal when fighting in support of traditions and class distinctions, as well as in favor of rigidly disciplinary educational systems and religious institutions, while at the same time wholly condemning sexual abnormalities of any type. On the other hand, those who in infancy somehow reject - on an unconscious, motional or rational level - such rules of parental conduct will favor radical causes, repudiate distinctions of class and treat understandingly those who exhibit any unconventional inclinations: homosexuals, for example.

For his part, Freud, in “Letter to an American Mother,” says that homosexuality, while certainly not an advantage, ought not to be considered a reason for shame, since it is neither a vice nor degrading, but simply a variation in sexual functions produced by a certain arrest in sexual development. In effect, Freud judges that the overcoming of the “polymorphous perverse” stage of childhood -in which bisexual impulses are present – due to socio-cultural pressures, is actually a sign of maturity.

Several contemporary schools of psychoanalysis would disagree with that judgment they would instead see in the repression of the “polymorphous perverse” one of the principal reasons behind the malformation of personality, especially in terms of the hypertrophy of aggressiveness. As for homosexuality itself, Marcuse points out that the social function of the homosexual is analogous to that of the critical philosopher, since his very presence is a constant reminder of the repressed elements of society.

With reference to the repression of “polymorphous perversity” in the West, Dennis Altman states in his work, cited above, that the principal components of such repression are on the one hand the elimination of the erotic from all human activity that is not definitely sexual, and on the other hand the negation of the inherent bisexuality of all human beings: society assumes without pausing to reflect at all, that heterosexuality equals sexual normality. Altman observes that the repression of bisexuality is effected by implantation of seemingly prestigious historic-cultural concepts of masculinity” and “femininity” which manage to suffocate our unconscious impulses and mask themselves in the consciousness as the only appropriate forms of conduct, at the same time that they succeed in upholding, down through the ages, the supremacy of the male - in other words, clearly delineated sexual roles which are learned during childhood. Moreover, Altman adds, the sense of being male or female is established, above all, by means of the other: men feel that their masculinity depends upon a capacity to conquer women, and women feel that fulfillment can only come about through being coupled with a man. On the other hand, Altman and the whole Marcusian school condemn the “strong man” stereotype which is presented to males as the most desirable model for emulation, since the said stereotype tacitly implies, an affirmation of masculinity through violence, which explains the constant presence of the aggressiveness syndrome in the world. Finally, Altman underscores the lack of any form of identity for the bisexual in contemporary society, and the pressures that he suffers, from both sides given that bisexuality threatens equally the exclusively homosexual forms of bourgeois life as well as heterosexual forms, and this characteristic would explain the reason why avowed bisexuality is so uncommon. And as for the convenient but - until a few years ago -merely potential parallelism between the struggle for class liberation and the one for sexual liberation, Altman emphasizes that in spite of Lenin’s concern for sexual liberty in the USSR, his rejection of anti-homosexual legislation for example, such legislation was reintroduced in 1934 by Stalin, and as a result, the prejudice against homosexuality - as a type of “bourgeois degeneration” - held fast in a number of Communist parties of the world.

It is in different terms that Theodore Roazak comments upon the sexual liberation movement in his work entitled The Making of a Counter Culture. There, he expresses the concept that the kind of woman who is most in need of liberation, and desperately so, is the “woman” which every man keeps locked inside the dungeons of his own psyche. Roazak points out that this and no other is the form of repression that needs to be eliminated next, and the same with respect to the man bottled up inside of every woman. Furthermore, Roazak has no doubt that all of the above would represent the most cataclysmic reinterpretation of sexual life in the history of humanity, inasmuch as it would involve a restructuring of all that concerns sexual roles and concepts of sexual normality that are currently in force.