Homosexuality has always presented a controversial social problem and has aroused strong feelings, not only among the general public, but also among the various professional groups who are trying to adopt a more scientific attitude towards this subject. In particular the differing opinions of psychiatrists, penal administrations and sociologists may be due to the fact that they come into contact with various types of homosexuals who present disparate problems and may have dissimilar personalities.
There was a great sense of excitement and optimism about the future of Great Britain following the end of World War II. When the Labour Party came into office at the 1945 election under a manifesto promising to restore public confidence through radical political and social change, it appeared that these sentiments of hope and renewal were well justified. Yet Labour's policies of egalitarian social fairness produced anxiety in the middle and upper classes, which, significantly, was embedded in an undercurrent of lingering Victorian moral values (Rotundo 1994). Ultimately, this moralism served to undermine the success of Labour's new agenda. As a result of these political, social, and moral tensions, the Labour Party ultimately lost public support, and the Conservative Party came into office in 1951. The Conservatives intended to respond to the prevalent moral and social concerns at this time by implementing legislative means designed to improve the moral climate in Britain. Under this new regime of morality through legislation, the government was obligated to preserve public order and decency in order to ensure that members of the public did not breach moral standards of behavior.
Since homosexuality was seen as one of the major ways in which the public sense of moral decency was outraged, the government was compelled to attempt to understand this sexual orientation. The aim of this search for understanding was to find a "solution" to the homosexuality "problem," thereby reducing the occurrence of homosexual offenses and, in so doing, ensuring moral decency and public order. However, as Paul Monette points out, "not everyone in the 1950s was conservative" (Monette 1992). Many people believed that the then-existing laws for male homosexual offenses should be changed. (2) Thus a new public sentiment began to metamorphose as the 1950s wore on, consisting of the view that, while public displays of homosexuality should continue to be punished since they would violate a sense of public order and decency, private acts of homosexuality should to some extent be de-criminalized (Monette 1992). In the face of these public views, Parliament formed the Wolfenden Committee in 1954 to consider "the law and practice relating to homosexual offences and the treatment of persons convicted of such offences by the courts...." (Rotundo 1994)
The guilt and fears some homosexual men experienced in 1950's also stemmed from the social and moral responsibilities inherent in their vocations. Perhaps choosing such vocations to quell their fears and desires, homosexuals found that these fears paradoxically heightened when they could not suppress their sexual desires through their work. "Among those who work with notable success in occupations which call for service to others, there are some in whom ... homosexuality provides the motivation for activities of the greatest value to society. ?xamples of this are to be found among teachers, clergy, ... and those who are interested in youth movements ..." (Ch. III, par. 24).
During the 1950s, nearly all Christians (Protestant and Catholic, liberal and conservative) viewed homosexuals as degenerates. In other words, homosexuality was sin, pure and simple. It constituted degenerate behavior in all of its aspects.
Conservatives, certain of the biblical prohibitions in Genesis 19, Leviticus 20, and Romans 1, the most often cited passages, remained convinced throughout the first portion of our period that homosexuality was against nature ("contrary to God's created order for the sexes") and a sin. In the mid- 1950s, for example, Audre Lorde quipped that if God had wanted homosexuals, God would have created "Adam and Bruce." (Lorde 1983) In the 1950s' conservative view, the fact that some homosexuals seemed proud of their orientation only demonstrated the severity of the nation's moral decay.
Because they understood homosexuality as a sin, it was treated primarily as an individual failing. The more conservative one is, the more likely one has been to place the emphasis upon sexual sin as an individual act. ?vangelicals and fundamentalists, during this period, stressed that homosexuals had no hope of reaching heaven unless they repented and changed. "The Bible condemns homosexual behavior," wrote Harold Lindsell, "and it says that homosexuals cannot inherit the kingdom of God" (1 Cor. 6:9-11). In general, because conservatives during the 1950s and 1960s felt so strongly about homosexuality as sin, they were frightened by the trend of increasing activism among homosexuals in American culture. FBI director J. ?dgar Hoover, writing for the conservative Christianity Today during this period, surely without intending any pun in the matter, argued that "hope for a reversal of this immoral trend tolerating homosexuality lies with an aroused public."
Liberals, prior to the 1960s, also generally emphasized homosexuality as sin. But as time moved into the decade of the sixties, some among them tended to emphasize the structural dimension of sin as much as they did the individual dimension. Duberman, for example, argued that "We must admit that we have created a set of cultural conditions in which sexual responsibility is made exceedingly difficult." (Duberman 1991) Through their emphasis on the social conditions of sin, liberal-leaning Christians tended to lessen the importance placed upon the sexual act itself by focusing attention on the condition that inhibited right action.
As time passed, in 1950's mainline editorials tended to suggest that structural sin, as opposed to individual immorality, may be more responsible for the "twilight world" of homosexuals, where homosexuals engaged in one-night stands to satisfy their sexual longings. If cultural condemnation of homosexuals were not so prevalent, they argued, "the exploitation by desperate individuals of fellow humans would be far less prevalent." (Duberman 1991)
During the 1950s the question of the relationship of morality to law (sin to criminal activity) reached paramount importance on several fronts, including judicial definitions of obscenity, legislative efforts toward censorship, and the move to repeal legislative restrictions pertaining to birth control and sodomy. Birth control laws are an interesting example. But it should be noted that Catholics in America rarely campaigned to put such laws on the books in the first place. They were Protestant laws. The tendency of Protestants to legislate sin as if it were crime was coming back to haunt them. But a majority of these same Protestants who now opposed birth control laws as inappropriate continued to support hundreds of other laws prohibiting such things as adultery, homosexuality, premarital sex, and abortion in all fifty states without recognizing that such laws also confused the relationship between sin and crime. Nineteenth-century Protestant culture had thoroughly codified its sexual ethic in legislation. The goal of pluralistic America during the 1950s and beyond has been to dismantle it.
Illinois became the first state to decriminalize homosexuality among consenting adults in 1953. Some Christians interpreted these arguments for homosexual civil rights as a frontal attack on Christian values. Their efforts, since the mid-1950s, have been focused on the losing battle, with few exceptions, of trying to close the widening gap in the law between Christian faith and American culture. Anita Bryant's victory in Dade County in 1977 capitalized on the fear many had that the legal guarantee of rights for homosexuals amounted to a social sanctioning of homosexual behavior. Some evangelicals still think along these lines. In the public mind, at least for many Christian people, the endorsement of homosexual rights meant the breakdown of long standing social structures, and the possibility of increased homosexual behavior among youth resulting from more public acceptance of it. Many evangelicals feared that the government might required churches to hire gay ministers or gay secretaries if full civil rights for homosexuals were guaranteed by federal law.
In the 1950s, even supposedly progressive critics denied the importance of gay male writers, claiming that their criticisms of postwar American society were insufficiently political Leslie Fiedler, for example, interpreted the popularity of gay male writers not as a sign of the emergence of a new form of politics but as an indication that left-wing intellectuals had abdicated their political responsibilities. In "The Un-Angry Young Men," an essay that first appeared in ?ncounter in 1958, he complained that left-wing intellectuals had created a political vacuum that had allowed gay male writers to emerge as "the staunchest party of all." According to him, left-wing intellectuals had failed to provide a satisfactory critique of postwar American society because they remained committed to an outmoded form of politics. They did not realize that postwar American society threatened "not exclusion and failure but acceptance and success" (Banner 1974) and thus could not be understood in terms of the categories adopted by Popular Front writers and artists in the 1930s. Fiedler dismissed their cultural politics as an "empty piece of mimicry" that did not adequately take into account the changes that had occurred in American society since the Depression. Their failure to develop an oppositional politics that accurately reflected postwar conditions was particularly disturbing because it had enabled homosexuality to become "the last possible protest against bourgeois security and the home in the suburbs where adultery is old hat" (Duberman 1991). Gay male writers had been able to supplant left-wing intellectuals because their explicit Despite his complaint that left-wing intellectuals had abdicated their political responsibilities, Fiedler had no desire to promote left-wing political activity. Rather, he sought to contain the emergence of homosexuality as an oppositional practice by comparing it unfavorably to traditional forms of left-wing politics. Clearly threatened by the way in which gay male writers politicized domains of experience that he assumed were apolitical, he refused to acknowledge that homosexuality could provide the basis for a political identity. According to him, gay male opposition to the political mentality known as the Cold War consensus represented a debased form of politics that bordered on exhibitionism. ?xaggerating the visibility of the gay male subculture, he argued that homosexuality had become "the purest and truest protest of the latest generation, not a burden merely, an affliction to be borne, but a politics to be flaunted" (Banner 1974). Fiedler tried to explain the emergence of homosexuality as an oppositional practice in terms of the marginal position gay male writers, had traditionally occupied in American letters. Unlike ?ngland, he explained, America did not have a "tradition of fiction asserting (behind the most perfunctory of disguises) homosexual responses to experience as the cultivated norm" (Banner 1974). Gay male writers who dealt openly with gay male experience were mistakenly seen as engaging in a "conquest of new areas of feeling, an opening up" (Banner 1974). Insofar as it tried to contain the emergence of a distinctly gay male literary tradition by assimilating it into the dominant paradigms of American fiction, Fiedler's essay was complicit with the Cold War construction of "the homosexual" as a national security risk. Like the discourses of national security, which exploited fears that gay men were virtually indistinguishable from straight men, Fiedler's claim that gay male fiction merely provided another example of the homoerotic character of American letters rendered gay male writers invisible.
If anyone had told the founding fathers of the ?uropean idea back in the 1950s that the ?U would one day appear to come unstuck over the question of homosexual rights, they would have shaken their heads in disbelief. Likewise, if you had spoken to Anglican divines of the same era, they might have foreseen many troubles ahead for their worldwide churches - chief of which was the drift towards unbelief and indifference. But the man who crowned our Queen, Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher, would simply have not been able to envisage a time when half the Anglicans in the world were threatening to leave and start their own church because the Americans had consecrated an openly gay man.
Addicts of the ?uropean scene see the row over the conservative Rocco Buttiglione as a conflict between the commission and the parliament; just as Anglican obsessives might wonder whether their worldwide communion can survive. Older homosexuals must think with a mixture of ruefulness and anger of their young manhood, when many of them still suffered prosecution by the police. As far as most civilised people are concerned, ceased to be a sin. The late Duke of Devonshire once told me that in the 1950s, when liberalisation of the law concerning homosexuality was beginning to be debated, his father told him: "I can remember the days just after Oscar Wilde was sent to prison for it; you will live to see it legalised; your son will probably live to see it being made compulsory." (Monette 1992)
Behind the joke is the realisation that social attitudes to private sexual behaviour vary enormously from generation to generat ion. The ancient Romans thought that the ?mperor Claudius was a bit weird because he only - pervy or what? - liked women, and did not have any lovers who were little boys. It has taken the collective mind of ?urope two millennia to return to a similar position.
The early 1950's supplied perils and pumpkin papers in which the loyalties of many Americans were being questioned. And in retrospect, it appears to have been a time when the last gasp of a particular brand of prudish morality was being heard. Sex in any form was big news and the very word homosexual was largely taboo. (It could not be used on radio and television, for Instance, which of course made it considerably better copy than it is today.) The really odd part is that the whole question of homosexuals in government was, and is, full of a more than slightly curious set of ironies.
At the same time, politicians began to target "aggressive female homosexuals" in prison as a serious threat to moral order. During the 1950s they invoked images of lesbians in prison as part of a larger cold war campaign to discredit liberal reformers for being soft on perversion, as on communism.20 By the late 1950s, women who formed homosexual relationships in prison had become stock cultural characters associated with threats to sexual and social order. At the same time, Black women ceased to be the primary suspects as prison lesbians. Class marking seemed to be replacing earlier race marking, making both Black and white working-class women more vulnerable to charges of deviance, while still exempting middleclass women. By the 1960s, the criminological literature no longer relied on an exclusively racial definition of lesbians and emphasized the social threat of white lesbian activity. (Monette 1992)
These changes coincided with a larger cultural emphasis on both the power of female sexuality and the need to contain it within domestic relationships among white and middle-class Americans. Reflecting the rhetoric of cold war America, which sought to identify internal enemies who threatened social order, the postwar clinical literature on lesbianism elaborated upon the image of the aggressive female homosexual, but it rarely targeted Black women. The new stereotype drew upon earlier concepts of the male sexual psychopath, whose uncontrolled, often violent, sexuality threatened to disrupt social order. In contrast to earlier studies that had posited little relationship between psychopathy and lesbianism, writers now suggested "the possibly greater tendency of the [female] psychopaths to engage in sex acts with other girls." New psychoanalytic theories also contributed to the image of a dangerous, promiscuous lesbian. One writer, for example, differentiated between those female homosexuals who simply preferred the company of women and a rarer group containing "the more dangerous type--the promiscuous Lesbian who passing quickly and lightly from affair to affair, usually with physical relations, may cause great harm and unhappiness." Just as the male psychopath was invariably portrayed as white, and often middle-class, the dangerous lesbian was no longer marked as a racial minority but appeared to be white, although usually working class.
Can anyone imagine 1950s-era airlines and politicians galloping after blacks' dollars and votes? The notion is ridiculous because, as a legitimate minority, the group was at an economic disadvantage, politically powerless and clearly distinguishable by its unchangeable physical characteristics.
Homosexuals can provide no such evidence. Former homosexuals and lesbians - who are now married heterosexuals giving birth to natural offspring - daily disprove the whining "born-this-way" arguments of homosexual activists. And airline marketing strategists are obviously able to determine which groups have the money to fly.
If efforts at pro-homosexual legislation, such as the so-called ?mployment Non-Discrimination Act (?NDA), are necessary because homosexuals and lesbians are losing their jobs because of discrimination, how is it that corporate America sees and pursues this particular group as a high-dollar market?
Can it be that the heartstring-plucking tactics of homosexual special interests are based on falsehoods? Their attempt to piggyback gay rights onto the civil rights movement is insulting to the genuine, historical struggles of true minorities.
One's sexual conduct does not qualify as a noble cause. It certainly does not merit the recognition and attention being lavished on homosexuals who vocally denounce "bedroom police" yet seek to push their private practices into public policies
Bibliography
1. Lois W. Banner. 1974. Women in Modern America. Harcourt, New York, NY
2. ?. Anthony Rotundo. 1994. America Manhood. Basic Books
3. Paul Monette. 1992. Becoming a Man: Half a Life. Harcourt, New York, NY. (artist)
4. Martin Duberman. 1991.Cures: A Gay Man's Odyssey, New York: Penguin.
5. Audre Lorde. 1983. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name Crossing Press
