The Ninth Street Center

Foreword to the 1973 edition of
Homosexuality:
The Psychology of the
Creative Process [1971]
by Paul Rosenfels

This book presents the subject of homosexuality as an aspect of the best in human nature, relating its existence to the creative side of civilized psychological development. In order to expound this viewpoint, I have found it necessary to defy majority opinions in both the homosexual and the heterosexual worlds. Many homosexuals want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to see homosexual capacity as socially valuable, healthy, and constructive, while at the same time justifying every promiscuous sexual event (between consenting adults) which exists in their world. In associating homosexuality with sex on the loose in the human psyche, they join forces with those institutions which have made a hidden place throughout recorded history for homosexual experience, namely male houses of prostitution, which in modern terms become the gay baths and the institution of cruising. The straight world, on the other hand, looks exclusively at the evidence of homosexual promiscuity and finds within this artificially limited view all the confirmation it needs for its frightened condemnation of the homosexual phenomenon. Those who are committed to sex on the loose are in truth vulnerable to psychic depression and neurotic symptoms, but this is equally true on the heterosexual side.

There is a great deal more in homosexuality than a simple release of new levels of sexual permissiveness. True psychological mating is not only possible between individuals of the same sex, it is actually the rule in human interactions (whether sexual or not). How can two men, biologically alike, find a true difference between them through which mating can occur? The answer is simple but profound in its implications: through character specialization. What this book says in effect is that character specialization is dominant over biological identity, and that therefore two men (or two women) can have a masculine-feminine interaction which can lay the basis for a true romantic union, pregnant with possibilities for creative self-development. The concept of masculinity and femininity, used in this way, has nothing to do with conventional masculine and feminine roles in our society. Such roles have social roots, not independent psychological ones.

If men and women are to find their true inner identity, set free from the sexist tyranny of their conventional social roles, there is no way to avoid passage through homosexual territory. The straight world adheres with stubborn tenacity to its idea of what a man or a woman should be, because it cannot believe that if men and women are set free to find what is best for themselves as individuals, they will be able to reach heterosexuality out of their own needs. What cynicism! The straight world adopts contradictory viewpoints. On the one hand, it says that homosexuality is hedonistic, superficial, and sick. On the other hand, it finds homosexuality to be both sinister and powerful, capable of mobilizing contagious tendencies which threaten to destroy mankind through self-imposed genocide.

This book undertakes to show where the real truth lies. It establishes first the basic scientific insights into civilized character differentiation and the associated mated capacities which are essential to the understanding of civilization itself. The book says that what the world really needs is more ability to love and more ability to take responsibility for each other. The deepening of man's psychic life and the broadening of his moral capacities is a number one priority. The promotion of this kind of human development justifies removing part of our population from the baby-making and rearing activities of family life. Without more truth and right in the world we are all lost victims of the destructive effect of a civilization whose technological development has outrun its human capacities.

Openness about homosexuality is essential to human creative development. Not only must sexism be left behind, but new goals of human devotion to truth and right must emerge, so that people find a way to be important to each other out of their genuine human resources and without help from conventional social roles. This revolutionary undertaking promises a world of contentment and happiness for all men. In such a world there can be no doubt that men and women will find the capacity to be attracted to each other for the purposes of child rearing and family life. When human beings have learned to make constructive relationships with someone of the same sex, they can learn to transfer this capacity to someone of the opposite sex, if they find it in their interest to do so. But this is for the future to show. In the twentieth century it is enough for men and women to demonstrate that their homosexual capacities can serve the interests of the creative development of all mankind. In this book I attempt to present the scientific basis for such a great human undertaking.

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