The Ninth Street Center Ninth Street Center Journal

Homosexuality: Civilization's Secret by Dean Hannotte

In a world that is often hateful and vicious, common sense tells us that what we need most now is love between men. When Jesus spoke on the shores of Galilee, summoning his disciples to be fishers of men, he was also teaching them to be lovers of men. Countless times since then men of wisdom have advised us to do away with the barriers that hamper a healthy love between men from taking root, warning that if we don't learn to love one another we will end up hating one another and ourselves as well. Men who have dared to take this advice have acted as the advance guard in civilization's greatest movement, the replacing of our idle dreams of utopia with the reality of a universal brotherhood. But love between men, like other kinds of love can become sexualized, and the emergence of homosexuality as a way of life has been one of the major sociological developments of this century as well as the most controversial issue in contemporary psychological thought.

Male friendships have always appealed to the popular imagination, from Damien and Pythias through Don Quixote and Sancho Panza down to the scores of comedy teams in today's movies and television shows. Our times are saturated with latent homosexuality from the loyalty between soldiers in battle who die to save the life of a buddy to the camaraderie of football stars for whom women are but exchangeable commodities. No authority exists that can tell us how much overt homosexual activity goes on behind locked doors, but it is a fact that the militant homosexual movement has sky-rocketed in recent years. And the gay world seems likely to remain a central dimension of the modern experience.

The gay world that journalists like to talk about is only a superficial manifestation of deeper homosexual trends that are moving into every area of our lives. Men and women are learning that no law requires them to like each other just because their genitals are different, and they are increasingly seeking out their own sex in their creative lives, acting out tendencies that are healthier than we are taught to believe.

By throwing off the stereotypes of the tough male and helpless female,, sensitive men and vigorous women can now more fully elaborate their yielding or assertive natures. The whole masculine/feminine dynamic has shifted from a physiological to a psychological context, allowing two partners of one sex a great access to love and power interactions. Ordinary people find it so important to move away from the enslaving images of heterosexual adequacy that in family life the woman lives for the get-togethers with the neighborhood wives, whereas the man is just as grateful for a night out with the boys as another year of wedded bliss. Children growing up are less vulnerable to propaganda about the opposite sex. And young adults are much less interested in marriage than they are supposed to be. Latent homosexuality is becoming the dominant basis of interpersonal involvement in modern American life.

There is a stubborn refusal to mention the subject of homosexuality on the part of society as a whole. Spokesmen of the establishment, the presumably responsible political figures and community leaders, paradoxically have nothing to say about the homosexual revolution. Our universities continue the intellectual traditions established by Socrates two thousand years ago, yet they would rather rewrite history than admit that the founder of Western philosophy was himself homosexual.

Society is not simply uninterested in homosexuality. On the contrary, it is all too interested. The very word is charged with a ferocious emotional impact and automatically conjures up frightening images of degeneracy, criminality and even the supernatural. The myth of the homosexual has become as sacred a modern American delusion as the myth of the witch was in early America. And the same kind of people who were incinerating witches then are incarcerating queers now.

Homosexuality has become civilization's great secret. Society has succeeded in hiding homosexual phenomena away in dark closets and hushing all discussion of the matter, but homosexuality continues to haunt them, forever lurking in wait at the fringes of their consciousness. Far from ridding themselves of the problem, they now suffer from an obsessive fascination, a voyeuristic entrapment in homosexual themes. The gay life that is now looming into public view simultaneously shocks, disgusts, frightens and attracts, amuses and enchants them. They are hypnotized by homosexuality and more involved then they ever wanted to be.

Not surprisingly, the theories about homosexuality which are sheer nonsense exceed both in amount and variety those about any other controversial subject. The serious student who wishes to learn about the wider implications of homosexuality comes up against not only society's conspiracy of silence but also the utter ignorance of the majority of teachers who will discuss it. Most of the books on homosexuality proceed from the assumption that homosexuals are pitiable unfortunates tragically inflicted with an incurable malady, recite endlessly unrevealing case histories and generally pander to the voyeuristic tastes of the reading public. In place of psychodynamic analyses, they revitalize the perennial myths, catalog anybody's and everybody's familiar quotations and appendix reams of statistics that cannot be interpreted outside the framework of a viable theory.

But most of what is written by homosexuals themselves is either obsequiously apologetic or else petulant and pugnacious. Homosexual prejudices are often as mindless as heterosexual ones, and there will always be those who cannot resist the temptation to lower themselves in order to attract the attention of their enemies. Young journalists often denounce straight society with ugly displays of tasteless vulgarity, needlessly exhibiting to the conventional reader everything he finds offensive about homosexuals. By enflaming the darkest suspicions and feeding the paranoia of the straight world, the gay press often ends up indicting the very way of life it might have championed.

Even personal interviews of homosexuals can provide only as much information as they themselves possess. And modern man often knows as much about the dynamics of his personal sex life as an animal in the forest knows about the workings of his digestive system.

The modern student is left hanging with bits and pieces of evidence that do not make a case for either side, rearranging the parts of a puzzle that do not seem to fit, trying to make sense out of columns of statistics that just don't add up. What meager facts as are available can as easily be made to hang on to society's rigid condemnation of homosexuality as used to support the arguments of its proponents. In such a state of abysmal ignorance, cynicism offers itself as a quick and easy alternative to the patient search for truth.

But the establishment persists in projecting a subliminal dare. The perjurer at a courtroom trial gives himself away by averting his eyes from the audience, speaking in hushed tones and avoiding offer information freely to fill in the details of his story. Today the established forces that run this country are giving themselves away by refusing to discuss homosexuality calmly and openly in the schools, in courts of law and even in the press. By hushing the matter up they can hide the fact that they have no coherent case against homosexuality, but they cannot hide the fact that they aren't telling the whole story. By making a virtue of ignorance and a vice of inquiry, they invite anyone who respects the integrity of human truth to undertake a personal search.

Each of us is deputized and made a private investigator in such an atmosphere, forced to gather and evaluate our own evidence, to construct our own hypotheses and to reach our own conclusion--charged with fidelity to our search even should homosexuality prove the kind of enigma that requires a lifetime of thought to unravel.

-- reprinted from The Ninth Street Center Journal 1, Winter 1973