The Ninth Street Center What People Say About Us

Review of Paul Rosenfels'
Homosexuality:
The Psychology of the Creative Process
by Ian Young

"Why are there homosexuals anyway? Why hasn't evolution eliminated them long ago?" The question was asked by the sexual theorist Charlotte Bach in the 1960's and there are those who are still struggling to answer it. Most orthodox scientists have preferred to restrict the scope of their speculations to the individual: "What made this particular man or woman queer?" And most gays would rather just forget the whole business and go out for the evening. But Charlotte Bach's question, in one form or another, has engaged more independent minds for well over a century.

Walt Whitman saw homoerotic attachments between men as essential for a healthy democracy. His English disciple Edward Carpenter tried to overturn the medical model of homosexualuality that is only now finally begninning to lose its grip. His view of gay men and lesbians as necessary for evolution was taken up by the philosopher Gerald Heard, one of the early pioneers of the American gay movement, and a friend and advisor to Christopher Isherwood and Aldous Huxley.

In the Seventies, gay liberationist David Gernbach also asked about the role of gays in human evolution. He questioned the commercial tangent the gay movement had veered off into, and urged gays to continue exploring androgyny, spirituality, and the nature of mated relationships.

The tough, important questions about the nature of gayness and gay relationships have, it seems to me, always been posed by independent, original thinkers unfettered by orthodoxy, academic position or close affiliation with political movements. One of the most interesting of these was Paul Rosenfels, a "renegade" psychiatrist (his own description) who died in 1985 at the age of 76.

Rosenfels stressed the importance of mated behavior in gay men, the interaction of love and power, and the working polarity of dominant and submissive (or "masculine" and "feminine") aspects. He emphasized the need to maintain the original inner spark that leads one to gayness in the first place: the spiritual drive to individuality, creativity and same-sex bonding.

Rosenfels -- whose students (he never called them patients) founded The Ninth Street Center in Manhattan -- worried about the compulsive promiscuity he was seeing in his young friends. Like Gerald Heard twenty years earlier, he connected promiscuous patterns to a more general loss of emotional balance in society, and saw personal creativity as a key to the way out. He saw sexual repression and compulsive promiscuity as two aspects (or consequences) of the same crisis -- a crisis of fear, with both personal and social dimensions. "Love," he observed, "is an entity which is not automatically brought into being because socially supported eroticism exists."

Homosexuality: The Psychology of the Creative Process, Rosenfels' most important book, first published in 1971, has been reissued in a new edition with an Introduction by Dean Hannotte, who was the author's lover. Like most of Rosenfels' writings, it is complex and challenging. Unfortunately, the good doctor's writing style is dense, philosophical and relentlessly theoretical. He never pauses for the examples, anecdotes or "case studies" that would illuminate his often murky prose. One reader described his books as "all steak and no sizzle."

But for those with an appetite for it, Rosenfels serves up an intellectual feast as satisfying as the meals he delighted in preparing at the Ninth Street Center. The Center's latest publication is a collection of conversations with Rosenfels' friends and students called We Knew Paul. Both books cost $9.95 each and are available from The Ninth Street Center, 151 First Ave., Suite 25, New York, NY 10003.

-- reprinted from Torso Magazine, December 1992