The Dictionary of Homophobia (121 page)

Felice, Théodore de.
Le Protestantisme et la question sexuelle
. Paris: Librairie Fischbacher, 1930.

Fourest, Caroline.
Foi contre choix, la droite religieuse et le mouvement “prolife” aux Etats-Unis
. Paris: Ed. Golias, 2001.

Gide, André.
Si le grain ne meurt
. Paris: Gallimard, 1926. [Published in the UK as
If It Die
. London: Secker & Warburg, 1950.]

Herman, Didi.
The Antigay Agenda
. Chicago/London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1997.

Leroy-Forgeot, Flora.
Histoire juridique de l’homosexualité en Europe
. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1997.

———.
Les Enfants du PACS
. Paris: L’Atelier de l’Archer, Presses universitaires de France, 1999.

———, and Caroline Mécary.
Le Couple homosexuel et le droit
. Paris: Odile Jacob, 2001.

Percey, William A. “Protestantism.” In
Encyclopedia of Homosexuality
. Edited by Wayne R. Dynes. New York: Garland Publishers, 1990.

Portal, Georges.
Un protestant
. Paris: Denoël, 1936.

Puff, Helmutt.
Sodomy in Reformation Germany and Switzerland, 1400–1600
. Chicago: Chicago Series on Sexuality and Society, 2003.

Schouten, H. J. “La Soi-Disant Pédérastie du réformateur Jean Calvin,”
Arcadie
, no. 105 (1962).

—Bible, the; England; Germany; North America; Europe, Northern; Judaism; Orthodoxy; Switzerland; Theology.

PSYCHIATRY

During the second half of the nineteenth century, psychiatry seized upon the question of homosexuality in order to reconstruct it as a mental illness. This appropriation lasted a very long time, during which psychiatry remained the preeminent paradigmatic discipline for the medicalization of homosexuality. Psychiatry was responsible for the essential theoretical data that has been generally accepted by other medical disciplines; this data relates to such issues as the pathological nature and innate character of homosexuality, its hereditary risk, and the concept of gender
inversion
. As well, psychiatry was responsible for many proposed
treatments
, which include aversion therapy, electroshock therapy, lobotomies, hypnosis, psychotherapy, and everything else that resulted from analytic therapy becoming increasingly instrumental among psychiatrists. Most of all, these theories and treatments enabled psychiatry to assume enormous control over homosexuals within its care, both male and female. Certainly, the genetic theories led to the forced
sterilization
of some individuals, and the hormonal hypothesis resulted in the death of some subjects used as guinea pigs, but neither of these instances negated the fact that psychiatry held sway over homosexuality around the world for nearly a century. It was consistently the psychiatrist to whom the adolescent or adult who felt an attraction to persons of the same sex would be referred, not only by those around him or her, but also by his or her own volition. As a consequence, the removal of homosexuality from the American Psychiatric Association’s list of mental illnesses in 1973 is a profound moment in the history of gay liberation, almost as important as
Stonewall
.

Since the emergence of the concept of “alienism” (the study or treatment of diseases of the mind) in the eighteenth century, homosexual relations have been the object of particular attention by psychiatrists. Nevertheless, until the second half of the nineteenth century, these types of relations were, at most, perceived as a “distasteful” behavior that could certainly be caused by mental illness, in the same way that alcohol abuse, or even an overabundance of heterosexual intercourse, could. Further, masturbation, considered the great “sexual” scourge that invariably led to insanity and death, received far more attention from the medical community during this period.

Conversely, the last quarter of the nineteenth century saw a reversal of this trend, when homosexuality became a major subject of concern for psychiatry. The theory of
degeneracy
(put forward by Austrian-French psychiatrist Bénédict Augustin Morel), the publicity arising from various criminal or political scandals involving homosexual relations, and the transformations in the structure of gender relations all paved the way for psychiatry’s interest in the subject of homosexuality. In fact psychiatry superseded the discipline of
legal medicine
which at one time was the principal medical branch involved in work on homosexuality, and was more able to propose etiology and treatments.

The central figure in psychiatry’s appropriation of homosexuality was Richard von Krafft-Ebing, the Austrio-German psychiatrist. His famous work
Psychopathia Sexualis
, a study of sexual perversity, was first published in 1886, then constantly updated throughout the next century, even after his death by his disciple Albert Moll. It was a bestseller from the start, a success that went well beyond professional medical circles. Its analysis of homosexuality can be summarized in three major points:

1. Homosexuality is a sexual
perversion
among others, following the example of fetishism or sadomasochism, but at the same time it constitutes a theoretical model for all other perversions. In this sense, it is a mental illness for which the individual cannot be held responsible.

2. Homosexuality is congenital, that is to say innate, and its etiology inscribes itself in the framework of pathological heredity within the theory of degeneracy. Thus, it is the product of the progressive delinquency of a family line.

3. Rarely curable, the clinical manifestation of homosexuality recalls an inversion of gender, even if the majority of homosexuals preserve the appearance and psychic life of their gender.

In the book, all the keynotes of scientific homophobia—homosexuality’s pathological nature, heredity, gender inversion—were present and elaborated upon. If Krafft-Ebing appears to be a doctor whom we cannot easily qualify as being virulently homophobic— unlike sexologist Auguste Ambroise Tardieu and his treatise, or the criminal intentions of the Nazi medicine—he is nonetheless the one who defined the three points above that would subsequently allow medicine in general, and psychiatry in particular, to be the privileged technology used to control and socially exclude homosexuals. Moreover, paradoxically, Krafft-Ebing’s concepts were considered progressive by the homosexuals of his time, many of whom risked imprisonment in their countries, in imperial Germany in particular. In a way, this phenomenon came from the ambivalence felt by the very first gay movement and its leader, sexologist Magnus
Hirschfeld,
who considered the effeminate homosexual to be an “accident of evolution,” thus allowing psychiatry to gain a better foothold on the issue, being that it was accepted by homosexuals themselves. Psychiatrists Jean-Martin Charcot and Valentin Magnan, at the frontier between psychiatry and neurology, pushed the etiological issue further by suggesting a cerebral cause for the “inversion of genital awareness.” For Magnan, along with nymphomania, satyriasis, and
exhibitionism
, homosexuality was the result of spinal-cerebral dysfunction. This is the first mention of the idea of the “homosexual brain,” which would be used to justify lobotomy as a treatment for homosexuality; today, it is again the subject of attention as a result of the published work of British neuroscientist Simon LeVay on the hypothalamus of gay men. The return of a theory of a cerebral cause for sexual orientation—by an openly gay researcher no less—in order to once again justify the “natural” character of homosexuality, reveals the longevity of psychiatric concepts that originated in the nineteenth century, proving once again the paradoxical dimensions of medicine with regard to homosexuality, both a justification for repression and a means of liberation.
—Pierre-Olivier de Busscher

Bayer, Ronald.
Homosexuality and American Psychiatry: The Politics of Diagnosis
. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1987.

Bonello, Christian. “Du médecin légiste à l’aliéniste. L’homosexualité sous le regard de la médecine au XIXe siècle.” In
Homosexualités: expression/répression
. Edited by Louis-Georges Tin. Paris: Stock, 2000.

Bullough,Vern.
Science in the Bedroom: A History of Sex Research
. New York: Basic Books, 1994.

Charcot, Jean Martin, and Valentin Magnan.
Inversion du sens génital et autres perversions sexuelles
(1883). Paris: Frénésie Editions, 1987.

Duberman, Martin, and Ellen Herman, eds.
Psychiatry, Psychology, and Homosexuality (Issues in Lesbian and Gay Life)
. New York: Chelsea House Publishing, 1995.

Krafft-Ebing, Richard von.
Psychopathia sexualis. Etude médico-légale à l’usage des médecins et des juristes
. Paris: Payot, 1950. [Published in English as
Psychopathia Sexualis
.]

Foucault, Michel.
Histoire de la sexualité
.Vol. I : “La volonté de savoir.” Paris: Gallimard, 1976. [Published in the US as
The History of Sexuality
. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.]

Lanteri-Laura, Georges.
Lectures des perversions: histoire de leur appropriation médicale
. Paris: Masson, 1979.

Steakley, James.
The Homosexual Emancipation Movement in Germany
. New York: Arno, 1975.

—Biology; Degeneracy; Endocrinology; Ex-Gay; Fascism; Genetics; Hirschfeld, Magnus; Inversion; Medicine; Medicine, Legal; Perversions; Psychoanalysis; Psychology; Treatment.

PSYCHOANALYSIS

In 1973, the philosopher Gilles Deleuze wrote to Michel Cressole, founding member of the Front homosexual d’action revolutionnaire (FHAR; Homosexual Revolutionary Action Front), these few words: “Subject of an intimate joke, how can the boys of FHAR, the girls of MLF [Mouvement de liberation des femmes; Women’s Liberation Movement], and so many others, get analyzed? Doesn’t it bother them? Do they believe in it?” At first glance, we can easily understand the joke, given that the different psychoanalytical vulgates seem to have rivaled each other in homophobia with a fury that borders on the comical. Since its invention, from Freud to Ernest Jones to Tony Anatrella and Daniel Sibony, the different currents of psychoanalysis have never ceased to explain:

First, that
inversion
, then homosexuality, is a regressive form of sexuality (infantile fixation of a partial urge and Oedipal identification with the mother or the father) serving as an etiological factor for a majority of mental “illnesses” (
perversion
by non-repression of the partial urge, hysteria and neurosis by partial identification, and psychosis, paranoia mostly, by debarment or denial of the Name-of-the-Father). Second, that homosexuality represents the structure of perversion
par excellence,
that is to say the reverse of neurosis (he who does not repress), this meaning being often confused with its moral meaning (he who ignores pity and wishes bad for the sake of bad through an alliance between cruelty and erotic urges, according to the Freudian theory of sexuality). Third, that it is nonetheless possible, even if difficult, to try to “treat” homosexuals, on condition that they be “sincere” (which Freud’s patients were not), be it without their consent (in the United States, the most reactionary psychoanalysts built clinic-prisons to this effect). Fourth, that the suffering of homosexuals does not come from the society that represses them or from arbitrary moral standards that degrade them, but rather from themselves and their own history with the Oedipus Complex. Therefore, they cannot have any legitimate political demands: it is a private affair. Fifth, that, in a sense, homosexuality does not truly exist, as homosexual desires are not true desires, they are but a substitute of other oedipal desires of heterosexual essence: what the homosexual female desires is the phallus, what the homosexual male desires is his mother, to the point of identification (for sodomy), or the breast as partial object (for fellatio). Sixth (and it is a beauty), that homosexuals can nonetheless take an active role in “the general interests of humanity,” but on the specific condition that “they fight their tendency to exercise their sexuality,” as Freud said with regard to the case of Daniel Paul Schreber.

In short, if it is true that the Unconscious ignores contradiction, we must admit that psychoanalysis is not any more familiar with it: homosexuality would thus be the source or the symptom of illness (neurosis and psychosis), all the while being the opposite (a perversion); therefore, it is not completely an illness, although it can be treated; and it thus does not truly exist (neither politically, nor truly in a private way), but it
must
be sublimated. What a joke! More so that psychoanalysis, atheist in its origins, thus seems to imitate the worst religious casuistry: How can one welcome homosexuals while pushing them away? How can one condemn them (they are perverse) and forgive them as they know not what they do (they are ill)?

And yet, despite all these tortures, all these poisons, it is quite difficult to brand, univocally and without distinction, psychoanalysis as homophobic. First of all, it has mended its ways—as a business of sexuality, it has had to adapt to the evolution of morals in Western societies: the offices of analysts are well frequented, and of their own accord (the Freudian fashion of accepting perverts by request of the Father being rather outdated), by homosexuals, some of whom, in all good conscience, do not hesitate to open up shop. Thus, in the middle of an ocean of psychoanalytical homophobia, there have certainly been islands of explicit anti-homophobia (isolated at first, such as Georg Groddeck or Otto Rank, but more numerous today). But first and foremost, deep down, it is not certain that psychoanalysis had been constituently homophobic since the beginning, and that, for at least three reasons.

The first holds to a historical principle of justice: we cannot blame all of psychoanalysis for the prejudices of the bourgeoisie of the early twentieth century, and it would be a caricature to present it solely under its repressive or rigidly conventional view of homosexuality. Not only did it sometimes constitute a place of defense, of listening, and of self-reconstitution for many homosexuals, but, significantly, it is not certain that this “theory” is necessarily homophobic: by over-reading the analyses of homosexuals, overt or supposedly repressed, we forget to read the analyses of others, which often are not worth much more; in other words, “true” psychoanalysis is more Augustinian than Thomistic, for it is all sexuality that it envelopes in the same suspicion (and in the same familialist conception). The second reason is both more speculative and more tactical: Is it certain that psychoanalysis has the exclusive effect of “normalizing” and “depoliticizing” homosexuality? By recognizing both the universality of homosexual urges and the universality of every urge to turn away from its initial objective, does it not on the contrary tend—in spite of itself or not—to establish the fundamentally subversive character of all freely affirmed sexuality? As to the third reason, it is essentially strategic. It may be in the best interest of gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer, or transgender movements, who oscillate between the wish for normalization and subversive intention, to maintain, one way or another, contact with a practical and theoretical discipline which, since its beginnings, has also constantly managed to deal with oscillation, analogous rather than identical—sacrifice the pleasure to save the desire (as Deleuze would say) or sacrifice the false desire of pleasure to save the true joys (as Foucault would say).