***** It's always open season on gay kids. But where, in all this, are psychoanalysis and psychiatry? Where are the "helping professions"? ...I am especially interested in revisionist psychoanalysis, including ego psycology, and in developments following on the American Psychiatric Association's much-publicized 1973 decision to drop the pathologizing diagnosis of homosexuality from its next Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-III). What is likely to be the fate of children brought under the influence of psychoanalysis and psychiatry today, post-DSM-III, on account of parents' or teachers' anxieties about their sexuality?
The monographic literature on the subject is, to begin with, as far as I can tell exclusively about boys. A representative example of this revisionist, ego-based psychoanalytic theory would be Richard C. Friedman's _Male Homosexuality: A Contemporary Psychoanalytic Perspective_, published by Yale University Press in 1988. (A sort of companion volume, though by a nonpsychoanalyst psychiatrist, is Richard Green's _The 'Sissy Boy Syndrome' and the Development of Homosexuality_ [1987], also from Yale.) Friedman's book, which lavishly acknowledges his wife and children, is strongly marked by his sympathetic involvement with the 1973 depathologizing movement. It contains several visibly admiring histories of gay men, many of them encountered in nontherapeutic contexts. These include "Luke, a forty-five-year-old career army officer and a life-long homosexual man" (RF, p. 152); and Tim, who was "burly, strong, and could work side by side with anyone at the most strenuous jobs": "gregarious and likeable," "an excellent athlete," Tim was "captain of [his high school] wrestling team and editor of the school newspaper" (pp. 206-7). Bob, another "well-integrated individual," "had regular sexual activity with a few different partners but never cruised or visited gay bars or baths. He did not belong to a gay organization. As an adult, Bob had had a stable, productive work history. He had loyal, caring, durable friendships with both men and women" (pp. 92-93). Friedman also, by way of comparison, gives an example of a _hetero_sexual man with what he considers a highly integrated personality, who happens to be a combat jet pilot: "Fit and trim, in his late twenties, he had the quietly commanding style of an effective decision maker" (p. 86).
Is a pattern emerging? Revisionist analysts seem prepared to like some gay men, but the healthy homosexual is one who (a) is already grown up, and (b) acts masculine. In fact, Friedman correlates, in so many words, adult gay male effeminacy with "global character pathology" and what he calls "the lower part of the psychostructural spectrum" (p. 93). In the obligatory paragraphs of his book concerning "the question of when behavioral deviation from a defined norm should be considered psychopathology," Friedman makes explicit that, while "clinical concepts are often somewhat imprecise and admittedly fail to do justice to the rich variability of human behavior," a certain baseline concept of pathology will be maintained in his study, and that that baseline will be drawn in a very particular place. "The distinction between nonconformists and people with psychopathology is usually clear enough during childhood. Extremely and chronically effeminate boys, for example, should be understood as falling into the latter category" (pp. 32-33).
"For example," "extremely and chronically effeminate boys" -- this is the abject that haunts revisionist psychoanalysis. The same DSM-III that, published in 1980, was the first that did not contain an entry for "homosexuality," was also the first that _did_ contain a new diagnosis, numbered (for insurance purposes) 302.60: "Gender Identity Disorder of Childhood." Nominally gender-neutral, this diagnosis is actually highly differential between boys and girls: a girl gets this pathologizing label only in the rare case of asserting that she actually is anatomically male (e.g., "that she has, or will grow, a penis"); while a boy can be treated for Gender Identity Disorder of Childhood if he merely asserts "that it would be better not to have a penis" -- _or_ alternatively, if he displays a "preoccupation with female stereotypical activities as manifested by a preference for either cross-dressing or simulating female attire, or by a compelling desire to participate in the games and pastimes of girls." While the decision to remove "homosexuality" from DSM-III was a highly polemicized and public one, accomplished only under intense pressure from gay activists outside the profession, the addition to DSM-III of "Gender Identity Disorder of Childhood" appears to have attracted no outside attention at all -- not even to have been perceived as part of the same conceptual shift....
...One of the most interesting aspects -- and by interesting I mean cautionary -- of the new psychoanalytic developments is that they are based on _precisely_ the theoretical move of distinguishing gender from sexuality. This is how it happens that the _de_pathologization of an atypical sexual object-choice can be yoked to the _new_ pathologization of an atypical gender identification. Integrating the gender-constructivist research of, for example, John Money and Robert Stoller, research that many have taken (though perhaps wrongly) as having potential for feminist uses, this work posits the very early consolidation of something called Core Gender Identity -- one's basal sense of being male or female -- as a separate stage prior to, even conceivably independent of, any crystalization of sexual fantasy or sexual object choice. Gender Identity Disorder of Childhood is seen as a pathology involving the Core Gender Identity (failure to develop a CGI consistent with one's biological sex); sexual object-choice, on the other hand, is unbundled from this Core Gender Identity through a reasonably space-making series of two-phase narrative moves....
...One serious problem with this way of distinguishing between gender and sexuality is that, while denaturalizing sexual object-choice, it radically _re_naturalizes gender....
...The renaturalization and enforcement of gender assignment is not the worst news about the new psychiatry of gay acceptance, however. The worst is that it not only fails to offer, but seems conceptually incapable of offering, even the slightest resistance to the wish endemic in the culture surrounding and supporting it: the wish that gay people _not exist_. There are many people in the worlds we inhabit, and these psychiatrists are unmistakably among them, who have a strong interest in the dignified treatment of any gay people who may happen already to exist. But the number of persons or institutions by whom the existence of gay people is treated as a precious desideratum, a needed condition of life, is small. The presiding asymmetry of value assignment between hetero and homo goes unchallenged everywhere: advice on how to help your kids turn out gay, not to mention your students, your parishioners, your therapy clients, or your military subordinates, is less ubiquitous than you might think. On the other hand, the scope of institutions whose programmatic undertaking is to prevent the development of gay people is unimaginably large. There is no major institutionalized discourse that offers a firm resistance to that undertaking: in the United States, at any rate, most sites of the state, the military, education, law, penal institutions, the church, medicine, and mass culture enforce it all but unquestioningly, and with little hesitation at even the recourse to invasive violence.
These books, and the associated therapeutic strategies and institutions, are not about invasive violence. What they are about is a train of squalid lies. The overarching lie is the lie that they are predicated on anything but the therapists' disavowed desire for a nongay outcome. Friedman, for instance, speculates wistfully that -- with proper therapeutic intervention -- the sexual orientation of one gay man whom he describes as quite healthy might conceivably (not have _been changed_ but) "have shifted _on its own_" (Friedman's italics): a speculation, he artlessly remarks, "not value-laden with regard to sexual orientation" (p. 212). Green's book, composed largely of interview transcripts, is a tissue of his lies to children about their parents' motives for bringing them in. (It was "not to prevent you from becoming homosexual," he tells one young man who had been subjected to behavior modification, "it was because you were unhappy" (RG, p. 318); but later on the very same page, he unself-consciously confirms to his trusted reader that "parents of sons who entered theraphy were...worried that cross-gender behavior portended problems with later sexuality.") He encourages predominantly gay young men to "reassure" their parents that they are "bisexual" ("Tell him just enough so he feels better" [RG, p. 207])....
...Referring blandly on one page to "psychological intervention directed at increasing [effeminate boys'] comfort with being male" (p. 259), Green says much more candidly on the next page, "the rights of parents to oversee the development of children is a long-established principle. Who is to dictate that parents may not try to raise their children in a manner that maximizes the possibility of a heterosexual outcome?" (p. 260). Who indeed -- if the members of this profession can't stop seeing the prevention of gay people as an ethical use of their skills? *****
What does the post-DSM-III regime of sexual normalization, as analyzed by Sedgwick, reveal to us? First of all, "there is no sin like being a woman," as the late Quentin Crisp once quipped. Secondly, unless gender is denaturalized, even a seeming depathologization of _adult, stereotypically "masculine"_ gay men doesn't really mean an equal valuation of homo and hetero, and the murderous wish to extirpate (perceived) "gayness" in the bud, so to speak, manifests itself in the diagnosis & treatment of the so-called Gender Identity Disorder of Childhood. Third, unlike Freud who, if anything, thought of "becoming woman" as more difficult than "becoming man," post-DSM-III ego psychotherapists seem to think that "becoming man" is a more perilous developmental pathway that can be easily derailed and that the making of "manhood" therefore requires constant policing of gender-norm conformity in every detail of life from early childhood. Fourth, all children are severely abused in that they are given even less freedom than adults to creatively think about sex, gender, & sexulaity, not to mention the fact that children are routinely denied access to knowledge, people, & institutions that can help them to explore how to live without trying to make sex, gender, & sexuality align "properly" according to hetero norms. Last but not the least, genderwise, we haven't made much progress since the days of _Tea and Sympathy_ (1953), especially with regard to childhood & young adulthood.
Yoshie