Playboy Panel: Homosexuality

Panelists

Irving Bieber, M. D., 62, is clinical professor of psychiatry at New York Medical College in Manhattan, chairman of the research committee of the Society of Medical Psychoanalysts and president-elect of the American Academy of Psychoanalysts. He is the senior author of Homosexuality: A Psychoanalytic Study and many other works on psychoanalysis. He has a psychoanalytic practice in New York City.

Paul Goodman, 59, received his doctorate at the University of Chicago and has since risen to prominence as an author and educator. A writer of social criticism (Growing Up Absurd), poetry (Hawkweed), novels (The Empire City), autobiography (Five Years) and co-author of Gestalt Therapy, Goodman has long been known for the passion of his attacks on anachronistic social systems and for the frankness with which he advocates the bisexual life style.

Richard H. Kuh, 49, a trial lawyer practicing in New York City, was graduated from Haryard Law School magna cum laude and served as assistant district attorney in New York City through 1964. He has taught law and written and lectured widely on diverse aspects of criminal justice. His 1967 book Foolish Figlcaves? Pornography In--And Out of--Court foreshadowed many of the conclusions of last year's Presidential Commission on Obscenity and Pornography.

Dick Leitsch, 34, is executive director of the New York Mattachine Society, a homophile referral and counseling service. A columnist for Gay, a homosexual newspaper, he has also written articles on homosexuality for many major publications and is a spokesman for the homophile movement on television talk shows and the college lecture circuit.

Phyllis Lyon, 46, is one of the founders of the Daughters of Bilitis, an international Lesbian society founded in San Francisco in 1955, and was the first editor of its magazine, The Ladder. She serves currently as vice-president of The Council on Religion and the Homosexual, and is the assistant director of the National Sex and Drug Forum. She and her partner of 18 years, Del Martin, are co-authoring a book on the Lesbian in a changing world, scheduled for publication late this year.

Marya Mannes, 66, born in New York City, is a prolific essayist, journalist, critic and social commentator who has been writing professionally since the late Twenties. During World War Two, she was director of a research bureau for the Office of War Information and, later, an intelligence analyst for the Office of Strategic Services. She Consolidated her reputation as a social critic and gadfly with the 1958 publication of More in Anger, a collection of essays. In the same year she was awarded the George Polk Memorial Award for magazine reporting.

Judd Marmor, M. D., 60, a member of the National Institute of Mental Health Task Force on Homosexuality, is the editor of Modern Psychoanalysis: New Directions and Perspectives and also of Sexual Inversion: The Multiple Hoots of Homosexuality. He is clinical professor of psychiatry at the school of medicine of the University of California at Los Angeles and director of the divisions of psychiatry at Cedar-Sinai Medical Center. He received the Silver Medal for Distinguished Service to the Field of Psychiatry from the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons.

Ted McIlvenna, 39, was graduated from Willamette University in 1954 and earned his theological degree from Pacific School of Religion in 1958. For three years, he studied social theory and social design in this country and abroad, then served for five years as senior minister of a Methodist church and director of a marriage-counseling service in Hayward, California. He was the organizer and first president of The Council on Religion and the Homosexual, and was the convener of an international conference on Church, Society and the Homosexual held in London before passage of Britain's homosexual-law-reform act in 1967. He is also the cofounder and codirector of the National Sex and Drug Forum and director of development and operational education for San Francisco's Glide Foundation, a church-related institution involved in the design of new methods for radically humanizing social problems.

Morris Ploscowe, 66, a former New York City magistrate, is a member of the Manhattan law firm of Littauer, Gordon, Ullman, Riseman and Ploscowe, and adjunct professor of law at New York University Law School. Along with Dr. Marmor, he was a member of the National Institute of Mental Health Task Force on Homosexuality. Author of Sex and the Law and The Truth About Divorce, Judge Ploscowe has long been a leader in programs of law reform in the areas of sex, crime and marriage.

William Simon, 40, received his Ph.D. from

the University of Chicago and spent three years at the Institute for Sex Research, at Bloomington, Indiana, where he co-edited, with John H. Gagnon, Sexual Deviance. More recently, he co-edited, again with Gagnon, The Sexual Scene. The author of numerous papers and articles, he is now program supervisor of sociology and anthropology at the Institute for Juvenile Research, in Chicago, and associate professorial lecturer at the University of Chicago. Dr. Simon's current research, sponsored by the Public Health Service, focuses on youth and youth cultures.

Kenneth Tynan, 43, who is probably best known in this country as the deviser of the erotic revue Oh! Calcutta!, began his career as an iconoclast as a schoolboy in Birmingham, England, where, in a mock parliamentary election, he ran as an independent candidate advocating the repeal of laws governing homosexuality and abortion. Asked to withdraw, Tynan handed the headmaster not only his own resignation but those of the other three candidates. He was graduated from Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1948 and quickly established himself as England's leading young drama critic. After writing for several months in that capacity for The New Yorker, he returned to England, where he became film critic of the London Observer and literary manager of Britain's National Theater. A champion of sexual frankness in his roles as both critic and theater administrator, and often at the center of critical controversy, he is currently at work as co-scenarist, with Roman Polanski, on the latter's film version of Macbeth, being shot by Playboy Productions in Great Britain. He is also a Playboy Contributing Editor.

[Q] Playboy: Until fairly recently in the U. S., homosexuality was something of a forbidden subject, but in the past few years it has come into the open. Books about homosexuals have reached the best-seller lists; plays and movies have portrayed homosexual life with relish, if not always with accuracy; radical gay-activist groups have sprung up and, in some areas, have clashed with police in street fighting. At least one homosexual church is flourishing in California and, in some states, homosexual couples have attempted to obtain marriage licenses. Is all this the result of an increase in the number of homosexuals in America, or simply a sign of greater frankness in public discussion?

[A] Leitsch: I think there are more overt homosexuals today than at any other time in history. And I think this is healthy, because there are correspondingly fewer closet queens--men who hide their homosexuality--or latent and repressed homosexuals. There are two reasons for this: First, the homosexual subculture has come to the surface; thanks to the larger sexual revolution, homosexuality is more open and people are better informed about it. Men and women who think they may be homosexually inclined can find gay bars, clubs--and other homosexuals in them. They can experiment sexually and find their niches. The old isolation each homosexual used to feel is rarer today; every homosexually oriented person now knows that he or she isn't the only one in the world. Second, the social taboos against homosexuality have been relaxed--just as those against freer and more open sexual expression of every kind have been. Psychiatrists and clergymen aren't as likely as they used to be to recommend heterosexual marriage as a "cure" for homosexuality, nor is it as necessary as it used to be for homosexuals to put up a facade. Social pressure used to result in male homosexuals taking wives--or Lesbians taking husbands--as "fronts." One need only read a biography of Oscar Wilde, or of André Gide, to understand what effect that had on the spouse. Not long ago, someone I know made the flip comment, "I have nothing against fags, but I wouldn't want my brother to marry one." I told him, "Better your brother than your sister."

[A] Mannes: I think one of the reasons homosexuals are more visible nowadays is that they accept themselves much more freely. They've begun to take a pride in being different, where formerly they felt they should probably be ashamed. It's part of a general change in attitude toward nonconformity; difference from the crowd has become a thing of value rather than a deformity. People are discovering the worth of being what you honestly are, without concealment, whether you're the norm or not, whether you're the majority or the minority. You have as much right to look as you like, to live as you like--and to love as you like--and to love as the next person.

[A] Kuh: My experience would lead me to avoid relying on court observations or police records to prove anything about the amount of homosexuality today. If you have a shake-up in the plainclothes division, which makes most of the homosexual arrests, you're probably going to get more arrests; when police manpower is increased by some percent, you're going to get more arrests; if you get a police drive against sex deviates, you're going to get more arrests. But that doesn't necessarily mean there is more active homosexuality. It would seem to me, just as a layman, that one sees more homosexuality today because--especially in a city like New York--some of its manifestations are more open than they were ten years ago, as some of the other panelists have suggested. Whether, quantitatively, more homosexuals exist, I don't know. But I do know that police figures would be an extremely unreliable measure.

[A] Tynan: Well, there are certainly more admitted homosexuals than there used to be, because public attitudes have grown more permissive. And this may have contributed to a general but illusory notion that there has been an over-all increase.

[A] Bieber: I agree that the greater visibility of homosexuality, particularly in large urban areas, reflects a change in sexual mores. There may also be an increase in the absolute numbers of homosexuals with the increase in population. But whether there has been an increase in percentage is simply not known. We can only speculate.

[A] Marmor: I think that's right. But evidence exists that when a society becomes progressively more urbanized and more complex technologically, as ours is doing, it becomes more difficult for men to define and fulfill the masculine role. Thus, in such societies, this may be one of the contributing factors to an increase in the actual percentage of homosexuals.

[A] Bieber: I don't know what evidence Dr. Marmor is referring to, but in Mexico the cultural, hypermasculine mystique called machismo has tended to water down as technology, education and general sophistication continue to develop. This makes cultural concepts of masculinity easier to fulfill as society advances. According to Dr. Lionel Ovesey, conflicts over an inability to fulfill cultural expectations of masculinity produce problems he has referred to as pseudo homosexuality, not true homosexuality. These men may develop fears about being homosexual, but they do not respond with sexual arousal to members of the same sex.

[A] Simon: Maybe social conditions do make it difficult for young men to fulfill their fathers' idea of what a man should be; but they're not going to give up women just because of that. Straight and gay people are both being freed from stereotyped notions of how to come on as men or women, but that doesn't mean there are more people doing homosexual things to one another. The proportion of the population that's homosexual probably remains static.

[Q] Playboy: Are there reliable estimates of what that proportion is?

[A] Leitsch: In Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, Kinsey says that 37 percent of all American males have had at least one homosexual experience leading to orgasm and that somewhere between two and ten percent of American males are exclusively or primarily homosexual. There are 100,000,000 males in America, so if only two percent are labeled homosexuals, then there are 2,000,000 male homosexuals in the United States today. Plus a lot of Lesbians.

[A] Lyon: I've always placed the figure a good deal higher. It's impossible, with the present attitudes of society, to obtain an accurate census, and I may be estimating too high, but I've always figured that there is an equal number of male and female homosexuals and that the total figure probably comes to around eight to ten percent of the population. That makes nearly 20,000,000 people who are more committed to homosexuality than to heterosexuality.

[A] Bieber: The only statistics in which I have any confidence were those published by the Armed Forces after World War Two, in which about 10,000,000 Americans served. The Army reported that four tenths of one percent were rejected at induction centers for homosexuality; another four tenths of one percent were separated from the Services because of it and, perhaps, an additional one percent--and this is an extravagant estimate--were undetected. This brings the total to about two percent, which accords with Mr. Leitsch's lowest statistic. But he arrived at a figure of 2,000,000 male homosexuals in the civilian population by taking two percent of the 100,000,000 males in the United States. What he didn't take into account is the fact that a substantial percentage of that 100,000,000 are children. Had he done so, the absolute number of estimated homosexuals would be considerably lower.

[A] Marmor: I think all the figures we presently have are dubious. When Kinsey was defining male sexual experience, he drew up a heterosexual-homosexual continuum scale on which individuals who were exclusively heterosexual in fantasy and behavior were numbered zero, those who were exclusively homosexual were numbered six, and there were various gradations in between. According to Kinsey's estimates, there are anywhere between 2,000,000 and 4,000,000 more or less exclusively homosexual men in American society--that is, men who would be scored as five or six on the Kinsey scale--and almost all the statistical estimates I'm familiar with indicate a lower incidence of homosexuality among females. When we include men who would be scored as three or four on the Kinsey scale--that is to say, those who are more or less bisexual--the percentages are probably appreciably higher, but we simply do not have any reliable figures. Kinsey's figures are open to question because of the looseness of his definition of homosexuality. For example, I don't think that the exploratory homosexuality of adolescents--which he included in his estimates--has anything to do with the homosexuality that we're concerned with in this discussion. Most adolescents are desperately heterosexual. The only reason they fool around with members of their own sex is that our culture blocks them from doing the heterosexual fooling around they would prefer. They're not homosexual.

[A] Simon: Some new data bears that out. The best part of the Kinsey male sample --those males interviewed while at college--was recently retabulated. About one third of the total group had had a homosexual experience in which either the subject or a partner had an orgasm. But out of that number, about half had had the experience before they were 15. Of the rest, one ninth of the total group had experiences confined to late adolescent experimental homosexuality. That leaves only one eighteenth--five or six percent--of the total who had any real adult homosexual experience. Half of these were exclusively homosexual and the other half had mixed amounts of heterosexual and homosexual experience.

[A] Marmor: Tabulating experiences is the only clear statistical measure we have, but even if the figures were trustworthy, they wouldn't be a precise guide to the number of homosexuals now in existence. Since the spectrum of human sexual behavior ranges all the way from exclusive homosexuals who have never had any heterosexual relations to exclusive heterosexuals who have never had any homosexual relations. I think you could describe the homosexual only as an adult who is motivated by a definite preferential erotic attraction to members of the same sex. Such a preference usually involves overt sexual relationships, but not necessarily: A person can be homosexual in his erotic motivations and desires, yet be inhibited about actually engaging in overt homosexual acts. There are homosexual virgins as well as heterosexual ones.

[A] Bieber: From a theoretical point of view, I conceive of two distinct categories--heterosexual and homosexual. Heterosexuality is part of normal biosocial development, while homosexuality is always the result of a discovered sexual development. The two categories are, therefore, mutually exclusive and cannot be placed on the same continuum. What can be placed on a liner continuum are various types of homosexuality, ranging from exclusive homosexuality to bisexuality with a predominance of heterosexuality and only occasional and sporadic homosexuality.

Individuals who are consistently turned on by members of the same sex are certainly homosexual; yet there are men who engage repetitively in homosexual acts but are not consciously aware of being turned on. Young male prostitutes sometimes deny sexual arousal and insist they do it only for money. I would regard such young men as homosexuals, as I would regard any other individuals--including bisexuals--who engage repetitively in homosexual acts.

[A] Leitsch: The key issue is, surely, whether a person thinks of himself as a homosexual. There are people who are heterosexually married and have lots of heterosexual experience that they may or may not enjoy and who have only occasional homosexual experiences; but if they think of themselves as being homosexual, in my definition they are. You can't define a homosexual by counting acts.

[A]Bieber: A man is homosexual if his behavior is homosexual. Self-identification is not relevant. I have known men who are exclusively homosexual but who don't think of themselves as homosexual because they always take what they consider to be the masculine role. I agree that one cannot define homosexuality by counting acts, yet one does have to do some counting. An isolated homosexual experience doesn't define a man as homosexual; but if he has one such experience every year, he would have to be considered homosexual.

[A] McIlvenna: I think it's totally pointless, destructive and narrow-minded to categorize homosexuals in this way, and talk of their "disordered sexual development." More and more young people today are trying to teach themselves to love one another regardless of gender, and they're certainly not disordering their development. They're developing in ways that the uptight would never understand. Men who make love to men and women who make love to women are far, far healthier than people who daren't accept their sexuality at all.

[A] Bieber: Instead of directing the terms pointless, destructive and narrow-minded at me personally, it would be more in keeping with the spirit of an exchange of ideas to drop ad hominem remarks and instead pay attention to the substance of the discussion. The terms loving and making love have widely different meanings. It is normal for women to love women and for men to love men. It is not normal for a man to "make love" to a man. It doesn't disorder sexual development for two men to make love to each other. It is merely evidence that their sexuality has already been disordered. The question of which is healthier--homosexuality or no sexuality--is not a good question to begin with, since both situations indicate sexual difficulties.

[A] Goodman: Other things being equal, I would expect people to engage mostly in heterosexual activity, but also to have some homosexual activity both for pleasure and to enrich friendship.

[A] Bieber: Fully heterosexual adult males cannot be aroused sexually by other men and they have no desire for homosexual activity. In what way homosexual activity would "enrich" a heterosexual friendship is quite beyond me, and Mr. Goodman hasn't told us.

[A] Leitsch: It would be hopelessly confusing to lump such people together with exclusive homosexuals and with people who have no homosexual experience but who have repressed homosexual fantasies, and call them all homosexuals. It seems to me a mistake to use the word homosexual as a noun at all; it should probably be used only as an adjective to describe types of behavior: homosexual acts, homosexual orientation. If the word must be used as a noun, it should be limited to include only those people who are primarily homosexually oriented and who think of themselves as homosexual. Perhaps it should be narrowed to include only those who live and function in the homosexual subculture.

[Q] Playboy: What exactly is the homosexual subculture? What kind of life style do most homosexuals adopt?

[A] Ploscowe: The homosexual way of life varies enormously from person to person. When you're talking about those who have committed themselves to a definite preference--with no ifs, ands or buts--then you often find them congregated in certain professions: acting, interior decoration, design, hairdressing, etc. Many of them will live together almost like husband and wife. They go to gay bars and socialize almost exclusively with other homosexuals.

[A] Simon: In his most visible form, the gay world is simply a sexual market place, with definite similarities to the single-swingers-bar world that's common now in nearly every city. The homosexual world has more than bars, though. Steam baths, for example, have always been a congregating place. In these places, homosexuals can negotiate their sexual experiences--but, of course, as in the singles bars, not everybody makes out all the time. So the gay scene is also a place where sexual frustrations are focused. People go into it often desperately wanting something they know they will very probably fail to find, and the scene can seem lonely and frightening to many. To anyone familiar with the gay world, it won't come as a surprise that masturbation is still the commonest sexual outlet for the homosexual and accounts for the largest part of his sexual experience.

[A] Leitsch: The gay World is bound together by one thing: sexuality. It makes all homosexuals brothers and sisters. They have nothing in common other than this. You meet men in a bar, and the only common subject is homosexuality; it's the one thing we may go home together for. Take me, for example. As a kid I moved to New York--originally from Kentucky, a provincial hick country boy. I had a bachelor's degree. By being gay, I was able to move in circles I wouldn't have gotten into otherwise. All around the world there are gay bars. It's always easy to be accepted. If you went to England as a straight person, you probably wouldn't meet many English people you'd spend most of your time in tourist places. A homosexual would immediately find his way into the English homosexual subculture.

[A] Simon: Those homosexual men who don't find their way into this society--or who reject it--run grave risks in trying to act out their sexual impulses elsewhere. But the gay world can be a trap, too. People may spend too much time there, or commit themselves to it so much that they cut themselves off from important non-sexual experiences common to the straight world. Unlike other subcultures, the homosexual community has very limited content. It may reduce the problems of access to sexual partners and reduce guilt by providing a structure of shared values, but the shared-value structure is often far too narrow to transcend other areas of value disagreement. The college-trained professional and the bus boy, the WASP and the Negro slum dweller may meet in sexual congress, but he similarity of sexual interests doesn't eliminate the larger social and cultural barriers. The subculture is such a small world, however, that it constrains most members to participate in it only on a limited basis, reducing their anxiety and conflicts in the sexual sphere and increasing the quality of their performance in other aspects of social life. But the fact remains that the homosexual community is in itself an impoverished cultural unit.

[Q] Playboy: Do Lesbians lead the same son of life?

[A] Lyon: Well, there are now four or five female bars in my city, there is more "public" behavior among Lesbians than there used to be and there are more women involved in the movement than ever before. Women's lib has been a strengthening force. But most Lesbians still visit each other's homes; that's where most of their social life is. Or they go away for weekends. It's a much more discreet, private life.

[Q] Playboy: If the Lesbian scene is so much more restrained than the male homosexual scene, this must make it more difficult for the young Lesbian to meet a partner or partners. Miss Lyon, how did you handle that phase of your life that homosexuals call coming out, when you first identified yourself as a homosexual and began to explore the homosexual community?

[A] Lyon: I think I was a strange, atypical case. I simply didn't know Lesbians existed. All my early-life experience was heterosexual--until I was about 24. All my life: I had been interested in women: I sought out women as friends. I used to fantasize about feeling and touching women, but somehow I don't remember this as a sexual awareness or experience. Then I met someone who explained my feelings and told me about Lesbianism, and that was the first I knew of it.

[Q] Playboy: Did the readjustment cause much strain?

[A] Lyon: Well, not immediately. My friend and I knew each other three years before we finally got together; then the stress occurred. I felt when I walked down the street that everyone would know. After I worked through all this, the problems disappeared. I talked to my sister about it, and that was no problem. I wanted to talk about it with my father, too, but he refused to discuss it, although I felt he'd found out or suspected the truth somewhere along the line.

[Q] Playboy: Was coming out difficult for you too, Mr. Leitsch?

[A] Leitsch: Yes. I came out when I was about 17 and assumed no one would understand, that people would be unsympathetic. Then, when I was 19, my parents found out. They were suspicious and guessed. I had a cousin who was a priest--a prison chaplain, I believe. He told my parents he thought I was queer. My parents went out and learned about homosexuality. Surprisingly enough, when they knew for sure that I was a queer, they were very tolerant and understanding and interested and they demanded to meet my friends. So there had been no reason for me to be panicked for the two or three years before they knew.

[A] Simon: Many male homosexuals go through a crisis of femininity when they first identify themselves as gay. They "act out" in relatively public places in a somewhat effeminate manner; some, in a transitory fashion, wear female clothing. After all, they've abandoned one of the major supports of their masculinity--the nonsexual reinforcement females give to the masculine status. It's not surprising that the very core of masculine identity should be seriously questioned. A few males retain this pseudo-feminine commitment; a few others emerge masquerading as female impersonators. But the tendency is for this kind of behavior to be a transitional experiment for most male homosexuals, an experiment that leaves vestiges of camp behavior.

[Q] Playboy: Is this confusion about how to behave in public accompanied by any parallel confusion about how to behave in bed?

[A] Simon: Most homosexuals probably make their sexual adjustments quite easily, but there are common exceptions. There's the attitude, for example, that "You're not really queer until you've blown somebody." A butch type may happily go on letting himself be blown and still think of himself as perfectly straight. But this type usually ends up on the other side of the counter. A lot of homosexuals pass through the phase of only being passive inserters, but eventually they find themselves both giving and receiving. There's a typical case in Laud Humphreys' book Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places, a sociological account of homosexual activity in public lavatories. There's a man described there who at first will only be blown; he says he "wouldn't have been caught dead with one of the things in my mouth." But he ends up the biggest cocksucker in town. Most homosexuals have indulged in anal intercourse, too, but only infrequently; at least that seems to be true of the American male homosexual. For some American gays, of course, anal intercourse is their primary mode of experience, but in general, fellatio is more common. In other cultures it may well be different. We have only fragmentary data for foreign countries, but judging by the homosexual literature, buggery seems to be more common in the Middle East and on the Continent, particularly in England. I don't know why.

[Q] Playboy: Dr. Bieber, you said earlier that homosexuality is "the result of a disordered sexual development." Were you implying that homosexuality is a form of mental illness?

[A] Bieber: No. I do not regard homosexuality as a mental illness. I regard it as a psychologically rooted sexual disorder in the same sense that I consider chronic frigidity in a woman or impotence in a man to be a neurotically evolved condition. Frigidity and impotence come about because of unconscious and unrealistic fears that sexual gratification, or gratification with certain partners, will invite punishment and injury. Homosexuality comes about for similar reasons. Homosexuals have unconscious fears of reprisal that they associate either with heterosexual intercourse itself or with fears of having a sexually fulfilling, sustained love relationship with a woman. In my view, homosexuality is maladaptive because it is based on fears that are not realistic, and not because of cultural unacceptability. It would be no less abnormal if it were culturally accepted. In a sense, homosexuality is a type of heterosexual inadequacy. Homosexuals whom I have examined--and these number in the many hundreds, including nonpatient homosexuals--suffer from a seriously impaired sense of masculinity, whether or not they are aware of it. A colleague referred a homosexual to me to see whether I could find evidence of any significant psychopathology. My colleague was convinced he had found a so-called normal homosexual. The man I met was about six feet tall, athletic-looking and weighed about 190 pounds. When I asked whether he saw himself as a well-built, strong man, which he obviously was, he said he had no such image of himself and didn't think any homosexual thought of himself that way.

[A] Goodman: It's meaningless to say that homosexuality is pathological, per se. True, it is pathological to be unable to function heterosexually: after all, the heterosexuality of animals must be deeply ingrained; otherwise the species wouldn't survive. But one's performance of homosexual acts is of no significance if his heterosexual activity is unimpaired. He would operate bisexually, and that's that. Homosexual activity under good conditions is obviously enjoyable, and sometimes--for geographical reasons, like being on a ship or in a barracks--it's practical, too. If there were a strong block against engaging in homosexual acts under such conditions, this in itself would be neurotic.

[A] Bieber: Homosexuality is never unrelated to fears and inhibitions associated with heterosexuality, whether the homosexuality is exclusive or whether a man is bisexual. The dynamics of sexual behavior center on fear of attack by men perceived as powerful, competitive and dangerous. The bisexual takes flight into a homosexual experience usually after he has experienced sex with a woman. In this way, he attempts to act out his psychological problems with men. Often, it is a submissive gesture. In part, he is saying unconsciously, "Look, guys, I don't really mean it. I'm with you and I've given her up to you and for you." After a good heterosexual experience, a bisexual will often feel compelled to have sex with a masculine type who psychologically represents the men he fears, and then eroticizes as a way of neutralizing he fear. In such a situation, the bisexual is motivated to please his partner in all soils of sexual ways to forestall the anticipated attack.

[A] Leitsch: I simply can't accept these theories. I don't think homosexuality itself is psychopathological or causes psychopathology; I think social attitudes toward it do. You hear very frequently that homosexuals are paranoid, that they think everyone is after them. But if you read the newspapers, you see that the cops are after them; the government is after them and everybody else is after them. It's not paranoid to think someone is after you if he really is. You also have everyone telling you that you're sick and you're criminal and you're a sinner. You obviously develop feelings of being inadequate and unwanted.

[A] Bieber: Society and social attitudes neither create nor maintain an individual's homosexuality, though a repressive society foments a gloomy, unpleasant atmosphere as well as realistic problems connected with persecution. I've known a fair number of homosexuals who are intellectual, for example, and could easily settle into intellectual social circles, but most don't. There aren't many sophisticated people around who concern themselves about the sexual preferences of their friends; most couldn't care less. Yet exclusive homosexuals, as a rule, live in a homosexual world. I think they isolate themselves because they're afraid to mix on an intimate level with heterosexuals. They experience anxiety with "straight" guys. They are afraid that, if their homosexuality is exposed, they will be humiliated and rejected. This, of course, does happen. Insecurity and ignorance abound, so it's important that homosexuals choose heterosexual friends with care. Another important reason for their social isolation is the need not only to get away from straight men, who may represent the father figure, if you like, but they also must avoid the company of sexy women, who might arouse heterosexual feelings--which they wish to avoid. Consequently, many live an atypical social life. They are not necessarily completely unconnected to other circles, but in the sense that heterosexual friendship groups aren't part of the fabric of their daily existence, a kind of self-imposed social ghetto existence is very common. The result of this separation is, of course, an accentuation of their differences as a group.

[A] Leitsch: I disagree that homosexuals are afraid to mix with heterosexuals. It's more boredom than fear that limits interaction. Heterosexuals are very nice people, but they do tend to talk about what broads they're trying to screw or which diaper services are most reliable.

[A] Bieber: I can think of a very long roster of heterosexuals who are not boring, including members of this panel.

[A] Marmor: I just can't agree that homosexual behavior is inherently pathological. Normalcy is a culturally defined phenomenon. In our time and culture, homosexuality is considered to be deviant from accepted norms, but in different times and in other cultures, homosexuality hasn't always been so defined and therefore wouldn't be regarded as pathological.

[A] Bieber: I believe Dr. Marmor is incorrect in his view that normalcy can only be culturally defined and that homosexuality would not be pathological in a society that accepted it. He implies that if our society accepted it, homosexuals wouldn't suffer any more psychological problems than heterosexuals. During the Victorian era, frigidity was regarded as normal. Can we therefore assume that frigidity created no psychological problems for a woman or for her husband because it was culturally defined as normal? I think not.

[A] Leitsch: I understand pathology to mean a condition that prevents an individual from functioning in society, that prevents him from having meaningful relationships and that causes unhappiness. Many, if not most, homosexually oriented people are very happy, function well in society, make their livings, contribute to the community's well-being and are not "sick" in any way--except by definition.

[A] Bieber: An individual may function quite well in society and appear happy, yet be schizophrenic. There is a common misconception that if an individual is effective and gets along well, he is therefore "normal" and that serious psycho-pathology is necessarily absent. Some notable world leaders, artists and scientists have had serious psychiatric disorders. So even if a homosexual is comparatively well-adjusted, this doesn't mean his homosexual adaptation, as such, is normal.

I'd like to add that criticism is often leveled at the clinician who views inversion as pathological because he presumably sees only the "troubled" homosexuals. I had occasion during my military service to examine a sizable sample of non-patient homosexuals, and I didn't find any significant differences between patient and nonpatient homosexuals in regard to family history or the psychodynamics that characterize homosexuality.

[A] Leitsch: Calling homosexuality sick is like calling it sinful. A value judgment is made that has no basis in objective criteria. There are responsible psychiatrists who laugh at the notion of homosexuality being a sickness, just as there are very moral people who feel that homosexual acts between consenting adults in private aren't sinful. But I must admit that the gay world is as likely to label behavior sick as the straight world is. Many overt homosexuals are convinced that closet queens are sick and unhappy; middle-class monogamous homosexuals are sure that their promiscuous younger brothers are unhappy; and the promiscuous ones are positive that the monogamous ones are miserable. Some homosexuals feel guilty about not being unhappy. They were taught that homosexuals must be unhappy and feel guilty if they aren't.

[A] Simon: It may be the 20th Century's form of the puritan ethic to see all pleasure-seeking behavior as pathological. In the puritan's view, pleasure is something that must be paid for and the payment nowadays is supposed to be a disturbed psyche. Not only do we pathology-hunt among homosexuals, we look for and delight in finding pathology in others who are presumed to be enjoying themselves more than the rest of us.

On the other hand, there's no denying that homosexuals as a group are probably in a higher-risk category than are heterosexuals. Because of their personality developments, they run the risk of greater unhappiness; they're likelier to become mentally ill or alcoholic, or to act in ways that block full development, Homosexual life contains great potential for demoralization, despair, self-hatred and a significant escalation of individual psychopathology. This potential is suggested by some recently collected data from a group of 550 white homosexual males. About one half reported that 60 percent or more of their sexual partners were persons with whom they had sex only one time. Between 10 and 20 percent reported that they often picked up their sexual partners in public toilets. An even larger proportion reported similar contacts in other public or semipublic locations. Between a quarter and a third reported having been robbed by a sexual partner. Between 10 and 15 percent reported having been blackmailed because of their homosexuality. For two fifths of the respondents, the longest homosexual affair lasted less than one year, and for about one quarter, kissing occurred in one third or less of their sexual contacts. About 30 percent reported never having had sex in their own homes. And two fifths of these men, finally, indicated serious feelings of regret about being homosexual, giving such reasons as fear of social disapproval or rejection, inability to experience conventional family life, feelings of guilt or shame, or fear of potential trouble with the law. These data suggest a depersonalized character, a compulsive quality about the sexual activity of many homosexuals, which cannot be reckoned as anything but extremely costly to them.

In no society that I know of is homosexuality a desired or even anticipated outcome of the child-rearing process. The whole society is weighted toward producing and accommodating heterosexuals. This doesn't mean that all heterosexuals are automatically better off than homosexuals; we all know exclusive heterosexuals who are sicker than many homosexuals. It may mean that life must continually present more problems for the homosexual. It doesn't automatically follow, of course, that a homosexual is incapable of leading a happy and productive life. In this post-Freudian world, major psychic wounds are increasingly viewed as par for the human condition. As one major psychiatric theoretician observes, few survive the relationship with their parents without such wounding.

[Q] Playboy: What is the nature of the parental wounding that turns people into homosexuals rather than heterosexuals?

[A] Bieber: In the researches my colleagues and I carried out, we found that the central causative factors were located in the family. I would say that parents are the chief designers of the homosexual pattern, and in most cases, the parent-son relationship has a particular style. There is usually an inappropriately intimate, overclose relationship between the son and the mother, and more often than not, she prefers him to her husband. She acts in quite a paradoxical fashion; we call it double-bind behavior. She is often, on the surface, puritanical; yet she will be intimate and seductive with her son. She may share his bed far beyond the time a boy snuggles in bed with his mother; she may appear in various stages of undress and so forth. In contrast, the father communicates hostility openly or in hidden ways. Of all his children, he is least fond of this boy, although he may have a pretty good relationship with his other sons. He plays a crucial role in the development of homosexuality. Most male homosexuals love their mother but will tell you: "I hated my father" ... "He wasn't there" ... "I don't want any part of him" ... "I'm not at all like him." There is also, almost always, a history of grossly defective ties with childhood groups and troubled relationships with siblings, particularly brothers. But one must keep in mind that parents largely determine a boy's emotional preparation for peer-group participation. Many a parent of a homosexual interfered with their son's choice of friends and thus set the conditions for his lone-wolf behavior.

[A] Marmor: That's very true. A great deal of evidence has accumulated to show that peer experiences play a powerful role in normal sexual development. But often the mother of a male homosexual contributes to her son's homosexuality by intruding on his relationship with his peers. Mothers instill fears in their sons of the usual competitive peer experiences and make their sons overdependent, interfering with normal development of their assertiveness and masculinity. It's characteristic of homosexuals in their early life that they tended to feel like outsiders to their own peer groups.

[A] Leitsch: Everybody develops his sexual orientation the same way, no matter whether he's gay, straight, bisexual or a compulsive masturbator. I don't think many people any longer accept the fatuous theory of Dr. Bieber and his associates that everyone is born to be heterosexual, and anything that diverts him from exclusive heterosexuality is sick. Dr. Bieber has even said that bachelorhood is a sick state, that only heterosexual marriage is healthy and "normal." In light of recent sex research, all of this is much too simplistic. As man evolved from lower animals, he developed the part of the brain that controls learning and conditioning, but at the same time, he lost the directional instincts of the lower animals. Hence, we have to learn our sexuality. Each of us is born with a sex drive that's undirected. Parental example, the attitudes of our teachers, relatives and peers toward sex, our whole environment, direct our sexual drive. We're programmed, much as a computer is, by the information that's fed into us. The system is designed to program heterosexuality and monogamy into us; but, for a variety of reasons, the programming process sometimes indicates that an alternative is better. There's nothing unhealthy about this; it's perfectly normal.

[A] Bieber: I don't hold with this tabula rasa view that one is born without any sexual orientation and that culture and society intervene to direct sexual-object choice. There is no animal species that doesn't have inborn mechanisms to guarantee heterosexual arousal. In most mammals, smell is the determining mechanism. There is convincing evidence that smell is a heterosexual triggering mechanism in man. It's important in the early phases of childhood sexuality and even in later adult arousal. If social pressures alone facilitated the heterosexual response, man would be the only species without inborn programming for heterosexual arousal, and this is most unlikely. Moreover, if, as Mr. Leitsch argues, society preaches heterosexuality so ardently and thus directs sexual choice, the obvious question is: Why would anyone then become homosexual? Incidentally, the research that produced the theories Mr. Leitsch thinks of as fatuous received an award from the American Psychiatric Association in 1964. Quite contrary to his opinion, our work has received wide acceptance, though not in the homosexual press, I'm sorry to say. It has been gratifying to my associates and me to have made a contribution that is respected in scientific circles.

[A] Marmor: The kind of family structure that Dr. Bieber and his colleagues have described certainly renders a child more vulnerable to the possibility of becoming homosexual. But if one has this kind of family structure, one is not inevitably going to become homosexual. There are heterosexuals who come from this kind of family background. On the other hand, there are many homosexuals who emerge from family structures quite different from that described by Dr. Bieber. Moreover, I think it's worth noting that Dr. Bieber's model family refers specifically to male homosexuality and not to female homosexuality. No single, specific family background has been elicited for female homosexuality at this point in our investigation; our studies indicate that multiple causes are involved there also. No one family background can be a total explanation. But all the answers are simply not yet in. My own clinical experience suggests that the development of homosexuality depends on a complicated conglomeration of factors that vary in terms of quality, quantity and timing in their impact on the developing child.

[A] Bieber: I can't think of any category of human behavior where we have all the answers. Homosexuality is no exception. But we have to be willing to set forth hypotheses based upon clinical experience about what we think contributes to it. The data we systematically collect may or may not support our hunches. In our research, it did. To say that homosexuality is complex and has various determinants doesn't help us find answers. In our study, we never said that only one type of parent-child relationship engenders inversion. But we did find a representative type--the close-binding, over-intimate mother and the hostile father. Some homosexuals had mothers who were rejecting, harsh and seemingly unconcerned. Some had nagging, aggressive, overbearing and very possessive fathers. Some came from disadvantaged groups and broken families. In such cases, causative factors have to do with underprotection. Such men usually wind up as effeminate, unassertive and overly dependent on an older man. But we never found a homosexual who had a reasonably warm and constructive relationship with both parents. Where heterosexuals have a family history similar to those found among homosexuals, we invariably found homosexual problems, even though they may not be acted out. When parents of homosexuals are compared with parents of heterosexuals, there is almost always a clear indication of differences in attitudes and behavior. In general, parents of homosexuals are much more demasculinizing.

[A] Goodman: The family as a whole is important, but I agree with Dr. Marmor that there seem to be many possible causes. One obvious, important one is resentment or hostility toward a mother or sister in early years. Disgust with a woman's smell or a woman's taste becomes an important block. But if you go behind this disgust, there is almost always some kind of weaning problem; your mother starved you, so you don't want to have anything to do with her. Another cause is probably incestuous feelings. Since the mother and sister are forbidden sex objects and are very strongly desired at an early period, and since you must have sexuality, you give up the more incestuous article. Fear of punishment is another important cause. It was very important in my case. Throughout childhood, although I was a great one to play ball games and so forth, I was also rather sexy in the heterosexual line and was continually punished. I was put back four grades in school, once for kissing a girl in the alley and another time for writing a love note to a girl. Our society's antisexuality hits especially at heterosexuality while you're growing up, so that it becomes too goddamn much trouble and risk. At a later stage, homosexual practice has most of the social sanctions against it, but at the earlier stage it's the heterosexual practice that has the sanctions against it.

[A] Leitsch: A good friend of mine had similar experiences. He attended Catholic schools and was taught at an early age that boys don't have sex with girls--at least not until they're married. He had five or six premarital experiences with girls but he invariably felt guilty, dirty and full of shame after each one. The priests had neglected to program into him the information that they considered homosexual acts just as bad as--or worse than--premarital sex. To this day, my friend feels guilty about heterosexual experiences but feels no guilt or shame about his homosexual contacts.

[A] Mannes: I'd like to suggest another factor that may work after childhood. If there is any increase in homosexuality among men, it might well be the direct result of the sexually aggressive female. I don't mean here what is conventionally thought to be the aggressive woman--that is, the woman who works or has a career. But what I often observe, with a kind of horror, is a predatory woman working on some sensitive male in an attempt to trap, possess or marry him just to get some sexual esteem and gratification. A young man of 17 or 18 who is more or less compliant by nature, tender and with a vulnerable ego, would automatically turn to another man in fear of this kind of man-eater. In a sense, he would find a much deeper commitment to human equality with another man than he would with this kind of predatory woman, who seeks to trap him into a house, a mortgage, a secure office job and all the consumer hang-ups that go with marriage.

[A] Bieber: A homosexual personality would have to be already developed for such a thing to take place. Boys who reach adolescence without a homosexual pattern do not become homosexual. Children who have reached adolescence with a homosexual pattern get a second chance at this stage. During this critical period, constructive experiences with peer mates or with adults such as teachers and admired figures may strengthen a masculine identification and redirect a boy toward heterosexuality.

[Q] Playboy: Whether or not predatory women play a part in driving some men into homosexuality, the picture commonly drawn of homosexuals in many books, plays and movies shows them as hostile to women, and homosexual literature often paints females as castrating monsters. Do most homosexuals really hate the opposite sex?

[A] Lyon: I don't think there is nearly as much hatred across the homosexual-heterosexual line as people think. Lesbians aren't fundamentally man-haters, and male homosexuals aren't fundamentally woman-haters. The most fundamentally man-hating group I've ever run across are heterosexual women who have just discovered how badly they've been oppressed by men. I once went to a meeting of the National Organization for Women and the three Lesbians there all felt we had never heard such a violent hatred toward men. It was really fantastic and frightening. A lot of women in the women's-liberation movement are gathering together in small encountertype groups to support one another while they try to find out what it means to be a woman in our society and to get their heads straight. But this kind of thing tends to lead to an anti-male bias. If you read and talk about how women have been degraded and put down, you snarl at the next man you see. There are some Lesbians who hate men and some male homosexuals who hate women, but in large measure, I find that people really want to tear down existing barriers so they can get along better with one another.

[A] Mannes: I guess I've met and known far more male homosexuals than I have female--unless I've been awfully unperceptive. Many of them are real friends and colleagues whom I respect for what they do and the way they live. I think there is a certain ease among male homosexuals which allows them to give more freely to women. One can be relaxed enough to know that they exist first as human beings and then as homosexuals. There are even times when I think literary descriptions of women by homosexual men are in many ways more astute or acute than what totally heterosexual men might give.

[A] Tynan: It's true up to a point that homosexual playwrights have a special insight into feminine psychology that enables them to write superb roles for women. But they're nearly always portraits of tragic, neurotically defeated women, victimized by a patriarchal society in the same way that queers are. When it comes to creating nontragic female characters, queers are no more skilled than heteros.

[A] Bieber: The idea that homosexuals hate women is a fictitious one. When there is no threat of heterosexual involvement, homosexuals as a group tend, as Miss Mannes notes, to feel very much at ease with women--more so than with heterosexual men. And, frequently, they trust women more than they do men. This isn't hard to understand. After all, the most meaningful love object in their childhood was their mother, and often a sister. As I emphasized before, there is usually a history of having hated and feared males, even though they may have admired them. In our study, we found that most of the homosexuals became depressed after a prolonged period of time without the company of women.

[Q] Playboy: If homosexuals have such a close and comfortable relationship with women, why is it that when they imitate women, on stage or off, they often seem to copy--and sometimes caricature--the least likable and most grotesque elements of the female stereotype?

[A] Leitsch: I don't know why, but whenever homosexuals try to emulate the opposite sex, you're right that invariably they seem to choose the worst possible models. Drag queens usually dress themselves up like 42nd Street prostitutes. Butch Lesbians almost always mimic longshoremen, truck drivers and sometimes thugs.

[A] Tynan: Waspish, spiteful, bitchy, malicious--these are some of the characteristics of a type of queer we've all met, and also, as you point out, among the less admired characteristics of women. But these may be the common attributes of discontented second-class citizens. Society victimizes queers, so it must expect them to develop antisocial attitudes. Some queers behave as if they were taking a long-term revenge on heterosexual society for having rejected them. This may not be very lovable of them, but it's wholly understandable.

[A] Leitsch: It's partly a "Fuck you, world" attitude, partly a gibe at society's rules. Society says that men should behave like a Western gunfighter, but the queen imitates Bette Davis. It's the ultimate put-down of society's expectations. Why do you think Mae West is so popular in the gay world? Hell, she's been satirizing the female role longer than most of us have been alive.

[Q] Playboy: It's a common heterosexual belief that all male homosexuals act effeminate--even when they're not imitating specific women--and that all Lesbians are butch. What's the truth?

[A] Leitsch: A male homosexual can be as masculine as any other man. I value my masculinity as highly as my heterosexual brother values his, and I'm no more of a sissy than he is. And Lesbians don't have to be mannish, either.

[A] Lyon: In the 1940s in San Francisco, the Lesbian bars were usually filled with women wearing butchy tweeds or men's clothes--and an opposite type wearing very feminine garb--but this isn't what's going on now. This whole pattern of breaking down into butch and fem has really changed over the years. At the beginning of a relationship between two young women, often the only pattern they have on which to base their relationship is the masculine-feminine pattern of their father and mother. But pretty soon most Lesbians find out that's not what they want. The same thing happens with male homosexuals. They aren't playing out the husband-and-wife thing, either. You end up with two people living together, sharing all the various tasks, each doing whatever he does best and not worrying about whether it fits into the conventional roles of husband or wife, man or woman. I think this is part of a larger drift in the whole society. We're moving away from specific kinds of dress, behavior and roles that have been connected culturally with being a man or a woman.

[A] Leitsch: Male homosexuals are generally regarded as effeminate simply because most people can't spot a homosexual who doesn't swish. And most of us don't.

[A] Tynan: Yes, in general, you can't tell that a man is queer unless he wants you to know. Lenny Bruce had a marvelous routine about a mother who never understood why her grown-up son hadn't got married: "He's so good-natured," she says. "A night doesn't go past he doesn't bring home some poor Serviceman, some guy who ain't got a place to sleep." Some queers do like to make a big production of their queerness, doing the full swishing and lisping bit, but many male homosexuals are as butch as John Wayne, and I've known Lesbians as kittenish as Truman Capote. Conversely, don't be fooled by young Englishmen who wear lace shirts and wave their hair; most of them are as heterosexually randy as gibbons. Many people have traits normally associated with the opposite sex, but this doesn't mean that they're homosexual.

[Q] Playboy: Conversely, again, it's widely believed that homosexuals are randier--and more promiscuous--than heterosexuals. Is this another myth?

[A] Marmor: This is one of the myths that exist with regard to all minorities. Minority groups are considered inferior and therefore closer to "animals." In a society that thinks of sexuality as "animalistic," it clearly follows that in the popular mind, minority groups are thought more sexual. I've seen many homosexuals as inhibited and moralistic about expressing themselves homosexually as some heterosexuals are about heterosexual activity. But as a general rule, homosexual men are able to be freer in expressing their sexuality toward each other because the same kind of binding factors and interpersonal commitments don't generally exist between them that exist between men and women. There is no danger of pregnancy and no social expectation of marriage. One therefore sees a greater degree of promiscuity among homosexuals than among heterosexuals.

[A] Tynan: The belief that queers are sexier, more promiscuous and less capable of controlling themselves than other people is usually held by very insecure heterosexuals. Of course, as long as we imprison queers for their activities, we expose them to the constant threat of blackmail, and in these circumstances an anonymous one-night stand may be safer than a long-term relationship. Considering the perils of the law, it's amazing how many durable homosexual "marriages" there are. And--bizarre as this may seem to sexual bigots--the binding factor in these liaisons is love. Plato thought that love between men was the highest form of human affinity, and he certainly didn't exclude sexual love. And Shakespeare's sonnets are unquestionably love poems, despite the fact that many of them are addressed to a young man whom he described as "the master-mistress of my passion."

[A] Leitsch: To a degree, it is true that homosexuals are sexually hyperactive, though. I don't think we're basically any more sex-oriented than anyone else; but our sexuality is inflated all out of proportion because society keeps screaming about our sex life, our sex life, our sex life--until it's built, up to the most important thing in our lives. It's the thing that can send us to jail, the thing that can get us fired from our jobs, the thing that can turn our parents and friends against us. Naturally, we develop defensive attitudes toward it, and sex is built up in us as something more important than it should be. It's what makes us different from the average man and binds us together as a group. The man next to me in a gay bar may be a black millionaire with five doctoral degrees, politically conservative and an orthodox Jew. I might be poor, white, uneducated, a political radical and strongly agnostic. If we develop any kind of relationship, it will probably start with sex. Gay relationships turn into more meaningful relationships only if the parties have more in common than their homosexuality. That's just the opposite of the traditional heterosexual relationship, where the two partners usually find common ground, then progress to sex.

[A] Goodman: And homosexual promiscuity can be a beautiful thing--if you're prudent about V.D. It can be profoundly democratizing, throwing together every class and group more than heterosexuality does. I've cruised rich and poor; middle class and petits bourgeois; black, white, yellow and brown; scholars, jocks and dropouts; farmers, seamen, railroadmen; heavy industry, light manufacturing, communications and finance; civilians, soldiers and sailors; and, once or twice, cops. Probably for Oedipal reasons, I tend to be sexually anti-Semitic, which is a drag. But only gross stupidity, obsessional cleanliness, racial prejudice, insanity and being habitually drunk or high really puts me off. There is a kind of political meaning, I guess, in the fact that there are so many types of attractive human beings. I have something to occupy me on trains and buses and during the increasingly long waits at airports. I have something to do at peace demonstrations. No doubt the FBI with their little cameras have innumerable pictures of me groping somebody. Saint Thomas said that the chief human use of sex--in addition to the natural law of procreation--is to get to know other persons intimately. That has been my experience. A common criticism of homosexual promiscuity, of course, is that it involves an appalling superficiality of human contact, so that, rather than democracy, it's a kind of archetype of the inanity of mass urban life. I doubt that this is generally the case, though I don't know. My experience has been the opposite. Many of my lifelong personal loyalties had sexual beginnings. But is this the rule or the exception? Given the usual coldness and fragmentation of community life at present, my hunch is that homosexual promiscuity enriches more lives than it desensitizes. Needless to say, if we had better community, we'd have better sexuality, too.

[A] McIlvenna: I don't like the term promiscuous; I think we give it bad connotations it doesn't deserve. The church has been one of the causes of this hang-up on sex acts. One of the reasons churchmen can't say that homosexuals should have sexual relations is because then they would have to say that heterosexuals, outside of marriage, could have sexual relationships, too. In fact, given the opportunity, heterosexual males would probably act out to the same degree as homosexuals. And why shouldn't they?

[A] Simon: Some homosexuals are undoubtedly sexually hyperactive, but I'm not sure that this remains a constant factor in most homosexuals' lives after their initial entry into the gay world. Probably the greatest rate of sexual activity occurs when the homosexual first comes out. He has finally become free of any inhibiting doubts he may have had about his sexual preferences and whether he should act on them; he feels a new freedom, and this frequently releases a great deal of sexual energy. He often pursues sexual contacts nearly indiscriminately, with more vigor than caution. It's parallel to that period in the heterosexual's life when he's first married, and coitus is legitimate and pursued with a substantial amount of energy. This high rate of marital coitus declines as demands are made on the young couple to take their place in the framework of a larger social system. Perhaps the same easing off of sexual activity occurs in the homosexual's life when he adjusts to his new pattern.

[A] Bieber: Promiscuity among homosexuals is not a myth. It is more the rule than the exception. A significantly higher percentage of homosexuals than heterosexuals are promiscuous. Promiscuity is an indicator of sexual and personality difficulties, not of vigorous sexuality. During lectures, when I have said that the female prostitute is mostly a sexually inhibited woman, it draws a reaction of incredulity and amusement. Yet many prostitutes are frigid in professional and even nonprofessional heterosexual encounters. The Don Juan is not too distant a cousin to her. Psychoanalysis has illuminated the psychodynamics of Don Juanism: He doesn't flit from one beautiful flower to an even more beautiful one because he can't resist satisfaction; rather, he takes flight from each one because he is afraid of the gardener. Promiscuous people are not primarily motivated by sexual pleasure-seeking. Like Don Juan, they harbor fears associated with having close sexual relationships with one partner. Under the rationalization of boredom or of an insatiable hunger for variegated experience, most homosexuals leave their relationship after a brief period. Or, if a closeness develops into a meaningful friendship, sex usually disappears and the search for sexual gratification continues elsewhere.

Seriously pathological mechanisms may be acted out in homosexual promiscuity. For example, some men are compulsively driven to find the biggest cock in town. They spend their time in a never-ending search for a gigantic organ, and they are relatively unconcerned with the person to whom it is attached. Various psychodynamics may be delineated, such as a desire to get strength or masculinity magically from a large penis. It is also a way of attempting to repair a defective sense of masculinity, or a way of symbolically castrating the father figure so as for once and for all to destroy his threatening power. After sucking off a big cock, one person dreamed that he had blood on his teeth. I have spoken to homosexuals who have had fellatio with 20 men in one day, but they experienced little gratification themselves. Their reward was fatigue and disgust. Loneliness is common among homosexuals and much cruising is motivated by the need for human contact. In such encounters, the individual is oriented to pleasing his partner in any way desired. Personal sexual pleasure is but a second consideration.

Another very important side of sexually compulsive behavior is the matter of filling in time left open by an inability to get involved in meaningful tasks because of inhibitions in work and creativity. This kind of screwing time away also occurs among heterosexuals who for some reason cannot allow themselves to pursue fulfilling jobs. In psychoanalytic therapy, as such problems are resolved, obsessive-compulsive sexuality tends to disappear.

[A] Tynan: One of the purposes of psychotherapy, as understood by work-minded psychiatrists, seems to be to carry out in the 20th Century the task schoolteachers and moralists took upon themselves in the 19th: to divert the time that could be devoted to pleasure so that it is penitentially dedicated to earnest effort and gain. One can understand why, in a country so dependent on a happy work force, certain psychiatrists hold that pleasure is some sort of aberration to be qualified by such words as obsessive and compulsive. The idea that there is a legitimate maximum time allowed for sexual pursuits is monstrous and dismaying evidence of the durability of puritanism in our benighted culture. If homosexuals devote more of their time to sexual enjoyment than heterosexuals do, it's their gain and our loss. If I had to choose between a physically fulfilled homosexual life and a triumphantly successful but physically unrewarding career as a nominally heterosexual business executive, I hope I would have the humanity to choose the former.

[A] Bieber: Mr. Tynan is confusing what we term work inhibition, or work block, with compulsive working, which excludes other pleasures. I am speaking of people who can't do the things they want to and who would get great pleasure out of doing them if they could. I am referring to writers who cannot write because they are blocked, performers who cannot perform because they suffer from stage fright, fine athletes who can't compete successfully because they tighten up in the clutch. As pleasurable as sex is, there are many other pleasures in the repertoire of a fulfilled person. Fortunately, Mr. Tynan has not had to choose between a fulfilling heterosexual life and a successful career.

[Q] Playboy: In discussing sexual activity, we have focused almost exclusively on the male homosexual. Does the female have an equally active sex life?

[A] McIlvenna: Well, we certainly don't see any more promiscuity between female homosexuals than we do among other women. The male of the species in our society, heterosexual as well as homosexual, acts out sexually much more than the female.

[A] Leitsch: I think things may be changing a little bit, but as a group, male homosexuals, at least the ones I know, have fewer hang-ups and restrictions than Lesbians about what kind of sex they're willing to have, and with whom. But Lesbians have always had lots of restrictions about how much sex they were willing to have. Some time ago a Lesbian friend of mine told me she was breaking up her relationship, which had been going for two years. I had thought they were very happy together, so I asked her what had happened, and she said, "After two years I finally put my foot down and said, 'OK, we're going to have sex and tonight is the night.' " And her lover started crying and said, "Oh, God, why does it always have to end in sex?"

[A] Lyon: Most of this is really explainable by the fact that Lesbians are brought up as women. They aren't trained to be aggressive in the pursuit of a partner in the way that young men are. It's very difficult for a young woman even if she gets up the nerve to go to a bar. Then she has to get up enough courage to take the second step--to talk to somebody. Usually, how a woman goes about meeting other Lesbians is to meet one person who has several friends and they have more friends, and eventually you get into a circle of some sort. Many Lesbians live either in a pair relationship or in a circle of friends for most of their lives without branching out in any way.

[A] Leitsch: Just as males in our society are told they should be sex-oriented and promiscuous, females are taught to be romantic and antisexual. This is even more evident in the homosexual than in the heterosexual community. Males tend to have large numbers of sex partners and a wide variety of sexual experience, and Lesbians tend to be more romantic, to date a long time before ever going to bed together, to be monogamous when part of a couple and to be sexually conservative.

[Q] Playboy: That doesn't gibe with the way erotic books and movies depict Lesbians, who are shown involved in wild sexual activities that include the use of dildos and other penis substitutes. Are these distortions?

[A] Simon: Almost totally. They're fantasies created to turn on the heterosexual male, and are revolting to many Lesbians. In general, penis substitutes aren't part of Lesbian practice at all. Mutual masturbation and cunnilingus are much more common.

[A] Leitsch: I would guess that female homosexuals are more uptight about sex and sex techniques than female heterosexuals, because, at least, female heterosexuals mix with males and have to be sexually creative and adventurous, if only to win and keep their men. The sexual revolution is finally being felt in the Lesbian world, though. I don't know if Lesbians are actually practicing a bit of promiscuity, partner swapping, extra-"marital" affairs and orgy-going, but at least they don't freak out at the mention of such things anymore.

[A] Lyon: Yes, there is a change going on, especially among young people. You find more young women saying, "I'm not going to be caught in the bag of settling down yet. I want to be free to go to bed with whatever girl I find." You didn't find this five years ago, or even three years ago. Every Lesbian used to think she had to find a partner and settle down, but many of them aren't worried about it anymore. This means there is going to be a great deal more direct sexual activity on the part of the Lesbian than there used to be. That's part of a whole new generation.

[A] Playboy: Despite this new freedom, many homosexuals--male and female--are attempting to legalize homosexual marriages. Do you think that such legal contracts are either likely or desirable?

[Q] Mannes: I think marriage is unimportant, and is becoming increasingly so, except where children are involved. If two people want to live together for as long as they love each other--whether they're man and man, woman and woman or man and woman--I personally see no reason why such a union needs any external sanctification by the state or the church. If the partners feel they need some sort of legal contract because of property rights or taxes or inheritance, there's no reason why they shouldn't have one, but I frankly feel that marriage itself is very much on the way out over the next few decades--unless a couple bears children.

[A] Tynan: I don't see that homosexual marriage is any more desirable or undesirable than heterosexual marriage, which is certainly in need of reform. I agree with Miss Mannes that it's a dying institution.

[A] Ploscowe: Among my other virtues or vices, I teach family law, specifically separation, annulment and divorce. And I think the idea of homosexual marriage is a damnation. It's an idiotic idea. Marriage is primarily an institution for family and for children. If homosexuals want to live together, that's their business, but I have never understood why they have to have the institution of marriage. They can own property jointly, they can sign for loans jointly. The only thing they can't do is file joint income-tax returns, and that's certainly not justification enough for wanting homosexual marriage licenses. I think it's just a way of affronting the heterosexual even further. Many homosexuals are exhibitionists, and to me this cry for a marriage license is more of their desire for exhibition.

[A] Kuh: I agree. I think the idea is absurd, completely undesirable. It would indicate that society is formally giving its blessing to such unions. Although it may be that society should discontinue heaping obloquy upon homosexuals, I don't think homosexuals should, by mocking marriage, hasten its demise--the rumors of which I, for one, believe to be grossly exaggerated.

[A] Goodman: I don't think homosexual marriage is desirable either, but for different reasons. I don't think homosexual monogamy is a healthy state. In a life that offers very few opportunities to avoid loneliness, it's probably better as a defensive maneuver to have a permanent friend than not, but such a life style doesn't get the full richness out of homosexuality. The main advantage of homosexuality at the adult level is a cultural one: It's a way of being close to people. One way of getting to know people is to have sex with them, and once you're real friends, normally the sexual tie would weaken very rapidly. But the friendly closeness would survive and you'd have a permanent friend. The same thing occurs in the master-disciple relationship, which I think is a very important part of the homosexual picture. The essence of a master-disciple relationship is that the disciple grows up. Something is very wrong in that relationship if the disciple hasn't been taught to discard the master. Homosexual acts and homosexual relations, when they're in a broad spectrum of sexual activity, have positive cultural advantages that are very difficult to achieve otherwise. Homosexual marriage would cut off these advantages.

[A] Bieber: I doubt if homosexual marriage is a realistic concept at all. Marriage is a heterosexual institution based on heterosexual relationships. I haven't observed a love relationship between homosexuals that has any analogue to such a relationship between a man and a woman. I'm sure that there are homosexuals who have very warm and loving feelings for other men, and when they get into the so-called love relationship, it tends to be very enthusiastic and supposedly passionate in the beginning, but that very rapidly changes. Where the two men really like each other, sex often drops out and sex is had with other people. This is quite different from a heterosexual relationship. If a man and woman really have a good loving relationship and a good sexual relationship, it gets better in a way that's not true among homosexuals. Of course, that doesn't mean there are no long-standing partnerships between two homosexuals, where they continue sex in the context of a warm, friendly and loving relationship. But most of the relationships are far from loving; they're punctuated by all types of conflicts, and the large majority don't last long. If a homosexual relationship lasts two years, that's a long time.

[A] Mannes: My experience is obviously limited, but I can testify to the fact that I know, among my direct friends and acquaintances, six all-male couples who have lived together for a long time and still do. Whether these are typical, I have no way of telling.

[A] Marmor: It's true that one finds a greater number of people among homosexuals who have difficulty in making commitments, whose relationships with one another are relatively unstable and may even show a higher proportion of neurotic patterns than is true among heterosexuals. But I disagree with Dr. Bieber in his assumption that being homosexual, ipso facto, inevitably means that such an individual has a massive incapacity for satisfactory human relationships. Over the years, I've known many homosexuals who have lived with partners in stable relationships not particularly different from relatively stable heterosexual relationships, and who lived lives of quiet dignity, respectability and responsibility within our social system. They have also had good friendships with nonhomosexual individuals of both sexes. Although I agree with Dr. Bieber that a large proportion of homosexuals show evidence of emotional impairment and instability, I object to the stereotyping of all homosexuals in this manner.

[A] Bieber: I don't believe, nor have I ever written, said or indicated, that homosexuals had a "massive incapacity for satisfactory human relationships." I wonder where Dr. Marmor got this notion from? Of course, homosexuals are capable of profound, warm and loving interpersonal relationships. The presence of Psychological problems doesn't preclude an ability to establish good human relationships. What I said was that they frequently are unable to combine a close interpersonal relationship with a sexual one. In my experience, I haven't found that there are many homosexuals who live as couples in a stable union that can be compared with heterosexual pairings. I don't think that it's of any great importance whether or not a homosexual partnership endures, but the fact is, very few such relationships are lasting.

[A] Marmor: I don't want to beat this issue to death, but all of Dr. Bieber's writings about homosexuals emphasize the severity of their psychopathology and are relatively silent about their personality strengths. Moreover, he has expressed the conviction that homosexuality is "incompatible with a reasonably happy life." I consider the former to be a distortion of emphasis, and the latter, an inaccurate generalization.

[A] Bieber: Dr. Marmor seems to be chiding me for not giving emphasis to the strengths of homosexuals. When I, as a physician, point out a condition as pathological, I am making a medical statement, not a pejorative value judgment or a minimizing criticism of the individual who has the condition. I don't have to apologize or reassure when making a diagnosis or explicating it. Besides, I don't see that personality strengths accompany homosexuality per se; strengths exist where they do quite apart from inversion and despite it. To me, homosexuals are human beings. As such, I am for them as I am for all humans. In my social and professional relations with homosexuals, I am not aware of having any less respect or consideration for them than for anyone else. It is not I on this panel who refers to them as "queers," to which no other panelists seem to take umbrage----not even the homosexuals. As for the condition itself, I am not for it any more than I am for any physical or psychological disorder. As for the happiness angle, I admit that it is difficult to assay and quantify happiness. Yet among the many men I have interviewed who are homosexuals, I have never observed evidence of a sense of contentment and satisfaction--happiness, if you will. One might say that's because I've seen only homosexual patients and they would not likely be happy people. But I have seen a great number of heterosexuals who are patients, and I have not infrequently observed an underlying sense of contentment despite discomforting anxiety or other symptoms. Homosexuals as a group have an underlying depression they often conceal under the gay facade. Mart Crowley, who wrote The Boys in the Band and is very sensitive to the problems of homosexuals, summarized the matter by the line, "You show me a happy homosexual and I'll show you a gay corpse."

[A] McIlvenna: I know many homosexuals who seem as happy as anyone else, and as for their relationships not being lasting--I'm not sure that so many normal males in our society would stay with one mate if it weren't for the existence of alimony and sanctions against the male who is divorced. I know many homosexual couples who have been together for a long period of time. I wonder what has contributed to this durability?

[A] Leitsh: I would guess that the best homosexual relationships involve two people with slightly different characteristics, with one partner probably being a little older than the other. I've noticed that couples in which both partners are of about the same age, economic bracket, educational level, degree of attractiveness, etc., tend not to last long. Somehow, it seems easier for persons of different levels to interact and communicate. Each brings to the relationship something the other doesn't have, and can have only through his partner. But, on the whole, it's Lesbian relationships that tend to be long-lived. Male homosexual partnerships are most often transitory. This is partly due to the kind of programming males and females get in our society, and partly to the lack of any equivalent of a marriage license for homosexuals. If a heterosexual marriage goes on the rocks, maybe because the husband is sleeping around and decides he'd rather spend the rest of his life with his girlfriend than with his wife, society becomes involved. There's the hassle over the divorce and child support and alimony payments, and there's usually pressure from family, friends of both partners, and maybe the church. Divorce also causes a loss of face. When a homosexual relationship goes on the rocks, there's no big deal: If there's joint property, it's simply split up and one or both partners moves out. It's so easy to break up, it's not surprising that gay "marriages" usually don't last a long time. What's surprising is that so many last 20, 30 or more years. The record in my circle of friends is 55 years.

[A] Lyon: You can share and do a lot of things together without a license; my friend and I have one bank account, one house and one car together. But we probably pay three times as much income tax. I would hope that this kind of inequity could be changed. Society might well institute some kind of legal binding together for any two people who wish it. If this happened, I suspect that the church would eventually consent to performing homosexual marriages, if the church is still around--and if marriage is still around.

[A] Simon: Possibly we shouldn't be measuring heterosexual and homosexual life styles by the same standards. Heterosexual preferences fit in with a whole host of general social expectations about what someone should be at different ages or stages of the lite cycle. An additional number of expectations and social arrangements exist to reinforce the patterning of a life predicated on a heterosexual preference. Homosexuals will--and most of them do--adapt as best they can, and for many this involves a denial of many of the experiences and opportunities available to heterosexuals. Most male homosexuals and many females will never experience the role of parent, and relatively few homosexuals--at least, male homosexuals--will know either the joys or the constraints of a long-term relationship. I don't see why we can't just accept that as a hard fact of life. This doesn't mean that all homosexual experiences are, by definition, more impoverished than those of heterosexuals. But it does mean that they will be different.

[A] Kuh: Let's face it: The over-all picture that emerges quite clearly is that, by and large, the homosexual's life is a barren one; his sex life is likely to be loveless one-night stands, often with little or no communication; his life, even when filled with friends, is basically alone; and rarely is there any long-term mutual commitment between two persons. His existence parallels that of the overaged playboy, although there's a social shunning of the homosexual that the playboy doesn't experience. Sure, there are unhappy marriages between men and women, and even the best marriage poses some trials. But-- and I don't mean to rhapsodize--in the typical man-woman marriage, isn't the potential for love, for tranquillity, for communication, for substance in a relationship, such that we sell short if we encourage anyone to forfeit his chances for it by choosing the life of a homosexual?

[A] Leitsch: I think the argument goes in the opposite direction. With all the money, training and effort that society puts into heterosexual marriages, it's pretty terrible for them to fail a third of the time. The whole society is organized to make marriage work--taxes, schools, advertising, everything--and yet, look at all of the unhappily married people. Maybe mankind is basically queer, and it takes all the efforts of society to get the sexes interested in each other. With all the crap homosexuality puts up with it does pretty well, and with all the help heterosexuality gets, it's doing pretty badly.

[Q] Playboy: Among the things homosexuals have to put up with are laws against their sex lives. In most states of the Union, there are statutes--many of them now being challenged--that proscribe homosexual acts even when performed in private by consenting adults. Do any of you feel that these laws serve a useful purpose?

[A] Tynan: It seems to me that law reform is inevitable, and the formula adopted by many European countries appears the most sensible: Homosexual acts taking place in private between consenting adults should be legalized.

[A] Kuh: Were I a legislator, I guess I would somewhat reluctantly agree with Mr. Tynan. But I can see the arguments for keeping the laws against this deviance on the statute books, and I don't think we can blithely write them off as antediluvian. England's Lord Devlin, commenting on the Wolfenden Report's recommendation to legalize private consensual adult homosexual conduct, suggested that "We should ask ourselves in the first instance whether, looking at it calmly and dispassionately, we regard it as a vice so abominable that its mere presence is an offense. If that is the genuine feeling of the society in which we live, I do not see how society can be denied the right to eradicate it." One of the functions of lawmaking is line drawing, and with enough of the community revolted by homosexuality--and I think when you move from our major sophisticated cities to our more old-fashioned rural areas, you will find homosexuality is a revolting concept to much of the citizenry--the law may soundly draw a line against it, whether or not you and I may personally agree with that line drawing.

[A] Simon: I partly agree that the law has to make sense to the population that must live with it, but I also think that most people's attitudes are more tolerant than you suggest or even than many of us realize. Homosexuals aren't very important one way or the other to most people, but our research shows that among college students, about half the boys and over half the girls said they would remain friends with someone they discovered to be homosexual. Over half of both boys and girls felt there was an element of homosexuality in all of us. No more than ten percent felt that homosexuals should be excluded from society. And studies of other segments of the young showed that working-class youth have attitudes only slightly less liberal. In public discussions, most people probably come on with a tough line merely because they assume it to be the most socially acceptable or, at least, the safest attitude.

[A] Tynan: Intolerance of homosexuality seems to be a trait of the older generation. Ernest Hemingway, I'm sorry to say, was typical of his time in taking an illiberal view of queers. Once, in the course of an anecdote about a famous theatrical queer, he stunned me by saying, "Then Mr. X came into the restaurant, and I raised my glass and smashed it on the table, as any gentleman does when a homosexual enters the room." I'm glad I never dined with him at a smart London restaurant after an opening night. The place would have been hip-deep in broken glass inside of ten minutes.

[A] Kuh: I'm not at all sure that citizen attitudes are becoming as tolerant as has been suggested. In New York--a state that has now legalized abortion--an able state commission a few years ago recommended that sexual activities between consenting adults, "privately and discreetly indulged in," not be considered criminal. But the state legislature overrode that recommendation, and in New York--as in most of the states--consensual sexual conduct among adults of the same sex remains criminal. But if attitudes are changing, that change is all to the good, and I join you in applauding it. Our laws, however, in many areas--like it or not--still reflect what legislative judgment deems to be moral values. Hence, we have laws in a number of areas, many of them sexual, that most of our society seems content to keep, although it would be difficult to show that they protect society against any real damage. We have laws against bigamy, laws against public nudity, laws against obscenity, laws against adultery and laws against abortion. We have our Sunday blue laws, laws against mercy killing, against narcotics use and against gambling. In any one of these areas that deal mostly with conduct among willing adults, one would be hard put to show a concrete harm that's being dealt with; these are laws that enforce concepts of morality. But all is not sweet reason. Emotion, tradition, a sense of propriety, all have a hand in shaping our laws. Even the most primitive societies have their taboos, and we have ours. When we substitute law for anarchy, inevitably our lawmakers adopt the biases of our society.

[A] Ploscowe: I've heard that argument again and again and again. You always run into it when you talk of reform in sex laws or reform in the birth-control or abortion laws. The law doesn't set moral standards. Moral standards are set by our religious groups, by our philosophies, by the conscience of our people. The law is supposed to set standards that involve damage to other people or damage to society generally. We have to distinguish between law and morality. Much of the trouble with the law has been the confusion of sin and crime. A sin should not necessarily be a crime. They are not synonymous. If the religious groupings want to consider homosexual acts as offenses, even as very serious offenses under the ecclesiastical law or under ecclesiastical standards, I certainly wouldn't interfere. This is an area where the church can step in, but the law really has no business there.

[A] Kuh: I believe there is some kinship between law and morality. Quite possibly, the law has an obligation in some areas to legislate morality. This is an old-fashioned concept that a good many of my liberal friends attack. These same liberals will attack wire tapping as being inherently immoral, regardless of its use under close court supervision and its proven value against narcotic wholesalers and spies and others. Racial discrimination is outlawed because it, too, is immoral. The death penalty is attacked as immoral--on the grounds that the state has no business taking a life under any circumstances--quite apart from the other arguments for and against its use. Were bullfighting to be introduced in Madison Square Garden, liberals--although they eat meat that bellows and bleats as it's being slaughtered--would lead the pickets and denounce bullfights as degrading and immoral. My point here is simply that whether one believes that the law should enforce concepts of morality really seems to depend upon whose particular ox is being gored.

[A] Bieber: I see no reason to have any laws that punish private homosexual behavior between consenting adults, and this is actually the de facto situation in most states. There is no reason to have such laws and I think removing them would be a constructive and realistic thing.

[A] Kuh: I think we could agree that if a man with homosexual tendencies never meets a practicing homosexual, it's unlikely that he himself will become one. The law can assist in reducing the likelihood that he will meet one. We have quarantines against scarlet fever, quarantines against other diseases--I know I overdraw the analogy--but I simply suggest that if open acceptance of homosexuality may encourage the latent homosexual to become an active homosexual, then a law that declares public policy against homosexuality may conceivably serve some quarantining purpose. I don't think we, priding ourselves on our liberalism, can simply write off such laws as wrongly interfering with the private pursuits of practicing homosexuals. We must remain ready to recognize that arguments for retaining these laws are entitled to our consideration. Entertaining the considerations on both sides, and balancing them, we may then reach our conclusions. Although we are becoming increasingly permissive, increasingly tolerant of conduct that a few years ago was generally deemed abhorrent, psychiatric thinking isn't unanimous in believing that homosexuality is simply another way of being normal, one that homosexuals can and should accept. Psychiatric thinking ten years hence may suggest that this era's permissiveness did more harm than good. None of us can be sure. And the law, particularly the criminal law, often acts as a sort of sea anchor for society; it moves, but far more slowly than the seas of social change. It serves, and maybe serves desirably, to slow our acceptance at any one moment of what may, at that particular time in history, falsely seem the revealed truth.

[A] Bieber: I want to comment on Mr. Kuh's point that if a homosexual never met another one, he would not become one. Some men who are brought up in rural communities where they never met or heard of homosexuals until well into late adolescence have reported to me that they believed they were the only men in the world who were attracted to other men. These people became homosexuals without having had any contact with homosexuals. If there were no overt homosexuals around to act as models, individuals with a homosexual pattern would soon find one another and discover it for themselves.

[A] Mannes: In other words, the laws against homosexuality have no deterrent effect whatsoever. But even if they did, I don't think the state should have any right to interfere in what an individual male or female does with his or her own body. To me this is the next civil right we have to establish. It's really nobody's business but the consenting adult's, provided that none of these tastes or combinations involves a violation of another person's rights.

[A] Simon: It's also important not to have laws that are impossible to enforce; otherwise, the structure of law enforcement is discredited. As Miss Mannes suggests, the present legal proscription of homosexual behavior has done and can do little to curb homosexual behavior. All it can apparently do is create conditions under which the homosexual is compelled to run greater risks in pursuit of his sexual goals. It's like Prohibition, except that fewer people are involved.

[A] Marmor: As a matter of fact, we have concrete evidence that legal sanctions against homosexual behavior have not proved effective. Homosexuality is no more common in France, Sweden and the Netherlands, where it is not a crime, than in the United States, where it is.

[A] Kuh: Our law, whether enforceable or not, provides precepts that may help to guide the impressionable. Legalizing adult homosexuality may suggest social approval of such conduct to youngsters, who tend to emulate their elders. The stigma of criminality, although it may intensify guilt feelings in some homosexuals, may at least help the A. C. / D. C. youngster to shape his actions in a heterosexual direction.

[A] McIlvenna: The most desirable thing the law can do is to do less. Whatever consenting adults do in private, as Miss Mannes said, is their own affair, and should have nothing to do with the law as long as it doesn't involve coercion. But that doesn't deal with the problem of the police even when the law is changed. It doesn't deal with some of the police and others who, after the law changes, will still think they should enforce God's law, whatever that is, upon homosexuals, who they feel must be punished. But I think we ought to move toward a liberalization of all laws about sexual activity in general. We need to do this in order to free not only homosexuals but all of us.

[A] Kuh: But how far do we carry the idea of letting adults do, in private, whatever the spirit of the moment impels them to do? Suppose a play like Futz, in which the hero has intercourse with a pig, touches off a public wave of hitherto repressed or secretive bestial acts. Are they, too, to be legalized? Mightn't that get the S. P. C. A.'s goat? Is the standard concerning sex laws to be one of anything goes, as long as neither force nor children are involved? Society has the right to be concerned in such matters.

[Q] Playboy: Surely, only if homosexuality represents a danger to society. Does it?

[A] Lyon: I really can't think of any conditions under which the homosexual could possibly be dangerous to society, particularly in a time when procreation is no longer considered the justification for sex. The real danger is the other way around: Society is dangerous to homosexuals--and to heterosexuals, too, for that matter. The danger is in sexual hang-ups and the wasted potential of human beings--homosexual and heterosexual--because of them. Sex should be a liberating experience allowing human beings to respond to one another openly, freely and reciprocally without rigid role definitions.

[A] McIlvenna: I think one of the reasons people feel homosexuality is a threat is that many of us are fearful of our own sexuality. We've used the homosexual as a scapegoat, possibly because he has been identified as a sexual offender. Many people believe that, somehow, the homosexual is going to prey upon little boys and that he's much more sexual than he actually is. It's a fear that springs out of insecurity about one's own sexual identification, which in turn results from our antisexual bias and fear.

[A] Marmor: Homosexual practices that violate public decency or involve the seduction of minors are a source of concern, but so is the equivalent kind of heterosexual activity. They should be treated equally by the law. Apart from this, homosexuality isn't dangerous to society. Moreover, homosexuals can have just as strong a sense of moral responsibility as do well-adjusted heterosexuals. Homosexuals should be evaluated as individuals, and it should not be assumed that they have poor control over their sexual impulses because they are homosexuals.

[A] Bieber: I agree. a study by a Dr. Doshay in 1943 demonstrated that of a series of 108 boys between 7 and 16 years of age who had been seduced by older men, none of the youngsters later became homosexual. An isolated homosexual event does not produce it. Homosexuality isn't a contagious disease, nor is it dangerous in the sense that it's going to destroy society.

[A] Kuh: I can see some degree of danger to society in homosexuality--far slighter than that of murder, as an extreme, but nonetheless some degree--and apparently the legislatures of most of our states agree, since they have various statutes making homosexual activities criminal under certain circumstances. One of the dangers--maybe a prime one, as Reverend McIlvenna suggested--is the potential for the seduction of minors. Whether or not the minor who is seduced by an older man goes on to become a homosexual, I think you would agree that the experience may be traumatic and ultimately harmful. A further danger to society that motivates legislators is a moral danger. Whether or not the law should legislate morality, this is an area in which, traditionally, it has. And, traditionally, homosexuality is clearly deemed a moral danger.

[A] Leitsch: I think your concern for minors is unwarranted. From my observation, pedophiles usually tend to be heterosexuals. I once studied the pages of the Daily News, New York's catalog of sex crimes, for a one-year period. Ninetyseven percent of all the reported sexual assaults on children--and seduction of minors is legally considered to be assault--were by an adult man on a little girl. from that evidence, one could make a better case for keeping heterosexuals away from children than for excluding homosexuals from contact with kids.

[A] Bieber: I find that homosexuals as a groups are not sexually oriented toward children. Some individual men may be, but very few. In general, Mr. Leitsch is correct that pedophilia is usually heterosexual. I try to get the point across to parents that they need not be afraid that their children will be seduced or misled if they're in contact with a homosexual. I have analyzed several men whose fathers were homosexual, but the sons didn't become homosexual. The idea that homosexuals are dangerous and that you have to keep them away and worry about them doesn't accord with my clinical experience.

[A] Simon: It's the dreadfully ignorant child who is most impaired by early homosexual experiences. Frequently, such a child has hysterical parents who make the act seem more significant than the child had felt it to be. There may be nothing going on in the child's mind until the parents put it there. Such a reaction can cripple children.

[A] Mannes: I agree. There's a great deal of evidence that many men, who later turn out to be good husbands, fathers and members of the Rotary, had--in the Army or in college or earlier--one or two homosexual experiences that in no way changed the ultimate course of their lives. If a boy is so completely turned on by early homosexual experience that it knocks out any desire toward being heterosexual, then he's probably on his way anyway.

[A] Bieber: A boy doesn't get turned on to homosexuality as one would turn on an electric light. A great deal has gone before to prepare him to respond this way and even to invite seduction from an adult.

[A] Kuh: Putting aside the case of consensual statutory rape of a 16-year-old girl by a 19-year-old man, and talking about sex between really young youngsters and considerably older adults, I think more men are fondling little girls than they are little boys. But I do think that there is some evidence of interest by adult homosexuals in youngsters and in very young men. I suspect it exists more than the permissive would choose to recognize, and less than the conservative would like to believe. There are some homosexuals who are happiest with adolescents or recent postadolescents, just as there are some heterosexual adults who think it heaven to have a beautiful young girl on their arm rather than someone more in their own age and maturity group.

[A] Marmor: This may well be true, but what of it? It's no more abnormal for older homosexuals to be attracted to young men than for older heterosexuals to be attracted to young women . And it would be an unwarranted assumption to conclude that older homosexuals are more apt to seduce young men than heterosexuals are to seduce young women.

[A] Leitsch: Things can often work the other way, too. Young people have their sexual needs, and masturbation gets tiresome and doesn't sate the curiosity they feel about sexual relationships with others. Young homosexuals want to get laid, just like young heterosexuals do. Being jailbait, they have difficulty in finding adult partners, but looking for partners in their peer group is dangerous, too, because an advance to the wrong person can lead to ostracism or arrest. Older homosexuals are more likely to be recognizable, they can provide entry to the gay world and they're less likely to reveal to anyone that the affair took place. I can tell you from experience that there are a hell of a lot more young men trying to get older men in bed than there are older homosexuals looking for schoolboy partners. In many cases, it may be more appropriate to talk about old-man molesters than to talk about child molesters.

[A] Goodman: In a healthy society, I can't see what harm there would be in an older man introducing a younger man to homosexual pleasures. But in their concern for the young, most people have overlooked an advantage in the laws against homosexuality. A happy property of sexual acts, and perhaps especially of homosexual acts, is that they are dirty, like life: As Augustine said, "Inter urinas et feces nascimur," "We're born amid piss and shit." In a society as middle class, orderly and technological as ours, it's good to break down squeamishness, since it is our overfastidiousness that causes us to institutionalize our sick and aged, to repress our children's earthy natural instincts and to discriminate against people different from ourselves. And the illegal and catch-as-catch-can nature of much homosexual life at present breaks down other conventional attitudes. Although I wish I could have had my parties with less apprehension and more unhurriedly, it's been an advantage to learn that the ends of docks, the backs of trucks, back alleys behind the stairs, abandoned bunkers on the beach and the washrooms of trains all provide what Marlowe called "infinite riches in a little room."

[Q] Playboy: You're talking about sex in public or semipublic places, Mr. Goodman, where even heterosexuals could expect some harassment from the law. Can the police really enforce the law against totally private sexual acts with any consistency unless they grossly violate the laws against privacy invasion?

[A] Kuh: The likelihood of the police learning about such acts is microscopic, and desirably so. I know of not a single arrest in New York City or New York State for such private acts over the past many, many years; there may have been some, but very, very few. For any one case that the police might find out about--if they're interested in learning of it, and many, wisely, are not--there may be 10,000 that they have no knowledge of, because there is no complaint and no public scene. If two people meet in places other than public, the opportunity for police to observe them meeting and to know that they are about to engage or have already engaged in homosexual acts is nil.

[A] Ploscowe: Occasionally, of course, the police will come into contact with adolescent boys who are somehow involved in sodomistic acts. And when they arrest a homosexual prostitute, they may start inquiring who his customers were. And this may wind up with the arrest of a lot of people, many of them quite respectable in the community.

[A] Kuh: With due respect, Morris, I think you overstate it. Even if police wanted to prosecute in such circumstances--and, by and large, there is no reason to believe that the police or courts in America today have any interest in private conduct among consenting adults--they'd have no case legally in most jurisdictions if all they had was the statement of a male prostitute as to who his customers were. Neither as a prosecutor nor a defense lawyer have I heard of a single arrest being made on a prostitute's statement--male or female--as to what customers he or she had. I'm afraid we have enough anti-police feeling now, among homosexuals and others, without intensifying it by painting the police as bogeymen in a field in which they have not been such. Yes, they do arrest homosexuals for hustling, just as heterosexuals are arrested for hustling professionally, but equally clearly, they rarely arrest people for private homosexual acts not publicly solicited, and they don't arrest lists of people whose names may turn up on the tongue or in the address book of a hustler. Enforcement even against public acts is often difficult, and therefore spasmodic. Obviously, the police would become known very quickly in gay bars where homosexuals solicit one another. They might make one arrest in a gay bar, but the same policeman isn't going to be able to make another; so the enforcement is quite different from the letter of the law.

[A] McIlvenna: You clearly associate with a better class of policeman than I do, Mr. Kuh. I've had experience with the fallout of homosexual witch-hunts in a number of communities. I specifically remember a training film from an Ohio municipal police department that had made movies of men having sex in a public toilet. They reported the success of follow-up prosecutions against other men whom these men confessed to having had sex with. The voice boomed out, "This man is now serving 10 to 20 years for sodomy"--just like Dragnet. This may not be typical of the police, but your characterization is a little too much on the side of sweetness and light.

[A] Ploscowe: The kind of witch-hunt enforcement you're talking about is extremely sporadic in large cities. Even enforcement of solicitation statutes is mostly directed toward discouraging homosexuals from meeting in particular locations such as comfort stations or public parks, and enforcement is simply a temporary activity. As soon as the police heat is taken off, things always slip back to normal.

[Q] Playboy: If enforcement of the laws against private sexual activity is rare and enforcement of the laws against solicitation sporadic, it could be argued that the laws should be rescinded rather than disregarded, since they are obviously out of touch with common practice and affect only those involved.

[A] Kuh: It would seem to me that laws against public solicitation--whether by males or females--are desirable. When we get into public conduct, we have the problem of appearances; with something as public as solicitation, the community has an even greater right to be concerned. If certain areas of town are known as homosexual or heterosexual pickup districts, a honky-tonk quality develops that a community might sooner avoid. Also, the unwary visitor can be embarrassed if he goes to a public toilet and is solicited. Not only may he be embarrassed but, if he's queer and if his reaction is too ambivalent, he may find himself involved in a very common shakedown situation, with con men posing as plainclothes cops. I think there are very valid and compelling reasons for laws against public solicitation of one male by another.

[A] Tynan: But what reason could there possibly be for laws against solicitation if there were no laws against homosexuality? The shakedown would become impossible and the embarrassment a vestige of ancient prejudice. In any case, I would suggest that a certain amount of sexual embarrassment is good for people, in that it forces them to re-examine the nature of their sexual roles. The man who first discovered that he had an Oedipus complex was no doubt extremely embarrassed, but his discovery was a boon to his fellow human beings.

[A] Leitsch: There's a very simple test possible that would show whether or not people are morally offended by homosexual solicitation: The police should initiate no prosecutions for solicitation. Let private citizens initiate all complaints. That would be a fairly good barometer of how the public feels, and of how much homosexuals impinge on straights. It would also remove the police from a possible source of corruption--the easy shakedown of the cruising gay.

[A] Ploscowe: Young street hoods are also frequently involved in assaulting and robbing homosexuals. I suspect there may be some gangs that specialize in robbing the more affluent homosexuals.

[A] Kuh: Many of these young males regard themselves as, and may be, heterosexual; but they see an easy buck, either by being paid for engaging in an act with a homosexual or going to his hotel room, pounding the daylights out of him and taking his money and his watch. In most such cases, the homosexual won't report the incident, whether or not he believes his own conduct is unlawful, because of the social obloquy involved. Law enforcement is powerless because it hasn't been notified; consequently, you get an anarchistic situation in which the homosexual lives at the mercy of the young hood who likes to beat up homosexuals for fun as well as profit.

[A] Leitsch: But this situation isn't created by homosexuals, who are unlikely to get involved in criminal behavior, except as victims: the victims of blackmail, the victims of gangs of hoods looking for someone to beat up. They pick the neighborhood queer as the most likely person not to hit back too hard. Homosexuals get involved in criminal behavior simply because most states disapprove of their meeting and getting together. The authorities disapprove of bars, restaurants and clubs that cater to homosexuals, so these places usually become very shady and fall into the hands of gangsters. The church isn't going to give Saturday-night dances for homosexuals, but the Mafia will give you a bar. So homosexuals get mixed up with criminals. But they don't tend to be murderers or bank robbers in any greater degree than heterosexuals.

[A] Bieber: Homosexuals, by and large, are law-abiding. But crimes are committed by homosexuals against other homosexuals. Cruising activity can wind up in beatings, robberies and occasionally murder. Even a seemingly stable liaison can end in unlawful violence. But crimes by homosexuals against the heterosexual community are rare.

[A] Simon: Attempts to control homosexual behavior have produced a whole series of crimes that present police enforcement can't handle. The data collected by Kinsey and his associates indicate that more than one out of every four homosexuals gets robbed and rolled at least once. That's an awful lot of crimes. And sometimes, as we all know, a would-be robber hits his victim harder than he intended and then the police have a murder on their hands--a murder that's frequently hard to solve because most homosexuals, as Dick Kuh pointed out, can't risk exposure. This strikes me as a very expensive price to pay for a program of police suppression of public forms of homosexuality, particularly when the programs themselves don't work. It must also be demoralizing for the police to implement laws they know they can't consistently enforce.

[A] Kuh: Bill, I don't disagree. You and Dick Leitsch have emphasized that homosexuals are preyed upon without any realistic redress. But I think it would be improper to conclude that this is the fault of our laws in any but the most marginal respects. Homosexuals don't come forward when victimized not because the law punishes their homosexual conduct but because of the public condemnation they fear might follow their self-exposure. That condemnation is not the result of laws; the laws are the result of the same strong anti-homosexual public feeling. The typical prosecutor is far more interested in convicting extortionists or thieves than in prosecuting the homosexual victim. I've seen prosecutors and the press--and this is typical, not the exception--join forces time after time to keep such victims clear of public identification in pursuing the goal of convicting the serious criminal who has victimized homosexuals.

[A] McIlvenna: If it's true that the police are willing to protect homosexuals in blackmail and murder cases, then I think they should make this clear to the homosexual community.

[Q] Playboy: This discussion of the laws and their enforcement seems to have been, again, exclusively male-oriented. Why?

[A] Ploscowe: Well, the laws themselves traditionally reflect this orientation. In English law, the statutes against sodomy have always been directed only against men. In America, the states' laws are more all-encompassing. Crimes against nature are variously defined and the majority of states prohibit fellatio and cunnilingus, whether heterosexual or homosexual. Only Illinois, Connecticut and Alaska no longer have such laws, though the Texas sodomy law was recently declared unconstitutional and the state is appealing the case to the Supreme Court. In New York, married people are exempted from the provisions of the sodomy laws. But male homosexuals have definitely borne the brunt of law enforcement in this area. The sodomy statutes are only rarely enforced against heterosexual couples and never against Lesbians. The Kinsey team couldn't find one case sustaining the conviction of a female for homosexual activity in the hundreds of sodomy opinions they searched through, and those opinions dated from 1696 to 1952.

[A] Marmor: In rabbinical law, male homosexuality is a serious crime, but female homosexuality is a disqualification for marriage only to a rabbi. On a deeper level, however, these differences reflect the attitudes that exist toward male and female sexuality. In our society, women are considered less sexual creatures than men. Consequently, what they do to each other isn't as disturbing. Moreover, laws are made by men, so they tend to reflect the fact that female homosexuality doesn't threaten the heterosexual male as much as male homosexuality does.

[A] Lyon: I think this relationship to the law is one of the primary differences between the life styles of the male homosexual and the Lesbian. Male homosexuals have much more trouble with the law, but the Lesbian really doesn't get arrested much at all. Part of this may be related to the different values that society puts on men and women, but it's also related to the kind of sexual life style that the male homosexual leads. He tends to do more open soliciting than Lesbians do, and in more public places.

[Q] Playboy: If the laws were changed, do you think there would be more or fewer homosexual acts performed?

[A] Kuh: Does the law against murder deter potential murders? I don't know, but one theory of criminal law is that it does. Under that theory, it seems to me reasonable for legislators to think that liberalization of the laws would result in more homosexuality. Making murder a crime may not deter the wife who, after a dozen years of being kicked and beaten by her drunken husband, finally plunges a kitchen knife into him; but when we're talking about deterring the acting out of a latent drive that otherwise law-abiding people may harbor, the arguments for deterrence are strong.

[A] Leitsch: If social laws and attitudes were (continued on page 164) Playboy Panel(continued from page 92) changed, more people would probably engage in homosexual acts, but fewer would identify themselves as homosexuals.

[A] Bieber: I see no reason to believe from what we already know that there's going to be an outcropping of many people who have repressed homosexuality, just waiting, as with Prohibition, for repeal to come and all the saloons will open. There's no reason to believe anything like that at all.

[A] Ploscowe: I agree with Dr. Bieber. I don't think law reform will have much of an effect on the frequency of homosexual incidents one way or the other. The percentage of homosexuals who are arrested for acts done secretly by consent is very, very low, and I don't think the fear of arrest can interfere in any conceivable way with the compulsion to commit a homosexual act.

[A] Tynan: If the laws were repealed, there might even be fewer people engaging in homosexual acts. A certain kind of paranoid personality, which feeds on a sense of being ostracized and persecuted, is often attracted by the homosexual sub-world in countries where queers are outside the law. It's like belonging to a secret society. Remove the element of persecution and you remove the attraction. Again, people often drift into membership of oppressed minorities to compensate for failure in other spheres. "Look at me," they say. "I'm victimized because I'm queer." I've known a good many borderline queers who wanted martyrdom more than they wanted boyfriends. By liberalizing the laws, society could help them face their real problem.

[A] McIlvenna: Even without law reform, I think a permissive situation has had a very positive effect on the San Francisco homosexual, because he doesn't have to be as fearful. San Francisco is only relatively permissive, though. There are still many persons who, if they were found out to be homosexuals, would be fired from their jobs. We've had situations where the police, when they've made an arrest, even though the person was found not guilty of certain sex charges, have called the employer and said, "Do you know that this person was arrested on such and such a sex charge?" There is still a bias on the part of the police and others against homosexuals, and the homosexual is pretty vulnerable.

[A] Marmor: You're right. Even with law reform, little would change to begin with, except that it would be an indication that our society was becoming more tolerant toward the private ways in which people choose to express their sexual needs. Discreet homosexuals would no longer be subjected to legal sanctions; but in actual practice even now, most police do not arrest such people. They would, of course, still be subjected to moral sanctions and possibly to blackmail because of moral opprobrium. Nevertheless, law reform would be a healthy thing, as an indication of growing tolerance on the part of society, and it would pave the way for other constructive evolutionary changes.

[A] Ploscowe: Homosexuality must be socially accepted as a fact of life; a laissez-faire attitude toward the homosexual must develop. But we will be far from that even if the law is changed. This is still a heterosexual world. The homosexual is still a deviant whatever the law may be and despite the so-called sexual revolution. It's tough for a homosexual to live in a heterosexual world.

[A] Kuh Exactly. I'm not sure by changing the law that you suddenly create a vast area of understanding, unless the public is so educated that it's really ready for that change. And as the great Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said, "The first requirement of a sound body of law is that it should correspond with the actual feelings and demands of the community, whether right or wrong."

[Q] Playboy: Some of those who draw the line at repealing the laws against "unnatural crimes" have suggested that instead of imposing prison sentences on homosexuals, they should be given some sort of psychotherapy. How effective would such a solution be?

[A] Lyon: How much does therapy do in changing a person's object orientation, and how many good therapists are there to work with homosexuals? You really find very few. If someone wants treatment, it's extremely difficult to find the right kind of help. I cannot in good conscience refer homosexuals with problems to their family doctors or clergymen, like "Dear Abby" does. There's too much ignorance, even among professionals. I've sent women to psychiatrists whose attitude was, "All you really need is a good man, sweetie, and here I am." That's not particularly helpful.

[A] Bieber: Obviously, Miss Lyon doesn't know any competent psychiatrists. But even an incompetent one wouldn't be likely to make a pass at a Lesbian patient in an initial interview.

[A] McIlvenna: I don't think this problem of therapists seducing patients is a trivial one, nor exclusive to homosexuals. In the new Masters and Johnson book, Human Sexual Inadequacy, they make quite a thing of the whole problem of therapists seducing their patients and causing considerable problems for them.

[A] Marmor: Leaving aside the question of the individual psychiatrist's competence, it's doubtful if compulsory psychotherapy would be at all useful. Treatment should be given only if people seek it. It shouldn't be imposed upon them against their will. It's nobody's business if men or women choose to indulge in homosexual activity with a consenting adult in private. If people are unable to control their sexual behavior in public places or they're involved in the seduction of minors, they're in need of help, but this is true whether they're heterosexual or homosexual.

[A] Kuh: The matter of consent would be extremely important even if we had a sure-fire technique. I can accept laws directed generally against public homosexual acts--solicitation in public--and, though I don't agree with them, laws directed against private acts; yet to compel X to undergo a change in his personality because the community around him doesn't feel comfortable with that personality is pushing too far. Of course, making treatment available on a voluntary basis is a different matter.

[A] Leitsch: I don't think psychotherapy would make a bit of difference, because I don't think homosexuality can be cured. I've never heard of a case where it was cured, if by a cure you mean turning a homosexual into a heterosexual. You can teach a homosexual to engage in heterosexual acts, just as you can teach a heterosexual to engage in homosexual acts, but he doesn't lose what he started with; he just gets something else as well. It's something like becoming a monk and taking a vow of silence; just because you stop talking doesn't mean you've lost your voice. You can teach people to become broader or to give up what they're doing. But you can't change them from what they are into something else. These cures that you hear about, most of them sound so barbarous. I recall reading in The Washington Post, about two years ago, of a doctor who was doing behavior therapy, in which he put a homosexual in a room and flashed homosexual stimuli on a screen. The guy had X number of seconds to remove the stimulus by pushing a button. If he didn't, he got an electric shock. Then they flashed a heterosexual stimulus on the screen and he got a pleasurable sensation of some kind. The doctor said that he had cured 75 or 85 percent of his patients. When he was asked what a cure meant he said, "The therapy stopped them from having homosexual experiences." Then the reporter said, "Did you get them to the point where they wanted to engage in heterosexual acts?" He said, "No, we've only done that with about five of the people so far. The rest have no sex activity at all." This guy was psychologically castrating his patients.

[A] Bieber: If you've never heard of a cured case, Mr. Leitech, you're clearly not tuning in on what you don't want to hear. Many homosexual become exclusively heterosexual. Homosexual behavior fantasies and dreams disappear. These men are (continued on page 178) Playboy Panel (continued from page 164) able to marry and enjoy a sexually gratifying love relationship. It's now well established that about one third to one half the number of male homosexuals treated by psychoanalysis or psychoanalytically oriented therapy become exclusively heterosexual and remain so. In our study, my colleagues and I found that 27 percent of 106 homosexuals in treatment became heterosexual. A follow-up study conducted five years later revealted that this group had remained heterosexual and that an additional nine patients became heterosexual in the courser of time, bringing the final total to approximately 37 percent who had successfully changed. I have personally followed up on some patients for 20 years, and they have remained heterosexual. Drs. Toby Bieber, Samuel Hadden, Lawrence Hatterer, Harold Lief, Lioel Ovesey, Charles Socarides and others have reported similar results.

[A] Marmor: I agree with Dr. Bieber. A great deal of incontrovertible evidence has accumulated by now that where a high level of motivation to change exists, between 25 and 50 percent of young homosexuals can be helped to change to a complete heterosexual pattern. It's more than likely that, as our therapeutic techniques continue to improve, this percentage will increase in the future.

[A] McIlvenna: People in the helping professions, wheter it be the ministry, counseling or psychotherapy, all take the approach of how to make homosexuals heterosexuals. I've given that up. I've estimated that all the psychiatrists in the world, working 24 hours a day in San Francisco, using every conceivable technique--including aversion therapy--wouldn't have any effect on ten percent of them. We might make them be able to have heterosexual experiences, but that wouldn't mean that they weren't still primarily homosexual.

[A] Tynan: We may invite homosexuals to try making love to women, but it would be impolite to insist. No purpose is served by forcing a poker player to play bridge. Indeed, perhaps we should have no more treatment. Society hates queers for reasons that have deep historical roots but are nowadays totally invalid. When the tribe needed offspring to work in the fields and bear arms against its enemies, it was natural to call down the wrath of gods on males who weren't inclined to propagate the species. Sodomy--to me a morally neutral act--was ferociously condemned because it didn't lead to procreation. In an underpopulated word, it's understandable that homosexuality should be denounced as antisocial. But today, when overpopulation is an imminent threat to the continuation of civilized life on this planet, the only valid reason for disapproving of queers has vanished. In fact, the logic of self-preservation suggests that we ought to encourage them.

[A] Bieber: I can't believe that Mr. Tynan is seriously suggesting that society should encourage homosexuality as a method of birth control. Even if he's kidding, I will assume for the sake of exposition that he means what he says. First of all, society would have to increase the percentage of exclusive homosexuals, because bisexuals can make babies just as anyone else. Secondly, if the percentage of exclusive homosexuals increase to 20 percent, a fantastic rise, that would still leave 80 percent of males who would be propagating. That's quite a sufficient percentage to continue the population explosion. Apart from the obvious ineffectiveness of the solution, the idea of society fostering a sexual disorder is anti-human and antisocial. I certainly pot for contraceptive measures. Contraception has the potential for a realistic solution and it castrates no one.

[Q] Playboy: As we've discussed, homosexuality is discouraged not only by legal sanctions but by many social factors. One of these factors is job discrimination. Many homosexuals feel they must keep their private lives a secret or face firing by their employers. Are such fears really justified?

[A] Goodman: In general in America, being queer is economically and professionally not such a disadvantage as being black, except for a few areas, like Government service, where there is considerable fear and furtiveness. In more puritanical regimes, like present-day Cuba, being queer is professionally and civilly a bad deal. Totalitarian regimes, whether Communist or fascist, seem to be inherently puritanical. But my own experience has been very mixed. I've been fired three times because of my queer behavior or my claim to the right to it, and these are the only times I've been fired. I was fired from three highly liberal and progressive institutions, two of which prided themselves on being "communities." Frankly, my experience of radical community is that it doesn't tolerate my kind of freedom. I'm all for community, because it's a human thing, but I seem doomed to be left out. I have been told that my sexual behavior used to do me damage in the New York literary world. It kept me from being invited to advantageous parties and making contacts to get published.

On the other hand, my homosexual acts and my overt claim to them have never disadvantaged me much in more square institutions, so far as I know. I've taught at half a dozen state universities, and I'm continually invited, often as chief speaker, to conferences of junior high school superintendents, boards of regents, guidance counselors, task forces on delinquency, etc. When I go, I say what I think is true--often on sexual topics. And I make passes if there is occasion. I have even sometimes made out--which is more than I can say for conferences of SDS or the Resistance. In any case, I seem to get invited back. Maybe the company is so square that it doesn't believe, or dare to notice, my behavior. More likely, such professional square people are more worldly--this is our elderly word for "cool"--and couldn't care less what you do as long as they don't have to face anxious parents and the yellow press. On the whole, though I was desperately poor up to a dozen years ago--I brought up a family on the income of a sharecropper--I don't attribute this to being queer but to my pervasive ineptitude, truculence and bad luck. In 1944, even the army rejected me as Not Military Material--they had such a stamp--not because I was queer but because I made a nuisance of myself with pacifist action at the examination and also had bad eyes and piles.

[A] Leitsch: But your own experience, in many ways, isn't representative. As a general rule, homosexuals are very much discriminated against by employers. Recently, the University of Minnesota tried to renege on a contract with a librarian when they discovered that the man in question was homosexual. A Federal court ordered the school to hire the man. I'm proud of my part in helping change New York City's employment practices, so that homosexuals may obtain city jobs. Formerly, homosexuals were barred from any city job, including that of working on garbage trucks or keeping books in the controller's office. Like Jews and Negroes, Homosexuals are too often judged by their membership in a minority group rather than by their ability to perform the job in question.

[A] Bieber: I don't like that analogy. In a sense, homosexuals are an American minority group, but in the other cases--Jews, Italians, Negroes--the minority group is not based on pathology. I think the analogy is too simplistically made.

[A] Leitsch: Jews are discriminated against because of their religion, and Negroes because of their skin color. Homosexuals are also victims of discrimination because of something they can't help: their sexual orientation. Homosexuality, black skin or Jewish background doesn't make one incapable of keeping books, operating a typewriter or steam roller or making executive decisions. What really worries people is that once they're in good jobs, the fags are going to use their power to get them into bed. But it's the heterosexual community that does all the proselytizing and recruiting. The society is set up to preach heterosexuality: The church preaches it, the law preaches it, everything preaches heterosexuality.

[A] Tynan: In any case, sexual exploitation, of course, isn't limited to queers. Heterosexual men have a terrible habit of employing attractive heterosexual girls.

[A] Simon: And queers hire other queers, but preferential hiring is profoundly less than the amount of outright discrimination against homosexuals by heterosexuals, many of them prospective employers. In addition, many homosexuals express a great deal of self-hatred by focusing it on other homosexuals--who are seen as unstable, irresponsible, malicious. That has always been one of the most distinctive and least attractive aspects of homosexual subcultures.

[A] Leitsch: The Mattachine Society ran into that sort of reverse discrimination a few years ago when we tried to set up an employment service. Many gay men in hiring positions said, "I'm the only homosexual in my company. If I bring in another one, he might start camping or otherwise give me away. I can't take chances."

[A] McIlvenna: The antisexual person is much more dangerous than the sexual person, who views his or her sexuality in a positive way. I've seen in churches, health agencies and Federal bureaus what an emasculating female or an antisexual person can do. Their attitude about sex is negative and fearful, and they want other people to exhibit the same characteristics. They can make their office a grim place where people don't produce and are afraid every step they take. That's a scary thing.

[A] Simon: The Lesbian is in a double bind. She's discriminated against both as a Lesbian and as a woman. If she admits she's homosexual, she risks dismissal; and if she doesn't, she gets passed over for promotions she's qualified for on the grounds that she's likely to get married, get pregnant and leave.

[A] Lyon: Unless heterosexual society wants to support homosexuals on welfare, it needs to rethink the whole employment thing through. Suppose the Lesbian could apply for a job and tell her employer about her orientation. It doesn't mean that anybody else has to know. If word did get around, the situation could be smoothed over by management. They could do a lot to change these attitudes if they would. Under present circumstances, it's still possible to manage very well even if it's known that you're a Lesbian. I worked in an office for nearly ten years and, as far as I know, I created no dissension. Ultimately, my co-workers figured out that I was probably a Lesbian. Finally, they asked me, I said yes, and we're still friends, even though I haven't been working with them for six years. When people get to know you and like you as a person, they're not going to flip out because your sexual orientation is different from theirs. You have to keep trying to change people's basic attitudes.

[Q] Playboy: Many large companies may be changing their attitudes about employing homosexuals, but how about jobs--such as teaching or social work--that involve working with children? Isn't that more difficult for employers to accept?

[A] Bieber: If I were choosing people to work with children, I would individualize--whether they were heterosexual or homosexual. The fact that a person is homosexual would certainly not mean to me that he should be categorically excluded from work with children--particularly if there is no reason to believe there are any pedophilic tendencies or desires. That can be established without any difficulty.

[A] Mannes: We would certainly lose a tremendous amount of teaching talent if we excluded homosexuals from close contact with young people. The possibility of physical molestation troubles me, but I think that if you can explain to your children the variations of sexual expression, then there's no need to fear.

[A] Ploscowe: The notion of a homosexual working with or teaching youngsters gives me a little pause, despite the fact that I know, as I've said, that most of them aren't interested in children. If it were possible to distinguish with absolute certainty--psychiatrically or psychologically or any other way--those who have no sexual interest in children from those who do, then maybe I would feel easier. But as long as there are no foolproof safeguards, the public will probably want to go easy before known homosexuals are employed in dealing with young people.

[A] Kuh: A further caution. Conceding, as we discussed earlier, that male homosexuals may pose no greater danger to little boys than do some heterosexuals to little girls, this doesn't mean that homosexuality, if open and accepted, is harmless to the young. Youngsters are shaped by what they see around them. If the image a growing boy has before him--whether it's a parent, or an uncle, or a teacher, or a clergyman, or a movie star, or a TV hero, anyone the youngster may emulate--is one of an overt homosexual, the youngster's wholesome maturing may well be set back. If some young boys with some latent homosexuality in their makeups both figuratively and literally aren't sure which way to turn, there is likely to be a danger if the men around them, whom they may emulate, are homosexuals.

[A] Lyon: Once again, everybody is worrying about the boys rather than the girls. There are all kinds of homosexuals in teaching and in administrative school positions, from the elementary schools to the universities--both men and women--who are working hard and contributing enormously to the educational process. If we eliminated them, I suspect a substantial number of schools would have a great deal of difficulty continuing many of their classes. These people are not warping children. And what's more, I think that something positive can be said about the ability of a Lesbian to be an effective female-role model for girl students. There is a large number of women who are currently questioning what an effective female role is, and a large number of them who have very little to do with organized women's liberation. Very often, the conventional woman teacher presents to the girl who's growing up only the desire to find a husband and get married and, consequently, teaches only cooking and sewing. A Lesbian could be more effective in giving a young girl a greater range of possibilities to follow; and I'm not talking about sex. They can show young girls that they can become doctors, lawyers or merchants and that even if they get married, they don't have to restrict themselves to the wife and mother role.

[A] Bieber: I think Miss Lyon's implication that a heterosexual woman teacher will teach girls only to be wives and mothers, and will neither stimulate nor develop intellectual aspirations, is not only preposterous but an attack on straight women. There may be no disadvantage to children being taught by a Lesbian, but neither is it an advantage.

[A] Goodman: In a very specific way, the ban on homosexuality damages and depersonalizes the educational system. The teacher-student relationship is almost always erotic. If there is fear that this necessary erotic feeling might turn into overt sex, the teacher-student relationship lapses or, worse, becomes cold and cruel. Our culture surely lacks the pedagogic sexual friendships--homosexual and heterosexual--that have been a feature of other cultures. To be sure, functional sexuality is probably incompatible with our mass school system. This is one among many reasons why the school systems should be dismantled.

I recall when my book Growing Up Absurd had had a number of glowing reviews; finally, one irritated critic darkly hinted that I wrote about my Puerto Rican delinquents--and called them "lads"--because I was queer for them. News! How could I write a perceptive book if I didn't pay attention, and why should I pay attention to something unless, for some reason, it interested me? I doubt that anybody would say that my observations of delinquent adolescents or of collegians in the student movement have been betrayed by infatuation.

[Q] Playboy: The Committee to Fight Exclusion of Homosexuals from the Armed Forces was established on the West Coast to combat another area of job discrimination. Do you sympathize with its aim to win acceptance?

[A] Tynan: I can't imagine why anyone would want to join the Army, but if a homosexual has his heart set on it, I don't see why we should stop him. After all, we don't prevent queers from going into monasteries. If fellow monks or comrades in arms resent a queer's advances, there are obvious ways of letting him know it.

[A] Ploscowe: The military restriction is silly. The fact that a man is a homosexual doesn't necessarily mean that he's going to make a lousy soldier. If you look into the records of history, you'll find that many armies included homosexuals, and they were perfectly good soldiers.

[A] Lyon: This is equally true of homosexual women who go into military service. Very often, they are among the best personnel. They go into the military with the idea of making a career. They're not going to get pregnant and they're not going to get married and drop out. The Service fills them with a dream of a serious and consequential occupation and a desire to do a good job until they retire. There seems to be a lot of excessive worry about the homosexual in the military. I don't care if someone is heterosexual or homosexual; there will be some who can adjust to military living and some who can't. But very few homosexuals get thrown out of the service, and when it happens, it's usually not because of anything they've done sexually. Sometimes, I feel that the services act as if they have a quota: They know they get a certain proportion of Lesbians in every military station, and every once in a while, they have periodic witch-hunts to search them out. They don't get them all; mostly they get young people who don't know their rights and haven't been around long enough to know all the rules and regulations. These are the ones they scare to death and drive out.

[A] Bieber: A categorical kind of exclusion is not a good solution. There were many homosexuals in the Armed Forces during world war two, and quite a few did notable work and service. If it were up to me, I'd leave the decision up to the man himself. I would, however, exclude certain types--such as those who might offend the sensibilities of the men they'd have to live with. And if homosexuals were accepted for military service and later had to be separated because of their inversion, they should be honorably discharged.

[A] Kuh: Excuse me, but I must differ. I, too, was in world War Two, part of it in the Infantry, overseas, as an enlisted man. It may well be that on a nine-to-five Army desk job, the military is much like civilian life and can absorb a modest quote of queers. But waspish homosexual behavior could only add to the tensions of crowded, impersonal barracks living, and intolerant square males--whether secretly nursing homosexual fears or not--couldn't be expected to keep the peace when quartered with homosexuals. Whether the military would win the plaudits of the folks back home for billeting sexually inexperienced 18-year-olds with military fairies is extremely dubious. I think it would be very unwise for the military to take literally that old Army expression, "Every week is fuck-your-buddy week."

[A] Bieber: In World War Two, when I served as a psychiatrist in a general hospital in Calcutta, all soldiers in the area who were apprehended by the MPs or CID for homosexual activity were referred to me for psychiatric examination. In my extensive military psychiatric experience. I never encountered anyone whose homosexual behavior began in the Army, including men who had been separated from women for long periods. I had occasion to discuss this matter with Dr. John Reese, who was brigadier in charge of psychiatry for the British army, and his experience was the same as mine. The fear that the presence of homosexuals in the Armed Forces will result in the seduction of sexually immature soldiers is unsupported.

[A] McIlvenna: Anyone who's had anything to do with the military knows that you get about the same number of homosexuals in the Service as you get in any other occupation, whether or not you try to screen them out. I think the military is fooling itself when it tries to exclude homosexuals. And discharging people for homosexual acts is disastrous in its effects. Sometimes I come across a Serviceman who's had some fleeting homosexual contact. The military finds out and it brands him as a homosexual, making him think he is one, and they put him in a terrible situation. At the Glide Foundation, we see them as they're cashiered out of the Service, drifting into San Francisco--guys who aren't homosexual but who have been at a gay party or had one homosexual contact. They got caught or maybe felt guilty and mentioned it to a military doctor or chaplain, or somebody blew the whistle on them for some other reason. These guys are really hung up. The military says they're homosexual, so they must be homosexual and, consequently, they sweep into the gay community in San Francisco or other parts of the country and try to be homosexual, despite the fact that they're basically straight. There are many homosexual contacts in the Services between people who aren't homosexual, just as there are in prison, because of the closeness of the men. Fortunately, there are many sensitive people in the gay world who learn to catch these guys and are very helpful to them. Contrary to what many people think, the gay world isn't nearly as missionary as might be supposed. They're not out to make converts.

[Q] Playboy: Late last year, it was reported that the Weathermen were planning to blackmail a homosexual lieutenant at a biological-warfare research center to make him help them steal canisters of germs. This sort of vulnerability might be one reason why the Government is wary of employing homosexuals.

[A] Ploscowe: Security clearances are another matter altogether. Homosexuals are subjected to pressure in a way that the ordinary heterosexual is not. I would certainly go easy in employing homosexuals in a high-security area. That doesn't mean they should be barred from all areas of Government. Most of Government has nothing to do with security. I think the elimination of homosexuals from all positions in Government would be a very bad mistake. Many of them are intelligent, talented people and undoubtedly very efficient public servants.

[A] McIlvenna: I don't see why a homosexual would be any more vulnerable to black-mail than a heterosexual who's engaged in an affair on the side, especially when the heterosexual has a family and children.

[A] Kuh: Perhaps in theory the homosexual should be no more vulnerable than the heterosexual who's cheating on his wife. But we're dealing with the world as it is, not as it possibly should be. And speaking realistically, the stigma of homosexuality today is far greater than that of adultery. Moreover, other things being equal, homosexuality may indicate a degree of immaturity and instability that would show that the homosexual may not be a person wisely trusted with a high-security matter.

[Q] Playboy: Though homosexuals are barred from Government posts, they are widely believed to have a strong influence on the arts. Are they inclined to be more creative than heterosexuals?

[A] Leitsch: There are an awful lot of homosexual artists, writers, actors, directors and painters, but I don't think this has much to do with homosexuality itself. I know a number of very active homosexuals who are terribly uncreative and inartistic. I'm not very artistic or creative myself. But around puberty, a boy may realize that he has homosexual tendencies and he then starts thinking of himself as homosexual. As a result, he feels isolated and becomes very introspective. Introspection is what makes a good artist. You examine yourself and you examine the world. I think the introspection and isolation the homosexual feels can lead to creativity in later life.

[A] Bieber: I don't think it's the homosexuality that makes them artists or contributes to it. I think many homosexuals are artists, but they would be whether they were homosexual or not. Their homosexuality may color the content of what they do, but it isn't going to determine their talents. We don't know what goes into determining these talents, but I don't think it's homosexuality or any other kind of neurosis.

[Q] Playboy: With the growth of the gay-liberation movement, young homosexuals are showing that they're no longer content to accept relegation to the arts. Marching and demonstrating to demand that the laws and social practices directed against homosexuals be changed in every field, they are sometimes an embarrassment to the older homosexual reform groups, which work in more traditional ways. Do you think the activists' techniques will work?

[A] Ploscowe: I think the gay-liberation front is as effective or ineffective as some of the other radical movements. But, to me, they are more of a joke than anything really serious. Change can be generated only by the usual techniques of influencing public opinion and influencing legislators. The homosexual organizations throughout the country that continually beat the drums about law reform are beginning to influence newspapers and nonhomosexual people of some standing. Conceivably, over the years, legislators may get away from the notion that they've always got to be against sin. Then they may vote a little more intelligently on these issues, and the pace of law reform will be a great deal faster than it has been.

[A] Goodman: Best of all techniques for achieving reform is the ordinary kind of civil disobedience. The way to change the sexual laws is to act out what you think is sensible and desirable for yourself, and join with others who do it--en masse. If you want to get rid of dormitory rules, you have a fuck-in. If you want to get rid of the laws against homosexuality, you get homosexuals together--including the Spocks and Coffins of the homosexual world, whoever they may be, and you all join in blow-ins, or whatever you choose to do. After a while, you create the world you want by doing what you want.

[A] McIlvenna: Yes. The gay movement is ready to confront straights rather than ask their permission for change.

[A] Lyon: It's part of the whole youth explosion, the whole new mood of militancy among young people. In many ways, the young homosexual is very similar to the young heterosexual. He shares many of the same political, social and moral concerns. The climate is far more open for militance now, and the kids have suddenly decided they're not going to take second place anymore. So they say, "I'm gay and I'm proud," and they're fighting very hard for their pride, even though they're still a small minority within the radical movement. This militance is making a lot of difference in the older homophile organizations, too. They're being challenged to move a little faster, to engage in more activist programs and not simply content themselves with passing resolutions.

[A] Leitsch: But, Phyllis, I believe we have to be careful not to get hung up again fighting someone else's battles. The social dynamics that cause prejudice against homosexuals are different from those that lead to racial, religious, ethnic and other forms of prejudice and discrimination, and the solutions are different, too. We need an alternative to the heterosexual middle-class system, not necessarily a place within it. When you come right down to it, the student movement, the civil rights movement, the women's-liberation movement are all basically heterosexual and middle class, admirable though they may be. Our movement has always copied other movements. But I feel very strongly that the homosexual movement is different from all other movements, and I don't believe in copying them. Our problems are as homosexuals, and they aren't shared by heterosexual groups.

[A] McIlvenna: It seems to me that you're pushing toward an anti-integration solution, focusing as you do on the uniqueness of the problems of the homosexual rather than on the problems he has in common with other minorities in society. Don't you think this may produce a form of ghettoism among homosexuals?

[A] Leitsch: Yes, but I don't see much chance of homosexuals having a place, at least during my lifetime, in heterosexual society. Can you imagine a mother telling her Lesbian daughter, "Do I have a girl for you!," or Cardinal Cooke marrying a gay couple in St. Patrick's Cathedral? Heterosexual institutions and social structures serve the needs of heterosexuals. Homosexuals should have the right to build institutions and structures that fit our particular needs. I don't want us segregated, but I'm afraid we'll have to remain nonintegrated for a long time. The traditional minorities--ethnic, racial, religious--have found it difficult to become homogenized. I suspect the erotic minorities will find that process even more difficult.

[A] Marmor: The extreme behavior exhibited by some members of the gay-liberation movement may easily backfire and have a negative effect. I have the impression that the members of gay lib do not represent a genuine cross section of the homosexual community, either among males or females. They reflect the more deviant groups in the homosexual community, in terms of overt behavior, appearance and social adjustment.

[A] Leitsch: I would suspect that the most extreme groups are composed of homosexuals with the least commitment to homosexuality. They get hung up on women's rights, black rights and other issues their heterosexual peers are involved with; they just want to be revolutionaries. But those who have broken with their heterosexual peer groups and made a real commitment to homosexuality recognize from reading Soul on Ice that Eldridge Cleaver is about as liberal as Spiro Agnew on the issue of homosexuality. They see homosexuals oppressed even worse in Cuba and Russia than in America, so they have no interest in a Marxist revolution. The loyalties of this group are to other homosexuals, not primarily to other causes or to any political philosophy.

[A] Goodman: I've been in close touch with material hunger all my life, so I can't take ideological liberation movements very seriously. But gay society can be fantastically apolitical or reactionary. When I give talks to the Mattachine Society, my sermon invariably embraces all other libertarian groups and liberation movements, and the response is pretty apathetic. But I feel that freedom is indivisible. Of course, my experience on the left wing doesn't lead me to expect acceptance of that proposition from them, either. Allen Ginsberg and I once pointed out to Stokely Carmichael that we were niggers, too, but he blandly put us down by saying that we could always conceal our disposition and pass. We didn't really exist for him. But since then, Huey Newton welcomed gay-liberation groups to the Revolutionary People's Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia and admitted that they were a proper part of the revolution, since they were equally oppressed.

[Q] Playboy: There seems to be an appreciable amount of bisexual experimenting within the radical movement and the youth culture. Could this be part of the attraction of the social revolution for homosexuals?

[A] Leitsch: Many of our younger people are, I'm afraid, using the New Left and the hippie movement as a new closet. In the old days, closet queens pretended not to be gay. Either they married and produced a couple of kids as a front, or they pretended bachelorhood or celibacy. Today, they use the pansexuality of the hippies as a cover, telling the world, "I'm not really gay, I just swing with whoever turns me on." But you'll notice that members of the opposite sex never turn them on.

[A] McIlvenna: I think that's untrue. There does seem to me to be a definite drift in the direction of private bisexuality. Many young people and some older ones are moving into the group-sex scene, and when you get more than a couple in bed, you have to have at least a tolerance for touching a body of the same sex. A man may not have sex alone with another man, but stimulated by a female who's present, he's far more likely to do it.

[A] Lyon: Yes. Being turned on homosexually in a group situation can lead to having sex with someone of the same sex outside of the group scene later. If homosexuality isn't a problem in the group, then you can admit to yourself that you might like it at other times.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think bisexuality is a realistic option for most people?

[A] Marmor: For the majority, probably not. Nevertheless, it's important to recognize that all animals exhibit both heterosexual and homosexual behavior. Heterosexuality tends to be preferred, and obviously this has survival value for the propagation of the species. As one ascends the evolutionary ladder, however, patterns of institutional behavior become more and more modifiable by learning and experience. This is particularly true in human beings. In mankind, most of the biological drives are capable of being conditioned and adapted to a multiplicity of different circumstances and a wide variety of objects. Human sexuality is modifiable by experience in almost any direction.

[A] Bieber: Homosexuality is a human condition. We are anthropomorphizing when we speak of it in animals. Even those biologists who loosely apply the term, when they are actually referring to mounting behavior, don't state that all animals show both homo- and heterosexual behavior. I agree that biological drives, sexual and otherwise, can be conditioned in humans and infrahumans. Pavlov demonstrated this a long time ago, but I should like to underscore the point that it isn't easy to sidetrack a male from a heterosexual destiny. It takes a lot of trauma, such as the continuity of specific types of destructive parental attitudes, operating over many of the formative years of childhood. I have never been able to find a shred of reliable evidence to support the notion of an innate ambisexuality.

[A] Tynan: This seems right to me. Some men are bisexual, but I doubt whether mankind is. It's comparatively rare for people to be bisexual in their erotic habits. Of course, it's virtually compulsory for queer writers to insist that we're all bisexual below the navel. They get quite evangelical about it. To coin a phrase, there are no atheists in assholes. Many queers take a sort of ideological pride in boasting of their heterosexual conquests. Much of this is propaganda. If, like myself, you're a hetero who goes for female bottoms, you're apt to be told by queers that this penchant indicates the presence of what Mel Brooks calls "a hint of mint." Bottoms, they point out, are common to both sexes. I usually reply that, while this is undoubtedly true, they stir me only when they belong to girls. Similarly, male and female lips are often identical, but heteros get no kicks out of kissing men.

[A] Lyon: Your remarks are typical of the dehumanized attitude so many men have toward women. It's precisely because of this male attitude toward women as a piece of ass, an object for sexual gratification or propagation and never to be considered as a whole person, that many young women in women's liberation around the country today regard Lesbianism as a political statement. They are consciously and deliberately forming Lesbian relationships, where otherwise they might never have, because they view men as oppressors who wish merely to exploit them as sexual and household servants. Many of these women, who are both fighting and switching, are learning that women are bisexual--even if Tynan thinks men aren't. They can and do respond erotically to either sex, and they can relate to one another emotionally and physically.

[A] Simon: It might be easier on all of us--homosexual and heterosexual alike--if we began learning to elaborate our ideas of masculinity and femininity along less narrow lines, particularly along less narrowly sexual lines. We can see, I think, a slight movement toward this among the youth of today, who seem to allow for a much wider amount of overlap of male-female distinctions in many aspects of life.

[A] Mannes: I'm for anything that will break down the arbitrary stereotypes of what a man is and what a woman is. A lot of people do a great deal of clucking over unisex clothes, for instance. No pair of pants is going to make any girl unfeminine, and no frilled shirt or blue velvet evening coat is going to make any man less masculine. I'm all for this cutting across barriers; I think it's not only decorative but it strips away this eternal nonsense that starts at birth in the average household. Pink for girls, blue for boys, frills for the baby girls, pants for the baby boys, baby dolls for the girls, trains for the boys. Right from the cradle, we start designing and limiting the kinds of people our children can be.

[A] Simon: Many of these rigid gender-role training activities we get into may, in fact, be among the causes of homosexual adjustments. If we have only one model for man and one model for woman, any young person who falls outside of those limits--like the quiet, contemplative boy who hates the Little League, or the active, intellectual girl who finds household gossip and dolls intolerable--is alienated from many important societal experiences.

[A] Tynan: These stereotypes are hangovers from primitive conditioning. Man have spear, take wife, make children. Man who not do these things not man. He bad juju, throw him out of tribe. People who nowadays think like that are appallingly bad juju. I wouldn't throw them out of the tribe, but encourage them to come out of their shells, attend some social functions, meet a few nice queers. Of course, the hypermasculine male has also been maligned as latently homosexual. When psychoanalysis first swept the States, anyone who led an open-air life was prone to be written off as cryptoqueer. It used to be thought chic among people who didn't know him to hint that Hemingway was latently homosexual. Incredibly enough, some people are still haunted by that legend. It badly needs laying, and so, in many cases, do the people who believe it.

[A] Marmor: The assumption that hypermasculine behavior necessarily reflects latent homosexual impulses makes no sense to me. I don't think the term latent homosexuality is a useful one. More often than not, hypermasculine behavior is a compensation for unconscious feelings of masculine inadequacy. Such individuals are driven to prove their masculinity precisely because they have inner doubts about it. It's characteristic of our cultural-value system that when a man feels inadequate, he often expresses this feeling as a fear of being homosexual. In the vast majority of instances, however, this doesn't mean that he has any genuine erotic preference for members of the same sex.

[Q] Playboy: If a young person came to you and confided that he or she was struggling with homosexual impulses and didn't know what to do, what advice would you give?

[A] Tynan: If anyone young came to me, I'd advise him to gain a little more sexual experience and then decide for himself, without feeling guilty about it.

[A] Simon: One has to accept certain hard facts of life. No matter how much we all agree on the need for law reform in changing public attitudes toward homosexuals, there really appear to be no dramatic breakthroughs on the immediate horizon. With this in mind, I would urge trying out heterosexuality, if it's possible without having to perjure yourself constantly to others and to yourself. If heterosexuality isn't possible, then one must learn to accept one's homosexuality without exaggerating or minimizing its importance. The major consideration is learning to be at ease with yourself; someone who can't learn to accept himself, whether he's a perfect conformist or a professional revolutionary, is in trouble. But the idea of preferring to be a happy homosexual than a nervous, self-battling heterosexual may be too one-dimensional. Some people--those with an overriding religious commitment, for example--might actually find a more effective road to self-acceptance by opting out of sex altogether.

[A] Marmor: Although I'm all in favor of liberalizing our attitudes toward adult homosexuals, there are cogent reasons for regarding the child who seems to be becoming a homosexual as someone who should be helped to move in a heterosexual direction whenever possible. If a young person is developing homosexual tendencies, it's unquestionably desirable to do something about it--the earlier the better. The fact is that an individual in our society is more likely to have a better self-image and a better chance for a happy and fulfilling life as a heterosexual than as a homosexual.

[A] Tynan: Except for having a family, there are as many valid reasons for being homosexual. If you're an uncompromising queer you're condemned to be childless. This means that you rob yourself of an enormous emotional experience. But it also means that you aren't plagued by visions of founding a dynasty, that you can't work out your own frustrated ambitions through your children, and that you're probably capable of living more fully in the present than a married hetero, who must always be thinking of his family's future. It could even be argued that a queer relationship is purer and more emotionally honest than the "normal" marriage, which is often held together only by children or economic necessity. Two queers can make only each other unhappy.

[A] McIlvenna: When anyone asks me if he should be homosexual, I usually ask him why he's concerned about it, what he feels about it. Is he asking for endorsement of his already established homosexuality, or is he looking for help because he may have had some fleeting homosexual feelings? There would be no tailormade response. If he's 18 or so and he's already a homosexual who has come out and is quite happy about it, not very much could be done to change him into a heterosexual. Most people across our country would agree with the view some of you have expressed--that it's better to be heterosexual than homosexual. But I have homosexual friends who say it's better to be a homosexual than a heterosexual, and their experience must be taken into account. In ten or fifteen years, the gay life may be a very viable life style. Already it's certainly much better than it was five years ago.

[A] Goodman: Getting back to the boy who came to me for advice: If he's cute, I'd try to make out with him. If I couldn't, I'd try to build up his heterosexual life, and also encourage him to have a homosexual life, if that's what he seems to want. I don't believe in encouraging mindless conformity.

[A] Leitsch: The first thing I'd do is sit down with him and talk. I remember when I was young how happy I was the first time I found someone I could talk with about homosexuality. I'd help him get acquainted with the gay scene and answer his questions about it. I wouldn't try to sway him toward homosexuality, heterosexuality or bisexuality. Making decisions that decide another person's life is more of a responsibility than I care to shoulder. If he couldn't make his own decision, I'd probably refer him to one of the psychiatrists on Mattachine's referral list. These doctors are carefully screened to eliminate those who feel that homosexuality must be stamped out at whatever cost to the individual. I know the doctors on our list would help the boy make his own decision and help him to be a heterosexual, if that's what he wants, or to be the best-adjusted and happiest homosexual possible, if that's what the boy decided upon.

[A] Bieber: Evidence of developing homosexuality in preadolescence and early adolescence should be viewed as an urgent indicator that both the child and his parents need help. The consultant should preferably be one well grounded in psychodynamics. As for young adults, the earlier treatment is attempted the better. I would advise psychiatric treatment in all cases. This does not mean, of course, that a young man should be forced into therapy if he doesn't want it. And well-trained therapists who work with homosexuals don't set themselves the specific goal of converting them into heterosexuals. The goal of treatment is to work through as many psychological problems as one can. Hopefully, the resolution of psychopathology creates the conditions for a shift in sexual adaptation. At least half who attempt treatment don't become heterosexual, yet a great deal can be done for those who remain homosexual by alleviating anxiety, depression, feelings of emptiness, loneliness and work difficulties. In any civilized society, an adult's sexual life is his own business and sexual behavior between consenting adults should be a private matter. Yet I don't think that society can pride itself on its emancipated attitudes toward homosexuality if it allows defeatist and pessimistic attitudes toward prevention and treatment to go unchallenged. Physicians, teachers, clergymen and others who work with youngsters and are in a position to observe them should be taught how homosexuality is engendered and how to recognize its manifestations. Therapeutic facilities should be made available for such children and their parents.

[A] Kuh: Don't almost all our answers here, to some extent, belie much of the earlier carefree talk? Here, after all the discussion, almost all of us say--in varying ways--get him some sensitive help. If Playboy's question had concerned an 18-year-old who came to us and said he had heterosexual feelings and wanted our advice, we might suggest a doctor, if only because we couldn't fathom why in hell, these being his feelings, he felt the need for advice.

[A] Lyon: In some ways, Playboy's question is really kind of unrealistic. It doesn't happen that way. My experience is that most people have already made a decision. I think all you can do with someone who's uncertain is to tell him or her everything there is to know--the advantages and the disadvantages. The idea is to try to help people see for themselves, but you can never really make the decision for them. We've tended to push too many people one way or the other, assuming that either homosexuality was better or heterosexuality was better. I know people living the homosexual life who I doubt seriously are homosexuals They were pushed into the gay life. Either they were thrown out by their parents or, through sheer ignorance, they felt they were homosexual because they had committed a homosexual act. On the other hand, we all know many, many homosexuals who get pushed into marriage for one reason or another and end up involving a wife or husband and children with their problems.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think a healthier view of heterosexuality in our society would diminish the number of people who make the homosexual commitment?

[A] Tynan: A healthier view of sex, by my standards, would be one that permitted any kind of erotic enjoyment that didn't involve coercion or the recruitment of minors. This would probably lead to more sexual activity in general, but whether this would swell the proportion of homo to hetero, I couldn't predict.

[A] Ploscowe: Conceivably, if it were easier to obtain satisfaction through heterosexual relationships, people who have both hetero-and homosexual feelings might not be pushed over into homosexuality. It's much easier, for example, for two men to room together than for a boy and girl to do so without being married.

[A] Leitsch: In a healthier society, where there was more sexual experimenting and less sexual labeling, we'd probably all use labels less often. There might be more homosexual acts going on in a healthier society, but I'm sure there would be fewer people who were exclusively homosexual. Today, anyone who engages in a homosexual act or relationship risks being labeled a homosexual. Even boys who aren't sports-oriented, who have hormonal imbalances that give them an effeminate appearance, etc., are labeled homosexual. When a person is called something often enough, he begins to think of himself in terms of the label applied to him.

[A] Kuh: As a lawyer and a layman, I think this last question makes a dubious assumption, and some of this discussion is, I think, equally ill-founded. The question suggests that our being more permissive is the same as our having a "healthier view of heterosexuality." I'm all for greater permissiveness, and I concede that it may lead to healthier sexuality, but when it results in one's screwing everything in sight--and doing so with no conscious guilt feelings--I'm not at all sure that it can be equated with healthy heterosexuality. Moreover, as a society, we haven't been repressive of male heterosexuality. Aside from the preachings of a handful of overprotective parents, it's been OK--indeed, properly gamy--for men, including young men, to get laid early and often. Equally clearly, it has been strongly tabooed for men to engage in homosexual acts. I therefore have trouble believing that, realistically examined, our so-called traditional repressiveness has driven men in any numbers into homosexuality.

[A] McIlvenna: Gamy sex can also be guilty sex, Mr. Kuh. It's not at all apparent to me that young men are presented with such an easy set of alternatives as you picture. Copulation is restricted, or at least used to be, to bad girls or to marriage, so that premarital heterosexuality, even when surreptitiously encouraged, was still a seamy, dirty affair. For girls, this seaminess and dirtiness was even more profoundly emphasized--so much so that I wonder why most females didn't give up sex entirely.

[A] Simon: Some men might claim that most of them have.

[A] Marmor: I agree with Judge Ploscowe that if society had a healthier attitude toward heterosexual behavior, there wouldn't be as much exclusive homosexuality. There might be more occasional, incidental, relatively guilt-free homosexual contacts, but exclusive homosexuality is often related to guilt about heterosexuality. Significantly often, homosexuals have been made to feel, as children, that heterosexual activity is something dirty and bad. Same-sex relationships aren't discouraged so clearly and openly among children and adolescents, however. In this way, in some puritanical families, the path to a homosexual adaptation is facilitated.

[A] Bieber: It's very hard to make a one-to-one correlation between a puritanical ethos and homosexuality. We don't know whether the Victorians produced more homosexuals than modern England. On the other hand, anthropologists such as Bronislaw Malinowski, in his descriptions of the Trobriand Islanders--a warm, genial people--tell us that apart from the incest taboo, no sexual repression existed and homosexuality was not reported. I think all experiences that associate heterosexuality with detrimental consequences may be damaging to normal sexual development and may contribute to many types of sexual disorders, one of which is homosexuality. Every homosexual is a latent heterosexual; the converse I don't find true.

[A] Tynan: Frankly, Dr. Bieber, you could just as well argue that heterosexuality. in many people, is the result of repressed homosexuality. According to one school of psychoanalysis, queers are men who hated their mothers in infancy, were consumed by guilt and have ever since overcompensated by identifying themselves with the maternal image. If their guilt prevents them from functioning, then there may be a case for treating them. But if they've come to terms with their guilt, why on earth should we try to turn them into halfhearted heteros?

[A] Bieber: Our experience doesn't support your formulation, Mr. Tynan. Most homosexuals I have studied loved their mothers. They were often the only human beings such a man ever loved. It is the father who emerges as the one who is hated, held in contempt and often feared. Guilt isn't the central problem at all.

[A] Leitsch: Tynan's point of view is a good one. People who function as homosexuals find more satisfaction in homosexuality than in heterosexuality. They're not repressing heterosexual desires, because they don't have any. You know, in the dark it doesn't matter what you're having sex with. The important thing is friction. You can enjoy masturbation, homosexual acts or heterosexual acts equally, except for the degree of guilt you feel about each one.

[A] Kuh: Haven't you placed your finger squarely on the trouble: to suggest that it doesn't matter what you're having sex with, and to equate sex with friction and simply minimizing guilt feelings? If, in saying that, you're a spokesman for homosexuals, you're painting a duller, bleaker, more hopeless picture of your buddies --and of what sex is to them--than I thought ever to hear from anyone past early puberty.

[A] Leitsch: The customs, emotions and life styles of exclusive heterosexuals look pretty dull and bleak to the homosexual, Mr. Kuh. I know some homosexuals for whom heterosexual acts are as repugnant as homosexual acts are supposed to be for a normal red-blooded American man. I once got a book out and showed a friend a picture of the female sex organs. He was horrified and said, "How can people stick their penis into a thing like that?" He sounded just like some of the heterosexuals I've heard saying, "How can homosexuals do things like that?" I believe man is essentially pansexual. There are any number of sexual things that he can do and enjoy himself. I think people have a right to look over and experience all the things that are possible for them, then make a decision and say, "I like this best."

[A] Simon: However much disagreement there may be on the pleasures, pains or potential value of the homosexual life style, I think we can all agree that for the homosexual in today's society, happiness is more difficult to achieve than it is for the heterosexual. There is profound difference of opinion among us on whether or not homosexuality should be called pathological, but if all the homosexuals in the country--and at the very lowest estimate put forward by the panel, we must count them in the hundreds of thousands--were to accept the label and seek professional help, the existing mental-health structure in the United States would be incapable of carrying the load. Until such time as psychiatric aid can be provided on a much larger scale and at much less expense, it would seem wise for us to focus attention on the laws and mores that make the homosexual's social adjustment so difficult.

In this context, we have to deal with the cost to society of productivity lost and potential careers damaged by repressive and discriminatory practices. There is some disagreement among us about how far society should condone the homosexual life style, and even deeper disagreement on how ready the community is to be tolerant. In sexual attitudes, probably more than in any other area, social attitudes are most profoundly influenced by the changing values of society. There have been fundamental changes in our view of sexuality since World War Two, and the laws on such issues as abortion, birth control and sexual privacy are still in the process of catching up with our new attitudes. It seems likely that community feelings toward homosexuals have altered as much as they have in these other areas. But even if, as some of the panelists suggest, there is still a large residue of anti-homosexual feeling in the country at large, my own researches and other sociological studies indicate that acceptance of homosexuality is growing markedly among the younger generation.

The future treatment of homosexuals clearly depends on what the future holds for all of us, and here there seem to be two main possibilities. Some feel that the present trend toward greater permissiveness will not continue. I and possibly the majority of the panelists believe that, on the contrary, society will continue to evolve in ways that will provide greater freedom for everyone. If we're right, there's a chance that we will live to see a fundamental alteration in our whole approach to gender definition and sexual stereotypes. The meaning of masculine and feminine may well be redefined so substantially that the whole image of homosexuality will have to be rethought from scratch. A more immediate prospect is that changing attitudes will permit heterosexuals and homosexuals alike to unashamedly devote themselves--in private as well as in public--to the pursuit of their own personal happiness. So the futures of homosexual and heterosexual are inextricably linked--and we all stand to profit.