a four-part series by Mark Salzwedel
Part Two: Damaged Brains– The Pathology of Queerness 1900-1960
With the rise in stature of physicians, psychologists, and researchers in the early 20th century, several competing theories arose to satisfy the general public’s new awareness of homosexuality as a “lifestyle option” about which they’d been previously unaware.
Gay-themed literature was the first to push the envelope of moral acceptability. In 1902 André Gide (who won the Nobel prize in literature in 1947) wrote a novel in which a new groom is distracted by some young Arab boys. Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice” continued the trope of an older man in love with a boy. The theme of gay men as tragic characters continued well into the century.
From its beginning as a medium, the film was often flirting with LGBT themes more to shock audiences. Erotic kissing between women popped up in Cecil B. DeMille’s Manslaughter in 1922, and again primarily as a shocking jest when it was star Marlene Dietrich doing the kissing in the 1930 film Morocco. Similarly, in the 1931 film City Lights, Charlie Chaplin’s character walks a fine line between portraying a homosexual and making fun of homosexual behavior.
One of the leading theories of what drove same-sex attraction was that it was abnormal, caused either by a birth defect or a postnatal imbalance. Adherents of the former claimed to be scientists as they went about transplanting gay men with straight men’s testicles, administering repeated electrical shocks, removing sexual organs, and removing the frontal lobe of homosexual brains.
Those who saw homosexuality as a social disorder were more often psychologists and only slightly less cruel. They felt that gay people were possibly victims of an overbearing mother and weak father, or that they had suffered a life-changing trauma that turned them gay. They subjected their LGBT patients to negative reinforcement, such as shocks, induced nausea, hitting, cutting, and threatening worse. The most popular therapy was called “conversion therapy,” which could include sleep deprivation, physical torture, and brainwashing.
Another theory of homosexuality saw LGBT people as having stunted development. They had halted their maturing process somehow, they thought. From this viewpoint, gay people were in a class of disability, and instead of torture, they were offered pity, which only damaged their self-esteem.
Most of the research into homosexuality in the early part of the century supported the idea of abnormality. Their study populations were far from normal, often the incarcerated or those in need of therapeutic intervention.
By 1956, psychologist Evelyn Hooker had completed her comparative study of functioning gay and straight men and presented it at the American Psychological Association’s annual meeting. Her research design was so tight, no one could fault her conclusion: That LGBT people’s sexuality had no bearing on their mental health.
Even though the idea of homosexuality as a sickness started fading, it would be several years before the free-love movement and the Stonewall riots opened the closet door wider. Until well into the 1980s, LGBT people had another adversary to overcome. There was nowhere they could meet without the threat of police violence, extortion, and/or arrest.
Mark Salzwedel
917-318-3368
The Hidden History of LGBT People Part One: Avoiding Execution Queer Rights up to 1900