iiiiiin Karlen, Arno. NEW COLLEGE OF CALIFORNIA (SF) Karlen, Arno. HQ Sexuality and homo- 12 sexuality. K37 HQ 12 Karten Arno* f K37 Sexuality and homosexuality a new view / Arno Karlen* [1st ed* N: ew York ] W. W* Norton* cl971* 2 xxff 666 p* 24 cm* ; Bibliography: p. 619-646* Includes index* *6553 Gift $15*00 ISBN 0-393-01087-2 1* Sex customs History* 2* Homosexuality* I* Title 08 APP 85 155371 NEWCxc 70-116103 U8RABY NEW COLLfJCr. OF T77 VAL£.NCIi •'.RiXT »AN FRAm:iSCO. CA »4U« (4M1 M«.ie*4 SEXUALITY AND HOMOSEXUALITY A New View AND SEXUALITY HOMOSEXUALITY A New View ARNO KARLEN WW- NORTON & COMPANY INC • NEW YORK © Copyright 1971 by Arno Karien FIRST EDITION SBN 393 01087 2 Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 70-1 16103 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Published simultaneously in Canada by George J. McLeod Limited PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 12 3 4 5 6 7 9 Contents Preface vu Introduction xiii PART ONE 1 1 The Myth of the Patriarchs 3 2 The Greek Revision 12 3 Homosexual and Pansexual 44 4 The Christian Bedrock 66 5 The Capital Sin 85 6 The Bisexual Glory 104 7 Marrieds and Libertines 124 8 Mollies and Roarers 139 9 The Victorians 161 PART TWO 179 10 The Scientific Overture 181 11 The Witch Reborn 199 12 The Apologists 213 13 Beyond the West 228 14 The Life 248 15 The Age of Irony 258 16 New Expectations 269 17 Instincts and Analysts 284 18 The Life Till the Fifties 304 19 Going for Facts 321 Contents yj PART THREE ^^^ 337 20 Genes and Hermaphrodites 352 21 The Erotic Disguise '179 22 Across the Gender Line ^^^ 23 Wired for Gender 24 Instead of Latency 25 From Outrage to Boredom ^-^^ ^^^ 26 In Other Worlds 4.R7 27 Masculine-Feminine ^^^ 28 In the Shadow ^^^ 29 Other Outsiders ^'^^ 30 Cure or Illusion Law 607 31 The Logic of the " ^ Critical Bibliography ^ 647 Index Preface This book is an act of presumption. I can only plead that at first it was the presumption of ignorance. In 1965 an editor and my literary agent suggested that I consider writing a very different book. The mass media insisted that we were increasingly surrounded by microboppers who took the Pill at puberty, suburban swap- pers, rodentlike college students, homosexuals and kinky undergrounds. The sexual revolution had allegedly reached a new peak, and with it the more baroque forms of sexuality. The press claimed that a homosexual Mafia was taking over the American culture establishment and breaking down whatever sex distinctions remained in our society. I declined to write a book rounding up the evidence for all these arguments, because I had doubts that they were true. In fact, my scientific reading suggested the con- trary. The more I read and talked to serious students of the subject, the more convinced I became that what passes for an informed, enlightened view of sex among educated laymen is twenty to fifty years out of date. The sexo- logical truisms of intellectual cocktail parties are just a few cuts above phlogiston theory in accuracy and relevance. I proposed writing a very different sort of book, and thus began a five-year venture that changed many of my own ideas and feelings. It took me from primate-behavior lab- oratories to luncheons with transvestites, from interviewing heterosexual college students to sifting through the intellectual backbiting of opposed schools of scientists. I rapidly learned that the important revolution of our time is not in sexual behavior but in the scientific study of sex. The widely publicized work of Kinsey and Masters and Johnson is only a fraction of it. Most lies buried in fragments in specialized journals. If one begins to assemble the contributions of psychiatry, anthropology, animal behavior, genetics and a half dozen other fields, there are dramatic congruences and contradictions among them. Some new answers emerge, and many of the old questions we asked seem so naively conceived that they must be scrapped. I looked for books summarizing and relating this research and found none. Only a handful of scientists are trying to join the pieces in a coherent whole, in guarded essays in specialized texts. Most lay writers VII — viii Preface report on sexology and sex in society without even knowing such develop- ments exist. As a result, a revolutionary interdisciplinary view of human sexuality remains unknown even to the majority of researchers, physicians, teachers and writers. This begs explanation, for talk of interdisciplinary study is fashionable in most fields today. After I had interviewed many people involved in sex research. I saw why the book I was seeking didn't exist. Many very differ- ent specialties are involved, and each is full of polemics and intellectual partisan politics. In a time of extreme specialization, when so much scien- tific literature consists of minute mutual criticism, the words "general" and "eclectic" have a bad odor in the academies. Scientists who venture outside their fields are likely to be attacked by their colleagues as presumptuous, uncritical and unprofessional (which is eventually costly in terms of grants and promotions). And the few scientists who write about their fields for laymen tend to receive scorn from their peers as mere showmen and finan- cial opportunists. Most professional writers simply cannot afford to spend enough time studying to do an adequate job with such material, even if they have the desire and ability to do so. Probably only a layman would write the book I had sought, knowing that on each page he dealt with ques- tions to which a scholar could devote his life. It was a presumptuous, per- haps an impossible task, but by now I was too fascinated and committed to back off from the project. Certainly the book was badly needed, for as I had learned, even most of the best existing ones were in some way out- moded, inaccurate or Hmited in scope. One had only to see the summaries of anthropological knowledge in psychiatrists' books, perpetuating ideas dead for a half century among anthropologists; or assumptions about the biology of sex in anthropologists' books, which no biologist would touch with a stick today. Somehow a narrowed focus had to be found. One can no more write a book about sex than about life, not without oversimplifying to t—he point of obscuring the subject. The idea originally suggested to me increased homosexuality and sex-role confusion as a symptom of sexual revolution was ideal. It demanded confronting all the fundamental questions about human sexuality, since the normal and abnormal mutually define each other. What is biologically programed into us at birth as male and female? As heterosexual or homosexual? What is culturally determined, and how? How do family structure and child-rearing relate to sexual behavior and attitudes? Do changes in attitudes really alter what happens in the bed- room? Or to put it in formal terms, what is the relationship between overt mores, covert mores and behavior? common So I decided that I would take three statements widely held as knowledge today: (1) there is a sexual revolution in progress or nearly complete; (2) there is more homosexuality and/or more open homosexu- ality; (3) these first two developments are related. I would subject these statements to the most advanced perspectives of medical and social science. Preface ix in as broad a context as possible, as a case study in human sexuality. I would use the results of this as a framework for social reportage. When I began, I could not predict the results, for no one had taken on such a fool- hardy task. I was still naively underestimating the job. I worked for five years, usually with one or more research assistants. Even so, I had to draw arbitrary limits to my studies in some fields because On of their inexhaustible complexity. the other hand, I discovered startling gaps in our sexual knowledge, many of them due to emotional fears of studying sex, let alone deviant sex. For instance, when I began to seek sources for what I expected to be a forty-page chapter on sexual deviance in the Western past, I found that not one half-reliable book existed. The half-truths and cliches that pass for sexual history of the West are not only accepted by laymen but influence the theories of specialized researchers in — sexology. I ended up —writing what amounts to a book in itself the first section of this volume to rediscover our sexual legacy and examine our myths about it. I could not responsibly write this book without constantly checking my own accuracy against the knowledge of specialists, and checking their knowledge against what turned up in observation and reporting. At first my interviews were not meant to be part of the book, but as I proceeded, they demanded a place in it. I spoke to psychiatrists, ethologists, homosexuals, heterosexuals, students, teachers, people sitting next to me on trains and planes. I heard experts try to demolish each others' work and personalities; homosexuals telling secrets long kept from their families and friends; some- times heterosexuals literally weeping with relief at finally talking to some- one about the uncertainty and suffering in their sex lives. Then I had to assess what I had heard and resolve the intellectual and moral problems that fell on me. The easiest problem to solve was protecting deviant informants. I have altered their names, residences, professions, looks and other identifying details if they wished (use of only a first name in an interview shows that the subject's identity has been disguised, and use of a surname as well indi- cates that such details are unchanged). More difficult was the problem of the knowledge I gained of many public and academic experts on sex. Some are secret homosexuals, their "research" disguised apologetics. Other researchers and clinicians reveal, in private, a vengeful hatred toward sexual deviants that they would never display in print or in public, and which makes their "research" equally suspect. Such people speak as authorities to troubled laymen and influence our laws and social policies. Like anthropologists who write about race and poverty, they bear a special ethical responsibility; I bear an equal responsibility not to leave them unchallenged. If I have erred in this book, it is toward protectiveness in naming names. Fortunately most biased writings can be adequately criti- cized on an impersonal level. Another problem, a quite serious one, was my presuming to judge so