Is Homosexuality Psychologically Healthy? Or Are We Talking About the Propagandistic Politicization of Sex?

Science and politics are the two subjects of this post. Let us take the science first.

Character and personality are volitionally created—not “socially constructed”—psychological products that generate and guide our actions. Same-sex behavior between two consenting adults, as a non-coercive relationship, is neither immoral nor a sin, nor should a contract between the two, or any other business or personal relationships involving same-sex attractions or behavior between consenting adults, be illegal. Individual rights apply to all human beings, not special “classes” or “groups.”

Psychology, however, is not the same as morality or politics.

Psychology studies the conscious conclusions we draw, and subconscious integrations we make, to direct our lives. If we hold objectively rational (that is, healthy) convictions, assuming a more or less friendly environment, we will likely live a happy life. To the extent that our convictions are irrational (unhealthy, not consonant with reality), to that extent we will be unhappy.

The job of psychologists and psychiatrists is to help us correct mistaken conclusions and incorrect subconscious integrations to enable us to live that happier life.

The leading theory on the origins of homosexuality derives from Freud, who did not write extensively on the subject, but whose followers over the past one hundred years have extended the theory considerably and even cleansed it of much Freudian jargon.

Joseph Nicolosi calls it the trauma theory of attachment loss (1, 2, 3). Typical pattern for a pre-homosexual boy includes an absent father, a mean father or other adult male (who may or may not be physically or sexually abusive), or an aloof father. The challenge of a young boy is to separate from his mother and be welcomed, as Edith Packer (p. 172) puts it, into his father’s club, to be dubbed a “male.” If this does not happen, problems arise and intensify.

Such a boy is often a sensitive, non-athletic child. As a result, he may be ridiculed by other boys, leaving him with no or few male friends. He may then become overinvolved with his mother (or sometimes girls of his own age, in a nonsexual way). He concludes, or more likely draws a subconscious emotional generalization, that he is not masculine and cannot become a man.

The boy is subsequently drawn erotically to other boys as an attempt to compensate for or repair his masculine deficit and attachment loss. He is often drawn to older boys or young men who are only too eager to welcome him to their club. But as one adult gay man said, it was not the sex so much that he wanted as to be held. And another said he just wanted a best friend (Nicolosi, pp. 111, 136). Loneliness, shame, and sadness are common emotions, profound grief and sadness, according to Nicolosi.

Janelle Hallman writes similarly about homosexual women and their relationships with their mothers (1, 2, 3, 4). Young girls tend to conclude that it is either unsafe, due to abuse, or undesirable, due to an absent, depressed, or alcoholic mother, to be a woman. Like boys, they tend to have no or few same-sex friends. Like boys, they often say lesbianism is not about the sex; they say, “I just want to be held, and I don’t want to be alone.”

Girls growing up, though, have a somewhat easier task than boys in the sense that they do not have to separate from their mothers. If there is attachment, Hallman interestingly suggests, this may explain the emotional differences between boys and girls. Psychologically healthy girls retain and readily show more than boys the emotional warmth and relationship-building skills of their mothers.

If there is no attachment, or a damaged attachment, feelings of abandonment and other problems result. The little girl may feel that there is something wrong with her, she may become afraid of or even hate men, and she can develop a subconscious hatred of herself. She is then drawn erotically to other women as compensation or reparation for the emptiness and loneliness in her psyche. The relationships begin quickly and just as quickly become highly emotionally dependent and possessive.

In a small percentage of cases, Nicolosi points out, an exception to the trauma theory is an infatuation of some adolescents that does not last long and is usually not further pursued after the initial infatuation’s ending.

What does the research say? Is homosexuality genetic, that is, inborn? No, this has been a settled issue for geneticists, which includes work by gay researchers, since at least the early 1990s (Nicolosi, pp. 42-43).

New Zealanders N. E. and B. K. Whitehead (1, 2, 3) have reviewed over 10,000 studies and publications to arrive at an emphatic no to the question of whether homosexuality is inborn.

In addition, many studies have been conducted comparing mental issues of homosexual men and women to heterosexuals in both the so-called tolerant western countries (Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, New Zealand) and the so-called less tolerant ones (UK, US, Australia).

Name the mental issue and gays unfortunately suffer it at least three to twenty times more than heterosexuals (1, 2, 3): three times the depression, six-and-a-half times the agoraphobia, twenty times the borderline personality disorder, five times the bipolar disorder, seven times the obsessive-compulsiveness . . . and so on. Suicidality and substance abuse are widespread and occur more frequently than for heterosexuals.

All numbers are the same in both tolerant and less tolerant countries, which effectively eliminate discrimination or social stigma as a causal influence.

Homosexuals have five times the number of partners as heterosexuals. Promiscuity, even after marriage, is rampant for both sexes—so common that activists have redefined it as normal and healthy (“extradyadic sex” and “open relationships,” they call it). Ability to stay together and maintain an intimate relationship is rare; at most the median for gays, depending on study, is three to five years, whereas in the “divorce-prone USA” (the Whiteheads’ words), median for married heterosexuals is twenty-five years.

Add to this: there are more ex-gays alive in the world today than gays. As gays get older, the tendency (frequently without therapeutic intervention) is to go straight and sometimes to marry and establish a traditional nuclear family, where, the research overwhelmingly shows, children do far better than in either single-parent or gay-parent homes (Nicolosi, chap. 11; Whiteheads, chap. 12; Regnerus; Allen).

Not a small percentage of gays of both sexes experience opposite sex attraction, which is now called “sexual fluidity.” All this term means is that attraction is an emotion and emotions have causes, which means emotions can change, either by oneself through introspection or with the help of a therapist or confidential friend.

Is something missing in gay relationships?

This brings us to the politics of sex, beginning with another pathway to homosexuality. The gay activists—“Stalinist gay activists” and “Stalinist feminists,” as lesbian Camille Paglia (pp. 67-92, excerpts here) calls them—appeal to young kids and adolescents to sell them on homosexuality as a healthy alternative lifestyle.

Leftist activists, after all, are abject subjectivists who see no differences between men and women or masculinity and femininity or, for that matter, men and boys—as in pedophilia, now euphemized as “intergenerational intimacy,” with the logical consequence of subjectivism that there should also be no difference between humans and animals (or between humans and trees) . . . in sex. See also Heyer.*

What the activists are doing is appealing to adolescents (and also to politically inclined adults) to adopt homosexuality as a defense value, to feel “cool” or “special” or to be a “celebrity” in the eyes of their peers for doing something different. A defense value is a pseudo-self-esteem, an attempt to fend off anxiety that makes us feel special in the eyes of significant others and superior to outsiders. Bragging is a sign that a defense value is operating, and the value can be rational or irrational. A criminal, for example, may brag, “I shoplift and never get caught.” See Nathaniel Branden, pp. 143-53, and Packer, pp. 185-88.**

Adolescents who fall for the activist line and say they are gay usually have not had any or substantial physical experiences. Perhaps this is why 98% of sixteen-year-olds who say they are gay a year later say they are not.

More on the politics of sex. From about 1970-73, gay activists harassed, intimidated, disrupted scientific conferences, and, in some cases, threatened members of the American Psychiatric Association to “persuade” them that homosexuality is not psychologically problematic. Because of the harassment and intimidation, only 54% of the membership in 1973 voted on the issue, 33% in favor of a resolution to normalize homosexuality. The activists won. (See also Whiteheads, chap. 12)

During the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, the press, those exemplars of courage and independence, flip-flopped (Paglia’s words) to preach the party line of the activists. The press still preaches the party line, including the falsehood that “the gay gene has been found.” This demonstrates why we cannot get our science from the press (or from television or Hollywood).

Gay activists now control the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association, and the Centers for Disease Control. These organizations determine what gets funded for research and what gets published.

Conclusions reached from research funded by non-activist sources, usually religious organizations and conducted by religious researchers, are not friendly to the gay activists. Hurling vile invective at the researchers is the modus operandi of Stalinist activists, including attempts to have researchers fired from their academic positions.

Vile invective is also what Dr. Nicolosi was victim of over the course of his career. Even his Wikipedia entry, as well as discussion of “reparative therapy” under the entry “conversion therapy,” has been repeatedly falsified. For a year, Nicolosi reported, he would change the falsehoods to the truth only to see almost immediately his corrections changed back to falsehoods by the activists. The falsehoods are still there today.***

Frail egos, adapting Paglia’s words, cannot tolerate differences or, especially, “that some people may not wish to be gay.” Criticism of activists, therefore, and disagreement with them are not allowed.

The activists’ ultimate goal is to ban all ideas and discussion that homosexuality may not be totally healthy. (Never mind the issues of HIV and AIDS.) The activists especially want to use government guns to ban psychotherapy for anyone seeking to examine unwanted same-sex attractions or behavior, and they have had some successes on this front (1, 2, 3, though the recent California bill has been withdrawn).

A final note. There are many reasons to feel proud of ourselves, for example, pride in our personal and professional accomplishments and pride in our rights and freedoms as individual human beings, but I don’t feel particularly proud (or not proud) of being a man or a white person or a heterosexual, or of having self-esteem. I don’t think about these issues in that way. To brag about them would be a pseudo self-esteem or defense value.

I believe the activists are doing a considerable disservice to gays for telling them they should feel proud of their sexual orientation, especially considering how many suffer serious psychological problems. Telling gays (or anyone) they should feel proud of their psychological problems does not enable them to feel proud. It likely intensifies the problems.

Over the several decades of my life I have enjoyed gay friends and gay co-workers. At one point, for about a year, two of my co-workers became after-work drinking buddies, that is, until I had to plead poverty and the need to start banking my hard-earned Scotch money. Sadly, these two friends have since died of AIDS.

I respect gays and their rights as consenting adults, and I feel sympathy for them. Are they happy?

As for the Stalinist activists . . . I feel an unrestrained anger. They deserve moral condemnation.


* The propaganda of the activists even promotes homosexual sex as superior to heterosexual intercourse, though a significant problem has to be that gays can only mimic intercourse, which many do, often in unhealthy ways. Lack of complementary gender differences, the “mystery of the opposite sex,” also has to be a problem. Romantic love? In our present culture, romantic love is rarely discussed—favorably or at all—for heterosexual relationships, let alone for homosexuals. As for today’s “women’s advocates,” I prefer to call them “toxically hostile feminists,” because they poison young girls’ minds by teaching them to distrust and hate men. For many of these in-your-face Stalinists, their motto is “who needs men?” They do not teach Betty-Friedan-style or Ayn-Rand-style that little girls psychologically need to think about and pursue productive careers. Paglia, not one to mince her words, makes this comment about the “lesbian dildo craze” of Stalinist feminists: “If penetration excites . . . why not go on to real penises?”

** And today, the activists appeal to young, pre-teen children, committing a vicious child abuse by encouraging hormone treatments of minors based entirely on a feeling of the child. (Have epistemology and psychology, not to mention morality, sunk this low?) Transgenderism, says psychiatrist Joseph Berger, is “emotional unhappiness.” Johns Hopkins University, a pioneer in transgender surgery, abandoned it in 1979, because sex was all the men seeking the surgery talked about (not family or children) and they were depressed before and still depressed after (1; 2, pp. 220-28). On detransition from transgenderism, see Heyer. Economist Walter Williams has facetiously declared himself a springbok trapped in a human body. Does that make him one? Reality is dispensable in the Stalinist activist world.

*** Nicolosi’s work is said by the activists (of course) to be “discredited” and “pseudoscientific.” The Popperian word “pseudoscientific” is used to denigrate claims of clinical psychologists who do not use the “experimental-positivistic-behavioristic” methodology (Maslow’s words) of logical positivism. The activists also falsely describe Nicolosi’s therapy as “conversion” and “reorientation,” neither term of which he endorsed. Nicolosi called his therapy “reparative,” to help his patients repair their gender wounds. Nicolosi, like all honest therapists, simply sought to help patients work out their problems in order to live a happier life. Unfortunately, Dr. Nicolosi passed away unexpectedly in March, 2017. (And the words “vile invective” are too kind to describe what activists have said about him since his passing.)