Lesbian Images: Essays

by Jane Rule

  The Reverend Robert L. Treese, in a pamphlet called Homosexuality: A Contemporary View of the Biblical Perspective, faces the general problem of human sexuality with more detachment and courage than most members of Christian churches. “In the realm of human sexuality, I, as a churchman, feel moved to confess that a great deal of the blame for preserving, if not indeed creating, the fears and guilt of sex which permeate our culture, lies at our feet. The failure to see sexual relationship in any other light but the functional one of reproduction has resulted in the limitation of sex to the purely physical with no concept at all of the depth of significant interpersonal trust, empathy, and love of which sexual intercourse, at best, is the expression. Of course our generation in the church has modified these ancient views but the pall of centuries of sin-obsessed taboos and misanthropic caricatures of human nature still blankets our culture and informs our mores. The current reduction of sexuality to the status of experience devoid of relationship and responsibility to a biological function needing only satiation, to a medium for mass marketing seems to me to be only the expected result—the acting out of a low view of sex which we have fostered.”27 After a short review of Christian history and a discussion of various psychological theories, Treese does not stop short of advocating full acceptance of the homosexual into the Christian community.

  He is not entirely alone in his opinion. The Reverend Robert W. Wood in Christ and the Homosexual also advocates both church membership and marriage for the homosexual, but it is a badly written, repetitive, coy and earnest book not apt to gain the respect of serious readers.

  Here and there in talks or sermons, in unpublished papers, other Christians have begun to question the church’s attitude toward homosexuals. Bruce Jones, lecturer in religious studies, puts the question to himself in this way: “The whole experience of the covenant community says to me that persons become fully human in relationship, in relationship to God and to one another. Cannot we consider all sexuality from that perspective? Sexuality is a gift from God; it is one of the ways we frail human beings can express love for one another. My fellow Christian may have a sexual orientation different from mine. Do I, because of that difference, have the right to deny him or her any aspect of a full relationship of love with another person?”28 An unofficial Quaker pamphlet called Toward a Quaker View of Sex states, “It is the nature and quality of relationship that matters: one must not judge it by its outward appearance but by its inward worth. Homosexual affection can be as selfless as heterosexual affection and, therefore, we cannot see that it is in some way morally worse.”29

  The official stand of most churches remains unchanged. The Presbyterian Church is a good example. The 1970 report by the Church’s Task Force on Human Sexuality was circulated to its clergy, recommending nothing more than support of basic law reform for consenting homosexual adults on the grounds that the current law made homosexuals afraid to seek the treatment for cure they so badly needed. Even this conservative proposal was received but not endorsed by the annual meeting of the General Assembly which then reaffirmed its “adherence to the moral law of God as revealed in the Old and New Testaments, that adultery, prostitution, fornication, and/or the practice of homosexuality is sin.”30 The United Presbyterian Church has three million members.

  Some lesbians still try to live within the church, either keeping their sexuality secret or working for reforms. Many more are rejecting and condemning the church. Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin, in Lesbian/Woman, after offering a number of case histories of lesbian women who have suffered psychological brutality as members of various congregations, conclude, “To us the church is a monolithic monster that preys upon people’s fear of death. Rather than raising the consciousness of its constituents, the church forces people into following rigid rules which only oppress consciousness. Rather than being life-affirming, the church is life denying.”31 Sally Gearhart, in a paper called “The Lesbian and God-the-Father or All the Church Needs Is a Good Lay—on Its Side,” says:

  I look forward with great anticipation to the death of the church. The sooner it dies, the sooner we can be about the business of living the gospel. That living cannot take place in the church as it presently exists, and I suspect that most of us here have known that for a long time. …

  What is devastating and dehumanizing about the church is not its foundation of love, but the superstructure of (patriarchical) theological clap-trap that has been hoisted on that foundation. The superstructure shivers and quakes whenever the sanctity of the nuclear family or of traditional concepts of sexuality are called into question—and well it might shake, for it is these two concepts that are the bricks and mortar comprising the church.

  The structure of the church (God over Man, man over woman, father over family, clergy over laity, power over powerlessness) is vertical, hierarchical. It is dependent upon who has power over whom; the idea is that God is at the top with power over all and I, of course, as a woman am at the bottom of the heap; together with children my passivity is sanctified.

  It will do no good to “renew” this monster/church. If the gospel is to live, then the vertical structure will have to be laid on its side—horizontalized—and that, to me, means the death of the church.32

  Revolution within the church has done more to destroy stained-glass windows than the myths which inspired them, and moral custom grows back like the lush weeds in the craters of church ruins. If radical acts are unsuccessful in bringing about fundamental changes in attitude, reform hasn’t any better a record. Those churchmen who turn a hopeful eye to science to offer them gradual new understanding about the nature of sexuality fail to understand how much psychiatry is based on the same ancient prejudices which cripple the church. Those who do understand know how to use science as a conserver of traditions. Father Gerald Kelly gives complacent reassurance to anyone fearful of change. “It turns out in the end that what is good morality is also good medicine.”33 Put another way by Father John Ford: “Indeed it is remarkable how modern ideals of mental health coincide with ancient ideas of holiness.”34 He might, for instance, have been thinking about Freud’s description of woman as genitally deficient in relationship to Augustine’s concept of woman as a “misbegotten male” or St. Thomas Aquinas’ version, “The individual woman is defective and misbegotten, for the active force and the male seed tend to the production of a perfect likeness of the masculine sex, while the production of woman comes from defect in the active force.”35 For most psychiatrists, psychologists, and therapists, the Catholic Hospital Association directive would not be, in conscience, difficult to follow. “The psychiatrists and psychotherapists … must observe the cautions dictated by sound morality, such as: avoiding the error of pansexualism, never counselling even material sin; respecting the secrets that the patient is not permitted to reveal; avoiding disproportionate risk of moral danger.”36

  How much psychiatry, in its dealing with lesbians, is simply a translation from moral into medical language is the subject of the next chapter, which, I am afraid, will offer no more rational explanations than this one for the taboo against loving relationships between women. Whether I said to a minister or a psychiatrist, “It don’t make no sense to me,” the answer would be, in the mystery of moral grammar, “Then it makes some sense.”

  From Sin to Sickness

  THOSE MEN WHO FIRST undertook the study of sexuality were, with one or two neglected exceptions, doctors of medicine. Perhaps because their investigations made them targets of moral outrage, they did not defend themselves as objective scientists, aloof from moral concerns, but insisted instead on the fundamental morality of their work, which would bring humane understanding and treatment to people who before had been considered sinful rather than sick, subjects for punishment rather than cure. They could not foresee that translating contempt into pity, punishment into treatment would finally not increase social acceptance for homosexuals but sidetrack scientific investigation for generations. To try to cure what is not an illness in the fir
st place is like trying to weed a field without knowing the nature of the crop. The temporary hope they may have brought to a persecuted people was at best, as Thomas Szasz points out, “a social expediency but cannot be supported by scientific observations or logical arguments.”1 However unscientific and lacking in logical argument they were, their contributions must be understood, for much of present-day psychology is still dependent on the concept of sickness.

  Hirschfeld, Westphal, Krafft-Ebing, Moll, Ulrichs, Freud, and Havelock Ellis, all working in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were persuaded that at least some homosexuality had a biological base. Among them only Ulrichs consistently argued that, therefore, homosexuality was natural rather than pathological, a view discredited not so much on the basis of the evidence he offered as out of mistrust for his pleading his own cause since he was himself homosexual.

  Krafft-Ebing, a clinician rather than a psychologist, shared with Moll the view that “the natural disposition is the determining condition; not education and other accidental circumstances, like seduction.”2 But that “natural disposition” was actually a “functional sign of degeneration.”3 “Antipathetic sexual instinct as an anomaly of sexual life is only found in individuals who are tainted, as a rule, hereditarily.”4 “These persons are, as a rule, also abnormal so far as character is concerned.”5 Krafft-Ebing’s case histories read like something out of a gothic novel, the patient’s forebears and relatives suffering from alcoholism, insanity, subnormal intelligence, left-handedness, fits, suicidal desires, afflictions often shared by the patient. Krafft-Ebing did not find much evidence of homosexuality in women, speculating that women did not come forward for treatment, were not under legal restraints, and were anyway not as sensual and aggressive as men. But he suspected that frigidity in women might often be suppressed homosexuality. He suggested that some homosexuality was acquired, causes for it in women being segregation of the sexes, extreme sensuality, masturbation, fear of disease, fear of pregnancy, abhorrence of men. For these patients he did not have the sympathy he had for congenital inverts since moral choice was obviously involved, therefore sin committed. Reform for conditioned inverts was the solution. For those suffering from hereditary taint, sexual abstinence was the most that could be hoped for, and that could only be expected of unusually self-controlled and moral people. Aside from studying the family history of a homosexual to establish congenital inversion, Krafft-Ebing assumed that techniques employed in sexual expression were significant. Tribady, presumably because it seemed to imitate the heterosexual act, was practiced only by congenital inverts. Women who wore their hair short, dressed as men, pursued sports, smoked, or drank were also suspect.

  The more liberal Westphal, in 1870, published a history of a female invert to argue that homosexuality was congenital, neither a vice nor an insanity. Hirschfeld, who claimed to know ten thousand inverts, even refused to accept the theory of degeneracy, insisting instead that homosexuality was primarily and simply a biological phenomenon. His portrait of the lesbian is far more flattering than Krafft-Ebing’s. “The inverted woman is more full of life, of enterprise, of practical energy, more aggressive, more heroic, more apt for adventure, than either the heterosexual woman or the homosexual man.”6 Second to no one but man himself! It was a characterization other psychologists were not often willing to acknowledge. Hirschfeld also identified a thoroughly feminine group of female inverts, which his colleagues did not recognize since their acceptance of a biological foundation for inversion depended on evidence of inversion in secondary sexual characteristics like masculine hair distribution around the nipples, up the belly, and on the face, long limbs, a deep voice, and muscle development.

  Havelock Ellis, who often based his generalizations on no more than ten patients, was, of all these men, the most urgent in arguing a case for biology, out of which could come legal and social reform. His moral commitment was clear, in his method as well as his solution. He made flat assertions: “Yet in the main, a man’s sexual constitution is all-pervading, deep-rooted, permanent, in large measure congenital.”7 Homosexuality “is a highly abnormal aberration and yet it seems to supply a greater satisfaction than any other aberration can furnish.”8 “Inverts may be healthy, and normal in all respects outside their special aberration.”9 “It is, even when extreme, only pathological in the same sense as color-blindness or albinism or transposition of the viscera is pathological.”10 “Sexual inversion has high significance in part because it tends to occur in individuals who are above average in intellect and character, even when we put aside many notable monarchs, statesmen, poets, sculptors, painters, composers, scholars, etc. both past and present.”11 He was deeply suspicious of treatment of any sort. Hypnosis “cannot even easily be applied, for the subject resists the suggestion, just as a normal subject resists under hypnotism the suggestion to commit a crime.”12 Even when treatment was shown to be successful, Ellis did not approve. “This artificial shifting or loosening of the anchorage of the sexual impulse is not favorable to stability of character nor to any high morality. Nor is it altogether a matter of congratulation to render the invert capable of procreation.”13 For treatment often involved encouraging the patient to drink to overcome reluctance, to make use of brothels where there was the danger of venereal disease. Ellis wanted what he thought of as nature to be listened to. “Sexual inversion in eccentric and neurotic families seems merely to be nature’s merciful method of winding up a concern which, from her point of view, has ceased to be profitable.”14 People of fine character should neither marry nor involve themselves in homosexual relationships but sublimate their sexuality in art, religion, or great causes, but Ellis was tolerant of the homosexual who must express himself sexually. He agreed with Wolbarst that “we may possibly find ourselves on the correct road if we act on the theory that any sexual deviation which has always given satisfaction without injury to a particular individual must be considered normal for that individual.”15 He argued strongly for law reform. “But there can be little doubt that we shall gradually break down the false notions and rigid attempts at legal and social prohibitions which have caused so much trouble and confusion in our recent past. In so doing we shall purify our spiritual atmosphere and strengthen our moral code by removing from it prescriptions which were merely a source of weakness.”16

  Freud did not contradict so much as neglect the theories of his colleagues. “Recognition of the organic factor in homosexuality does not relieve us of the obligation of studying the psychical process connected with its origin.”17 He acknowledged, apparently without concern, that “psychoanalysis cannot elucidate the intrinsic nature of what in conventional or in biological phraseology is termed ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’: it simply takes over the two concepts and makes them the foundation of its work.”18 “It is not for psycho-analysis to solve the problem of homosexuality,”19 but to be content with offering psychic origins in mother fixation, rejection of father, penis envy, and feminism. “In general, to undertake to convert a fully developed homosexual into a heterosexual does not offer much more prospect of success than the reverse.”20 He respected the “lofty resignation” of a medical colleague with a lesbian relative when he said, “Well, it’s just a misfortune like any other.”21 So far from an ambition to cure homosexuals was he that one of his delights was gathering enough admissions from heterosexual patients, usually out of the material of dreams, of latent or unconscious homosexuality to be able to claim that there is a “very considerable measure of latent or unconscious homosexuality … in all normal people.”22 The only biological theory he rejected was that of degeneracy since inversion is found in highly efficient people with no other “disorders” and also in primitive tribes, presumably not developed enough to be able to claim degeneracy. He did admit, however, that inverted women are much more apt to have inverted characters as well, but “women are conventionally secretive and insincere; so information is slight.”23

  Roasted Freud is by now as common as, and cheap
er than, hamburger and, when served, in danger of dulling the appetite for any subject; but unless his theories are laid at his feet, his presently influential followers might be credited with bizarre originality instead of blind faith. Freud’s discovery of the unconscious, his development of hindsight in interpreting of dreams, his theories of the id, ego, and superego, the polymorphous perversity of children and of the “average uncultivated woman,”24 the genital sexuality of adults (mostly male), along with half a dozen others, have provided, particularly in North America, a religion to parallel, without needing to replace, Christianity, with suitable myths and the flourishing institution of psychoanalysis. Blame for that cannot be laid at Freud’s feet since he could not realistically have expected such mindless popularity.