Table Of Contentiiiiiin
Karlen, Arno.
NEW COLLEGE OF CALIFORNIA (SF)
Karlen, Arno.
HQ
Sexuality and homo-
12
sexuality.
K37
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12 Karten Arno*
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K37 Sexuality and homosexuality a new
view / Arno Karlen* [1st ed* N: ew York
]
W. W* Norton* cl971*
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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
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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
