Many theories of homosexual causation focus on childhood experiences,
especially those within the family. In the following viewpoint, Roy Masters
states that male homosexuality is an emotional/mental disorder caused by poor
father-son relationships. Masters is a stress management consultant who hosts
a syndicated radio show and has written several books, including How to
Control Your Negative Emotions.
As you read, consider the following questions:
1. How does Masters distinguish between racism and criticism of
homosexuality?
2. What basic family pattern leads to homosexuality, according to Masters?
3. Why is the father so important to the family, according to the author?
The question of whether homosexuality is caused by life's experience or is an
inborn quality is, indeed, an extremely sensitive subject. The topic invokes
strong emotion and prejudice, no matter which side one takes. Like abortion,
it seems to be one of America's almost unsolvable problems. To understand the
causes of homosexuality, a great deal of objectivity and compassion are
required.
As is the case with so many other forms of aberrant behavior, we are dealing
with victims who are in denial that they are victims. The very concept of gay
pride was, of course, in imitation of racial minorities' call for ethnic
pride in the '60's. However, the difference between the two is obvious to
most Americans. One is simply a racial matter, but the other is behavioral.
Of course, homosexual organizations deny that being gay is a behavioral
problem because their claim to political power is based on convincing the
country that being critical of homosexuality is equivalent to being racist.
In order to make that stick, they must first convince the public that gays
were born that way and that their inclinations have nothing to do with
upbringing or moral choice.
Sickness and Denial
Thus homosexuals have been drawn into their sickness, siding with their
torment rather than face the painful truth about their troubled childhood.
Denial is a powerful thing for any individual to overcome. But added to this
problem is the fact that the whole gay movement is there to be supportive of
a deviant lifestyle. Such unhealthy support groups are common in our society
and are, sadly, very effective in keeping people from finding themselves. Of
course, these organizations believe that they are helping and being
compassionate. But in reality, they provide the troubled individual with all
the excuses and rationalizations he could ever need to justify his aberrant
lifestyle. Often, these organizations are simply after power....
The average person is unaware of the depth and breadth of the childhood
traumas that have formed his adult modus operandi. It is very important not
to underestimate the effect parents can have on their children. If we take a
moment to think about it, all of us can remember how vulnerable we were when
we were children surrounded by the giant adult world. In a way, our parents
were our gods; they represented our only real protection against a confusing
and dangerous world. It is damaging enough when a child is traumatized by any
adult, but when a child is betrayed by his own father or mother, that
betrayal has a tragic and lasting effect.
So, what does all this have to do with homosexuality? Everything. When
talking about a child's reaction to trauma, it is important to understand
that we are dealing with a scientific, repeatable phenomenon called
conditioned response, discovered and made famous by the Russian psychologist
Ivan Pavlov. In Pavlov's ground-breaking experiment, a dog learns to
associate the ringing of the bell with food; soon he salivates at the sound
of the bell even when there is no food. This associative technique can apply
to anything; it is employed in just about any family situation. For this
reason, almost any problem of compulsive behavior that a person might have
can be clarified by understanding what went on in the homosexual's family.
Once we realize that we have all gone through something very similar, we just
manifest it differently, then we can have the compassion necessary to
understand homosexuality.
Patterns
In many years of counseling, I have dealt with countless family situations
conforming to the following pattern. Two boys are born into a dysfunctional
family, composed of a cruel, confusing mother, and a brutal father (perhaps
an alcoholic) who is rarely at home. Now, the anger and resentment which the
(victim) mother feels for the father is unloaded on these boys. She
unconsciously hates men, beginning with her own alcoholic father, but
extending now to her husband - and becoming a cumulative traumatic experience
for her sons. Because of the different dispositions and status of the two
boys, one rebels from her control and one conforms. One way or the other, the
boys have been traumatized away from their natural center, their true
personhood.
There are many types of dysfunctional family disorders. One of them, of
course, is overt homosexuality. The other is connected to the same pressures
that cause homosexuality, but manifests in an entirely different way: "macho"
behavior, a false masculinity that is a compensating overreaction to feelings
of vulnerability and latent femininity. This compensation could well include
any other traits of the child's father by association. So, for example, the
boy could take on a veneer of religious values, picked up from his father by
association, rather than by any true insight. This is the basic process by
which one brother becomes homosexual while the other enjoys an apparently
normal life.
Both boys carry a great deal of anger just beneath the surface - unconscious
feelings of resentment toward the parents who failed them. As it is passed
from generation to generation, this continuous flaw in the nature of the
family structure itself can be cured only by overcoming denial barriers and
facing hidden anger. Ironically, great political power can be derived by
simply exploiting the existing rage that millions of people feel about their
family experience. Radical Berkeley, California, is full of leftist posters
that call for overthrowing "the patriarch." It is not hard to guess who is
the intended target of that kind of message.
Abnormal Choices
In the case of the two boys, the mother's daily pressure on her rebellious
son traumatizes him to side with his errant father. In such an emotional
state, where common sense goes out of the window and there's more heat than
light, there are only two lifestyle options available: rebel against your
father and join you mother - or rebel against your mother and side with your
father. Both are obviously abnormal choices, since the child wants and needs
the balance of both parents.
So one errant son sides with his angry father rather than take the identity
of his mother as his effeminate brother did. But again, just as his brother
found a false femininity, he finds a false masculinity, laid on like a coat
of paint rather than drawn naturally from within. This "macho" brother bonds
falsely with various traits of his father's association - like Pavlov's dog -
perhaps his father lifts weights and talks tough. This bogus identity becomes
the son's chief form of denial, and if that isn't enough of an escape from
the thing he unconsciously fears the most - his latent femininity - he turns
to other forms of addition for comfort.
The question is, why is he in denial? Again, remember that the normal process
is to have a loving mother/father unit, but when you are traumatized by anger
at parental failure, a strange thing happens that affects you deep in your
psyche. You don't actually "succeed" in your rebellion, but become slowly
transformed into the likeness of what you hate. The reason for this is
simple; you cannot hate without feeling guilt, hate being a destructive
emotion - and you especially cannot hate your parents without guilt. You
unconsciously relieve the guilt by bonding to the very thing you hated, by
way of compensation.
But the main motivation compelling the macho son to escape is to avoid seeing
what he has secretly become at the hands of his dominating mother. He is much
more affected by his childhood bonding to her than he can ever admit to
himself. Clinical, the rule of thumb is simply this: Reject your father and,
no matter what, you will become overly influenced by your mother.
Sadly, there are many young men in America who are losing their grip on their
true masculinity in this way. Simply put, it is the mother's instinctive
responsibility to nurture the children, to protect them from the harsh
realities of the world that they are too young to face. On the other hand,
the father's instinctive responsibility is to bring the children into the
reality of the world, to see to it that they are strong enough and
independent enough to start another nuclear group - another family.
So therefore, there must be a healthy balance of these two types of love, one
earthy and compassionate, the other a kindly but no-nonsense type - a
tougher, masculine love without which the child is in danger of becoming
spoiled and immorally wild, unable to make his way in the world. If the child
becomes more interested in comfort than in challenge, more interested in
"rights" than in responsibility, he will soon need a dictator in one form or
another to govern him, his capacity for self-governance having been ruined.
This is how nations fall.
Lack of Balance
Without this balance in the family, without a strong center, the macho,
hard-drinking son is actually running away through drink and machismo
activities from the fact that he has been and is evolving from a feminine,
nurturing core. In this case, if he has enough women to mother him and make
him warm and secure, that feminine "seed" tends to emerge, only to be further
denied as the macho son immerses himself into more machismo behavior, hard
drinking, and the like. This is an immutable law.
On the other hand, the weaker, conformist, effeminate son, is more directly
mothered and loved for succumbing to his mother's will. As a result, he
becomes the extension of her personality and thus comes under a compulsion to
validate his mother identity by re-immersing himself in her approval. This is
the classic denial process: We tend to reaffirm the wrong in us by
identifying with the very people who corrupted us. Here, mother and son are
"very close." This son is one of two types: If he retains his male behavior,
he will be a weak and ineffective father, a womanizer, etc. - or else he will
become an outright homosexual. The mother shows a kinder face to her
approval-hungry, conformist son. She is very supportive of her identity in
him. It must be clearly understood that the reason both parents treat their
offspring so shamefully is that they too were victims of trauma in their own
lives. They were hurt in much the same way as they are now doing the hurting
- but they are not aware of it because of the denial of their own pain. By
living in denial of what has gone wrong with them, they are, without
realizing it, becoming the vehicle of destruction of innocence as a defense
against realizing the truth.
Now, to the homosexual connection in all this! Here we have the rebel and the
conformist, one who is homosexual or basically effeminate - the other who is
rebelling against that same identity within him through machismo behavior and
drink. One truth that the homosexual groups have always claimed is that there
are two distinct types of homosexuals, one actual and one latent. As I said
before, some men are transformed more directly into the female, early,
directly from mother, while the rebel can also become a homosexual through a
longer, more opposite course, in his struggle to deny his implanted feminine
nature. The completely conformed homosexual simply takes on and accepts
female characteristics and seeks acceptance for them, which is part and
parcel of the denial process. He thinks and feels like a woman, looks at men
through women's eyes.
The rebel goes on to lose himself in machismo behavior, boxing, body
building, and the like, in an attempt to deny the implanted feminine identity
which is gestating within him. He too, by virtue of his trauma, is very
woman-fixated, often fearful of women, possibly even compensating for this
fear through violence. (It is no coincidence that the incidence of rape has
risen staggeringly in the last few decades, and that high school boys polled
readily admit that they would rape if they knew they wouldn't get caught.)
Understand that in the normal growing-up process, the good parent weans the
child away from needing excessive parental approval, but in this case, since
the boy had a stunted relationship, he sadly goes through life looking for
the motherly love he never really had. Logically, the macho male will suffer
from this irresistible need and try to overcome it with further false
manhood, when all along, real manhood, which has more to do with not needing
outside reinforcement, escapes him. The trouble is that he doesn't come back
to a woman as a man should in marriage - independent and ready to lead his
own family. Rather, he comes back to the woman as a little boy needing his
mom. And while he has the illusion, through the nurturing love he receives,
that he is becoming more of a man (more powerful and in control), he is
actually becoming emasculated like his brother. Sensing the loss of
masculinity outrages him and throws him into fits of violence , verbal or
physical, or he runs and hides in drinking and hanging out with "the boys."
So the macho son is drawn unwittingly to the kind of women his mother was -
not to him (he was the rebellious one), but to his conformist, accommodating
brother (now the homosexual). Since the macho rebel has the same secret
nature that his brother does, the feminine nurturing he gets from his wife is
actually evolving his feminine side to the surface. If the process is allowed
to complete itself, he wakes up one morning and finds that his feminine
identity is emerging from a chrysalis that can no longer contain him.
Emerging Homosexuality
This process breaks through all machismo compensations. That is why we so
often see the muscle-bound, athletic man become a homosexual, after long and
apparently normal relationships with women in which he tried to prove his
manhood. The machismo compensator tries to deny the implanted femininity and
may even succeed for many years, only to awaken one day because of some
temptation as a full-fledged homosexual. He stops resisting the forces
working within him. Now this newly emerged self, the "false self" discussed
earlier, must be accepted as normal and the rebel who denied his feminine
nature (rather than confronting and overcoming it) becomes a denier in a
different way, in the same way as his homosexual brother. At first, the rebel
denies his gay inclinations; in the end, he claims gay is normal. At that
point, of course, the gay rights organizations rush in to "support" the poor
fellow who deserved - but never got - his father's love.
There, in a nutshell, is the whole process. The violator (the abusive or weak
parent implanting the original nature) and the compassionate supporter are
one and the same in principle, and in spirit. Therein lies a terrible danger
concerning the motives of all the "compassionate" nurturers of the
liberal-left. The imbalance of too much mothering and not enough real
fathering is what did both sons in. Even those abused and neglected sons who
never become homosexuals live in deep conflict and torment their entire
lives, having extremely difficult relationships with their wives - and
sometimes even committing violence against women as a way of getting even
with their mothers for the effect her false love had on them. However, the
more typical reaction is that they use women sexually, often going from one
relationship to another, never able to commit to a marital relationship based
on respect and loyalty, because they fear the control that women have over
them.
Problems with Masculinity
All in all, some American men have a problem with their own masculinity that
often makes them more susceptible to "crossing the values line" and accepting
homosexuality as a legitimate lifestyle. In a Time magazine cover article,
"Onward Women" (December 4, 1989), the reporter made a startling admission:
"Already, there are numerous signs that male attitudes and values are
becoming 'feminized,' though most men might reject that description." She's
right, of course, on two counts. Men are becoming feminized, especially the
younger ones, and most men would object to the description. It comes too
close to the truth. The chilling thing is that the Time reporter meant it
positively.
Our nation is in great trouble because of the widespread lack of enlightened
fathers. Where there is no real father, only a weak or violent one, or none
at all, the mother inevitably fills the void. Thus the identity of the
children springs dominantly from the feminine side of the family, resulting
in great conflict. If, as a nation, we can get fathers to understand what is
written here, we can return the hearts of the fathers to their children and
the hearts of the children to their fathers where they belong. Women will not
have to shoulder the burden of raising children alone which, as has been
shown here, creates a devastating psychological imbalance in the offspring.
With the well-balanced American family unit back together again, the
feminization of America will come to an end. Families can become strong and
loving again - and the country can avoid the inevitable destruction that
results when its men and women hate each other - and its children grow up
hating their parents.
Fathers and Sons
Homosexuality is a developmental problem that is almost always the result of
problems in family relations, particularly between father and son. As a
result of failure with father, the boy does not fully internalize male
gender-identity, and develops homosexuality. This is the most commonly seen
clinical model.
Joseph Nicolosi, Reparative Therapy of Male Homosexuality, 1991
Child Abuse and Lesbianism
There are special needs that little girls have that make them unique. When
those needs are denied, ignored, or exploited, the future womanhood of that
child is in jeopardy.
Just how are those needs denied, ignored, or exploited? Through
abuse....Abuse can be overt, as in physical or sexual abuse, or it may be
more subtle. Of course, its more subtle versions wouldn't legally qualify as
child abuse, but they are forms of abuse nonetheless, and they have
far-reaching consequences. One of those consequences is a distorted sexual
identity. I have seen, time and again, clear connections between early abuse
and confusion in sexuality. And I cannot ignore the histories of the many
women I've known who have survived one form of abuse or another and are also
attracted to other women. Although abuse by itself does not cause lesbianism,
it can certainly be found in the background of may lesbian women and has in
many cases been a contributing factor to their orientation.
Carol Ahrens in Desires in Conflict, 1991
http://www.fhu.com/homosexual1.htm
AB
