Henry Gerber: "More Nonsense About Homosexuals," December 1934
"More Nonsense About Homosexuals"
Copyright (c) 2008 by Jonathan Ned Katz. All rights reserved. Reedited by Katz from Gay American History (1976).
- The December 1934 Chanticleer includes Gerber's "More Nonsense About Homosexuals," a review of the book Strange Loves by La Forest Potter, M.D.
…I think the history of psychology is …damning evidence of man's credulity and outright stupidity. The volume under review by Dr. La Forest Potter, who boasts of being a "late member of the New York County Medical Society, Massachusetts Medical Society," etc., etc….proves to me two significant facts: 1) that the medical authorities in America, of which Dr. Potter is a shining example, are about 100 years behind the times, and 2) that most psychologists in this country are mere yes-men who 'blindly and obediently follow the current authorized moral code without any regard to common sense or the results of modern scientific research….
While the title of the book would indicate that the author had in view all phenomena of sex which seem strange to him and to the ignorant public alike, Dr.Potter deals mainly with homosexuality….such a title is a profitable device for the sale of books, for the morons are always looking for something new and "strange" in sex matters. In other words, the book of Dr. Potter is just another instance of the morbid sex racket, a lurid description of sex abnormalities under the moral guise of condemnation of the queer. sinners dealing in such "strange" loves in order to get the filthy details by the post office censors of "obscene" literature. Krafft-Ebing was perhaps the first author to start this racket and the volume in review is evidence of the sad fact that the end of it is not yet.
In the accepted fashion of Krafft-Ebing's pot-boiler, Dr. Potter goes through the various artificial classifications of homosexuals. He has Chapters on the Riddle of Homosexuality, …a chapter on the history of….the various unsuccessful attempts of "scientists" to solve the "riddle,"….special chapters on Lesbians (female homosexuals), in which the author makes the sensational statement that "there isn't a man on earth who has a Chinaman's chance against a Lesbian, once she has thoroughly seduced a woman to her wiles" (any doctor having knowledge of gynecology ought to know the reason to be due to the fact that males are very deficient in the fine art of satisfying a woman's sexual needs), [etc.]….
…Dr. Potter views the psychoanalytical method of dealing with homosexuals and cites cases in which homosexuals have been "cured" by psychoanalysts…
But the author does evidently not think so much of this "cure" of homosexuals, for he cautiously warns that homosexuals can be cured only if they want to be cured. The only way to cure a [male] homosexual of his foible is to make him love women, a very simple process indeed, but Dr. Potter does not seem'to realize that heterosexual men can be cured exactly in the same fashion from their love for women, by getting them to like men. By the same method, Pop-eye, the sailor cures children who do not like spinach by making them believe that spinach is really good fox them and that every normal citizen must eat it.[1]
References
- ↑ Henry Gerber, "More Nonsense about Homosexuals," Chanticleer, vol. 1, no.12 (Dec. 1934), p. 2-3. A group of approximately two hundred letters exchanged between Gerber and Manuel Boyfrank (about 30 percent by Gerber, c. 1935-c. 1957) is in the collection of Jim Kepner (Kepner to J.K., March 11, 1974). This is no doubt one of the most valuable collections of original Gay Americas history manuscripts that will ever be found. The correspondence contains references to the 1924 Chicago organizing attempt, to articles Gerber published under pseudonyms, to four books written by Gerber, to plans for a new homosexual emancipation organization. These letters should be carefully edited, and published in a scholarly edition-a project for which a grant is badly needed. Between 1927 and 1930, an American art connoisseur and ex-patriot, Edward Perry Warren, published in London, under the pseudonym Arthur Lyon Raile, his three volume Defense of Uranian Love (London: Cayme Press, 1928, 1930), described by Timothy d'Arch Smith as "a sixty-thousand word apologia for an acceptance of the preeminence of the Hellenic paederastic philosophies." Warren, says Smith, was an anglophile, who lived almost his entire life in England, and who spoke "zealously for the revival of !he Greek paederastic ideal which he found embodied in the classical art works he collected." Warren's Itamos: A Volume of Poems, first published in 1903, is said to present the Greek pederastic ideal with "great fervor," celebrating their author's "own very real friendships, loves, and quarrels." In 1884, at Oxford, Warren had met John Marshall, the "soulmate" with whom he lived until Marshall's death in 1928. Warren's novel of Oxford life. A Tale of Pausanian Love (London: Cayme, 1927) is said to present a-"trenchant argument in favor of Uranian section." (Timothy d’Arch Smith, Love in Earnest; Some Notes on the Livcs and Writings of English 'Uranian' Poets from 1889 to 1930 [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 19701, p. 2, 114-17, 148, 253, 267-68).
