Henry Gerber: "More Nonsense About Homosexuals," December 1934

"More Nonsense About Homosexuals"

Reedited from Jonathan Ned Katz, 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.

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