One of the crucial issues in the public discussion about homosexuality is whether or not the condition is a mental illness. To try to find out, TIME asked eight experts on homosexuality —including two admitted homosexuals —to discuss the subject at a symposium in New York City. The participants: Robin Fox, British-born anthropologist at Rutgers University; John Gagnon, sociologist at the State University of New York; Lionel Tiger, a Canadian sociologist also at Rutgers; Wardell Pomeroy, a psychologist who co-authored the Kinsey reports on men and on women and who is now a psychotherapist; Dr. Charles Socarides, a psychoanalyst who has seen scores of homosexuals in therapy and is associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in The Bronx; the Rev. Robert Weeks, an Episcopal priest who has arranged for the meetings of a homosexual discussion group to take place at his Manhattan church; Dick Leitsch, a homosexual who is executive director of the Mattachine Society of New York; and Franklin Kameny, an astronomer and homosexual who is founder-president of the Mattachine Society of Washington.
Kameny: All the homosexuals whom you have explored in depth were patients or others in clinical circumstances. So how do you know that all the ones who wouldn't come near you are sick and suffer from severe anxieties?
Socarides: We do hear, from people who are in treatment, about their friends in homosexual life and some of these also come to us. They see around them a complete disaster to their lives. They see that the most meaningful human relationship is denied them—the male-female relationship.
Tiger: There is a lack of a tragic sense here. All people have problems. I have all kinds of anxieties; everybody I know has anxieties. Some of them are severe; some of them are not severe. Often they are severe at different stages of the life cycle and for different reasons. To pick on homosexuals in this particular way, as on Communists or Moslems in another, is to shortchange their option for their own personal destiny.
Socarides: By God, they should live in the homosexual world if they want to! No one is arguing that point; no one is trying to say that a homosexual should be forced to seek help. Everybody is now saying that the homosexual needs compassion and understanding, the way the neurotic does or anybody else suffering from any illness. That is true. I agree with that.
Weeks: I think that historically the church has had a very hypocritical view of homosexuality. Instead of accepting the totality of sexuality, the church is still a little uncomfortable with the total sexual response; it still insists that people conform to a certain type of sexual behavior.
Fox: I was talking to a very pretty American girl recently who said that her first reaction to European males was one of considerable shock because the kind of touching behavior, the kind of behavior between males, was something that she would have been horrified to see in the men she had grown up with. This strikes me as a very American attitude, because of its rigidity, because of its absolute exclusiveness, because of its treatment of this as something horrible and beyond the pale.