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Gagnon: There is no explanation for this attitude unless you want to take Ken Tynan's explanation, which is that people think that people ought to be alike, and anyone who didn't get wife, have spear and carry shield was bad juju, and you threw him out of the crowd.
Leitsch: It has always struck me that one of the primary reasons for the American attitude toward homosexuality is that we are so close to our agrarian background. When America was first settled, we had a hell of a big country to fill up, and we had to fill it up in a hurry. We have never been big enough to be decadent before.
Fox: Yes, America has to learn to be decadent gracefully, I think.
Weeks: I just finished counseling a person who was addicted to the men's room in Grand Central Station. He knows he is going to get busted by the cops; yet he has to go there every day. I think I did succeed in getting him to cease going to the Grand Central men's room, perhaps in favor of gay bars. This is a tremendous therapeutic gain for this particular man. But he is sick; he does need help. However, I don't think Dr. Socarides is talking about people like another acquaintance of mine, a man who has been "married" to another homosexual for fifteen years. Both of them are very happy and very much in love. They asked me to bless their marriage, and I am going to do it.
Pomeroy: I think they are beautiful. I don't think they are sick at all.
Socarides: In medicine we are taught that sickness is the failure of function. For example, a gall bladder is pathological precisely when it ceases to function or its functioning is impaired. A human being is sick when he fails to function in his appropriate gender identity, which is appropriate to his anatomy. A homosexual who has no other choice is sick in this particular way. Is the man who goes to the "tearooms" any more or less sick than the two men in this "married" relationship? No. I think they are all the same. However, I think that perhaps the element of masochism or self-punitive behavior is greater in the man who will go openly, publicly, and endanger himself in this particular way.
Fox: You seem to say that the anxieties provoke a homosexual into seeking a partner of the same sex. Isn't it possible that he prefers such a partner, and that this provokes anxieties?
Socarides: If his actions are a matter of preference, then he would not be considered a true obligatory homosexual.
Gagnon: I am troubled here by the sense of intellectual and historical narrowness. We should not get hung up on the 20th century nuclear family as the natural order of man, living in the suburbs and having three kids, or on the kind of Viennese-Jewish comparison that Freud really created. All of a sudden, I find a new penisology—that somehow the shape of the penis and of the vagina dictate the shape of human character. I have a minimum definition of mental health. You don't end up in a psychiatrist's office or in the hands of the police, you stay out of jail, you keep a job, you pay your taxes, and you don't worry people too much. That is called mental health. Nobody ever gets out of it alive. There is no way to succeed.