(3 of 4)
Socarides: It is a very bitter definition. Freud's test was a person's ability to have a healthy sexual relationship with a person of the opposite sex and to enjoy his work.
Fox: A psychoanalyst says that we are destined to heterosexual union, and anything that deviates from this must by definition be sick. This is nonsense even in animal terms. Animal communities can tolerate quite a lot of homosexual relationships. The beautiful paradigm of this is geese. Two male geese can form a bond that is exactly like the bond between males and females. They function as a male-female pair; and geese, as far as I can see, are a very successful species.
So far as the two "married" individuals are concerned, they are engaged in what to them is a meaningful and satisfying relationship. What I would define as a sick person in sexual terms would be someone who could not go through the full sequence of sexual activity, from seeing and admiring to following, speaking, touching, and genital contact. A rapist, a person who makes obscene telephone calls—these seem to me sick people, and I don't think it matters a damn whether the other person is of the same sex or not.
Socarides: The homosexuals who come to our offices tell us: "We are alone, we are despairing, we cannot join the homosexual society—this would be giving up. We like what they are doing, but we will not join them in terms of calling ourselves normal. We are giving up our heritage, our very lives. We know how we suffer. Only you will know how we suffer, because we will tell only you how we suffer." As a physician, I am bothered by this, because I deal with the suffering of human beings.
Pomeroy: I am not speaking facetiously, but I think it would be best to say that all homosexuals are sick, that all heterosexuals are sick, that the population is sick. Let us get rid of this term and look at people as people. I have heard psychiatrists perfectly soberly say that 95% of all the population in the U.S. is mentally ill.
Gagnon: The issue is that the society can afford it and the homosexuals cannot. The society can afford 4% of its population to be homosexuals and treat them as it wishes, as it does the 10% who are black. The homosexual pays a terrible price for the way the society runs itself. This is central to the daily life of the homosexual. Can he get a job? Can he do this? Can he do that? If we took the law off the books tomorrow, the homosexual would still pay a very high price.
Kameny: One of the major problems we have to face is the consequences of these attitudes, which are poisonous to the individual's self-esteem and self-confidence. The individual is brainwashed into a sense of his own inferiority, just as other minorities are. When we are told "You are sick," and "You are mentally ill," that finishes the destruction.
Pomeroy: If I were to base my judgment of homosexuals, both male and female, on the people who come to me in my practice, I think I would agree that they are sick, that they are upset in many, many different ways. But I had 20 years of research experience prior to this, in which I found literally hundreds of people who would never go to a therapist. They don't want help. They are happy homosexuals.