Sigmund Freud famously asked the question, obviously in frustration, “What do women want?” He never did answer his own question and I would suggest that most women would respond with either, “You have to ask?” or, “It’s none of your business!” or, “We want you to stop asking stupid questions, that’s what!” Personally, I wouldn’t dare to even ask.
Making an educated guess in answer to the question, “What do gays want?” I would say, first and foremost, to be accepted. Whether that response involves acceptance as normal, or as a variation on the norm, or simply as people I wouldn’t venture to say but that isn’t really relevant since gays, homosexuals, lesbians have been well on their way to societal acceptance at all levels for some three decades now. Whether that’s a good thing or not is another question. I’ll save my answer to that for another day.
Today’s topic demands an understanding of how gays got to this point in the first place.
Over half a century ago, Karen Hooker conducted a study on biological determinism which many believe led to “normalizing” homosexuality (http://mybitchingarea.blogspot.com/2006/09/nature-vs-nature.html), which isn’t quite true. In fact, the American Psychiatric Association, the APA, continued, for sixteen years after being aware of the Hooker study, to classify homosexuals as sexual deviants in its DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. It took until 1973 before the APA changed its diagnosis and expunged homosexuality as an abnormal mental disorder (Section 302 in the DSM II).
What happened in those intervening sixteen years to cause this re-evaluation? In 3 words: agitation and intimidation by the gay community and pusillanimity on the part of the APA. (For details, see http://www.traditionalvalues.org/urban/eleven.php.)
(For the rest of this article, please see http://genelalor.com/)