HOMOSEXUAL… AND SO WHAT?

By IWC

That was the answer the famous English writer Oscar Wilde read in a public letter during the most well-known trial of the XIX century. The middle-class in Victorian England was scandalized by his behaviour. Wilde, who had maintained an intimate friendship with Lord Alfred Douglas, was charged with sodomy by the aristocrat´s father, the Marquess of Queensberry. Wilde was convicted in the trial, held in May 1895, and was sentenced to two years of hard labor.

Prison ruined Wilde material and spiritually. That was a lesson for all those “deviated” that dared to fight publicly, a clear warning so that they remained in the shade in a society that didn´t accept them.


Sexual orientation, homosexuality and society
The human being is born man or woman, and according to his sexual orientation he or she can be heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual. On the other hand, the transsexualism includes people who biologically have a sex, but struggle in the conviction they must have been born with the opposite sex.Homosexuality doesn´t describe an uniform population, since men and women with this direction form a group so different inside as heterosexuals and bisexuals from the point of view of education, occupation, life styles personality, and physical appearance.

Homosexuality and its causes: genetic, hormonal, psychological or social?
There is a great diversity as for the definition of homosexuality in scientific literature. The attitude towards homosexuality has varied from its acceptance in old Greece and the tolerance in the Roman Empire, to the absolute condemn in many societies, western and eastern ones.

In the XIX century the German neuro-psychologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing considered homosexuality as a “hereditary neuropatic degeneration” that supposedly worsened with excessive masturbation; while Cesar Lombroso - one of the most outstanding representatives of the Criminal Anthropology- on the basis of Phrenology, sustained the degeneration theory. Thus, crazy people, delinquents, prostitutes, ethnic minorities, and homosexuals were degraded, excluded and marginalized under the auspices of science.

The Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud postulated the existence of a constituent predisposition, although he also emphasized the determining effect of experiences during the childhood (like for example, the lack of an ancestor of the same sex with which to be able to identify itself) and the frequency of masculine homosexual experiences during the adolescence, that considered like sexual deviation.

The scientists are not able to agree among themselves. Diverse theories have tried to explain the causes of homosexuality although without any definitive answers. The most popular have been as follows:

1. The genetic theory: It was one of the first scientific explanations about homosexuality. Displayed by Kallman, in 1952, it assured that the homosexual orientation was dictated by the genes; that is to say, people inherited homosexuality. Nevertheless, there isn´t any proof to confirm the study, and its conclusions have been, therefore, discarded.

2. The hormonal theory: Some scientists have suggested that the origin of homosexuality is the i hormones´ imbalance in the fetus or the introduction of unsuitable hormones. The fault of this theory is it hasn´t found yet any physical proof of such hormonal disorder in new born babies nor in adult individuals.

3. The psychoanalysis : It proposes several postulates. The problem with them is that they have been put never been tried nor verified in an ample sector of people, but only in small groups of individuals submitted to therapy.

Freud thought that the homosexual tendency was a natural stage it was due to go through to reach maturity. According to this principle maturity meant, among other things, a heterosexual direction,. A homosexual adult was somebody whose psycho-sexual development had been interrupted. Freud´s reasoning was that when boys discovered that girls did not have a penis, they feared to lose his if they maintained contact with them. And, since the men did have it, they would not be in danger if they maintained contact only with those of the same sex.

The sexual direction has also been attributed to the distant and hostile relations with parents. Males, after those tending to this theory, look for a homosexual relation to obtain the masculine love they never received from their fathers in fact. Also females approach other women to compensate the feminine lack of love on the part of their mothers. Similarly, lesbianism has been attributed to have distant parents, which caused that the girl did not know to make contact with adult men.

Masculine homosexuality, some researchers maintain, can be attributed also to have had too protective mothers, who have not released their children in the competitive masculine world and thus, these have not learned to fight to get a woman in equal conditions.

The most recent and popular among the psychoanalytic theories is the narcissist one. According to it, children, in their stage of development, are sometimes so lured by their own endearments that look for sexual mates similar to them.

Nevertheless, all the theories about homosexuality and the relationships with parents seem to come down when they are put under experimentation. A same rule for father-mother relationships, and father-son or mother-son relationships can generate homosexual or heterosexual children, no matter if these relationships are intimate or distant.

Respect, homosexuality, and diversity
It has been difficult to obtain a space to vindicate homosexuals in a predominantly heterosexual society. Two facts, at least from the point of view of professional diagnosis, put an end to the fight against the discrimination and marginalization of the relationships between people of the same sex: in 1973, the Psychiatric Association of the United States eliminated the homosexuality of its list of mental diseases; and in 1980, it also disappears in the Manual of Classification of the Mental Diseases of the World-wide Health Organization (WHO).

Nevertheless, in many other countries, the fact of being homosexual or to practice homosexuality can make a person to lose a job, the discrimination when renting a house, social rejection and even jail. During the past few years, the groups in favor of the gays´ rights have focused their fight in securing a greater acceptance of homosexuality on the part of the public opinion.

There´s left a long way to walk yet. A state of “tolerance” has gone in ascent in the last twenty years. The fight that gays has maintained with their feelings on themselves does not have anything to do with their condition, but with the point of view of the society that consider them as inferiors, lacking of human dignity and as individuals without any right and unworthy of being respected.

As a principle, the society must maintain the respect to the sexuality of everyone, whether he or she is homosexual, heterosexual, or bisexual. What´s relevant it´s to recognize and accept differences.