Homosexuality: A Freedom Too Far

In this explosive book, Dr. Socarides, an early and persistent advocate of civil rights for homosexuals, dares to relate how gay politics has sold society on the notion that same-sex sex is "a normal variation, like left-handedness." Dr. Socarides knows that homosexuality is not a normal variation. Nor are gays "born that way" -- another idea that has been created by pseudoscience and accepted as truth by the media and the courts and academe. He knows that the seeds of his patients' homosexual orientation were planted in their earliest years, usually before the age of three, and their appropriate genderdefined self identity impaired as the result of abuse and neglect.He documents this clinical opinion by summarizing a number of systematic studies, first reported in the early psychoanalytic literature, and continuing on into the 1990s, and by giving us an inside look at his successful work treating homosexuals over more than 40 years.Treatment? "Yes," he says, "in suitable cases, through the insight that comes with a successful analysis, we can free men from their compulsions and help them go on to happy family lives, with women (and children) who love them." In these pages, he shows us how he himself has made this happen in the course of his career.That endorsement didn't come by accident, but by design and by a monolithic public relations campaign that has been carried on since 1973, when gay rights activists infiltrated the American Psychiatric Association and succeeded in striking homosexuality off the APA's list of disorders. Dr. Socarides shows how that move, a political shell game and not a professional inquiry, has hurt homosexuals in the long run, and subverted society in the process.Dr. Socarides describes his mounting concern over same-sex sex and AIDS, the sexual revolution, gay psychiatrists, the seduction of the innocent in our nation's classrooms, the gay and lesbian takeover in academe, gays in the military, and the disastrous road U.S. society has taken by ratifying the self-serving self-delusion (and ultimate self-destructiveness) of the gay rights crusade - which continues to seek a freedom that cannot be given by any society. "It is a freedom too far," he says. "Homosexuality cannot make a society, nor keep one going for very long."Dr. Socarides continues to work with men and women who are deeply troubled about their orientation and want to change. Indeed, Dr. Socarides leads a group of therapists around the world who specialize in dealing with homosexuality. In the spring of 1995, he won the Distinguished Professor award from the Association of Psychoanalytic Psychologists, British Health Service, and lectured on his research findings in London at the Anna Freud Child Development Center, the Portman Clinic, the Tavistock Clinic and before the British Psychoanalytic Society.