Understanding Orientation

If a person who lived before the turn of the 20th century were asked about their sexual orientation, they would have been bewildered by the question. Though a wealth of literature depicts same-sex behavior as far back as the ancient Greeks, people at that time would not have understood terms or concepts like “heterosexual” or…

  In 1896, Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) founded a new strain of psychology and called it psychoanalysis. Most of his theories, resolutions, and treatments linked to assumptions he had formulated about various stages of sexual subconsciousness, from infancy through its progression during childhood and into adulthood. Most mental illnesses, he speculated, began with sexual abuse, fear…

Every year around June when the majority of Gay Pride Events take place you’ll apt hear, “We want God’s rainbow back; the gays stole it.” Just as no one culture or group “owns” the rainbow, we’ll see the gays did not “steal” the rainbow, and likewise, they did not steal the word “gay.” I was taught the acronym Roy…

On a lovely October evening, I spent three delightful hours talking with Dr. Kenneth Lewes, a pioneer who challenged the American Psychoanalytic Association’s (APsaA) stances on homosexuality in the late 1980s. Dr. Lewes had already graciously given me over two hours of his time on a phone call several months before and had fact-checked a…