Peter Tyler Boullata and Jean-François Monette | Anatomy of Desire / 1995

what makes a homosexual queer?

by Douglas Messerli

 

David Wilson (screenplay), Peter Tyler Boullata and Jean-François Monette (directors) Anatomy of Desire / 1995

 

Today we take a great deal of pride in defining and openly expressing our sexuality, particularly LGBTQ individuals. We are proud for being lesbians, gay men, transsexual or transgender individuals. And often we define ourselves in the world very strongly through our relationships to our sexuality and gender.

     But as Anne Fausto-Sterling (author of Myths of Gender),, in the short Canadian documentary film, Anatomy of Desire, directed by Peter Tyler Boullata and Jean-François Monette points out, the notion of being a “homosexual” or a “transgender woman,” etc. occurred only in the 20th century. Before that there were simply “homosexual” acts that were part of one’s larger sexuality. One had heterosexual sex or committed sodomy not as a certain kind being but as desire dictated. As esteemed critic Martin Duberman adds, in near recent and ancient times a great number of men might be defined today as adjusted heterosexuals who went to bed on a regular basis with young boys. When speaking of homosexuals are we accounting for those men (we know less of women historically, he argues) who behaved in such a bisexual manner as being homosexual?

      The definition of homosexuals matters, of course, in determining whether or not it can be defined by the brain. Can something in the brain then be detected to describe this historically sexual behavior, to define such forms of bisexuality?

     These are important issues in what has seemed to boil down to the central issue that is discussed in this film, whether same-sex behavior is a production of our genes, something of nature, or of our psychological development, an issue of nurture.

   The film begins with a brief discussion with neurologist Simon LeVay, who at the time this documentary was made (1995), had developed the thesis that within the hypothalamus of the brain he found homosexuals to have smaller gatherings of cell clusters than heterosexual men.

     And for many gay men and women of the day—and one might add many still today—the idea that their sexuality was defined at birth is an important issue in establishing that their behavior is not controllable or changeable, which might encourage others to realize that their behavior is not “inverted” or “perverted” or different much like one’s gender or the color of one’s skin. Certainly, at the time before the abandonment of laws against homosexuality and at a time when gays were still unable to marry, this seemed like a step forward for recognition of their equality just as women and blacks had fought for their rights. In other words, for many it became a political matter.

   And as June Reinisch, from the Kinsey Institute, argues, we still don’t know what causes heterosexual behavior. If we were to knew that, then it would far easier to demonstrate what is behind homosexual actions.

      Indeed, the film goes on to interestingly explore the cycles of scientific research since the Age of Reason which might almost be said to alternate between the nature/nurture debate. The film focuses, for example of the early 20th century studies of German Magnus Hirschfeld, who was definitely on the side of nature, arguing similarly to LeVay’s current belief in a “third sex”— actually Hirschfeld argued for a array of sexes, which the movie does not explore—and attempted to study these sexualities as “difference,” arguing that since sexuality as inborn it made no sense to apply special penalties to what was described as deviant behavior. But, of course, his studies where interrupted and destroyed by another force, Nazism, which also saw homosexuality as something inborn, but defined that “otherness,” as they did also for Jews, as a natural aberration, as a perversion of human nature that needed to be destroyed, filling their murderous concentration camps with Jews, homosexuals, and gypsies. How the Nazis used the notion of inborn homosexuality and racial differentiation should give us pause for any celebration we might have over studies such as the one briefly outlined in 1995 by LeVay. Scientific concepts can be used in various way.

      Certainly, the post-World War II reaction against Hirschfeld’s notions further prove that point. An entire new generation of psychotherapists grew up after the way, many of the theorists having escaped from Germany to the US, developing an entirely opposite view of homosexual behavior that was based on how we developed as children and young adults. Using some of the concepts of Freud’s theories about absent father and domineering mothers, psychologists now argued not only that homosexuality was a disease, but was a curable one, if one really wanted to change and was willing to pay a psychiatrist to help him or her make that change. Accordingly, homosexuality continued to be listed by the medical establishment as an unnatural disease.

      It was startling to hear Duberman describe how all the young gay well-educated men with whom he was connected believed to a man that they had some sort of characterological disorder, were basically unhappy with their “condition” and sought out psychiatrists. He relates how at one point as part of the therapy he was forced to abandon his lover, given the view that homosexual “acting out” (the way sex was described) was to relieve the anxiety. The only to get to the root of that anxiety was to give up “the acting out,” when tension would develop and the patient would be forced to face it and resolve the problem.

     The film goes on to mention even more horrific forms of educative methods such as shock therapy and neurological operations. All of these forms, in the long run, have been shown to be ineffective, and that any changes in the patient who often attained only in an attempt to please the physiologist or with significant psychological damage, resulting in depression or worse. There is no evidence that such treatments can change one’s sexual orientation, argues one commentator.

      Duberman goes on the mention that there were a very few psychoanalysts who disagreed with these theories of homosexuality, but no research was done and they were considered primarily as mavericks.

      Growing up near end of this era in 1950s and early 1960s, I myself begin to explore psychological reasons for my own still-hidden sexual urges, creating what were clearly fictional explanations about my father and mother to explain my desires. There seemed to be no other way in which one could explore one’s feelings since we had no history of other explanations at that time.

      As the picture expresses it, however, “then something happened to shatter the complacency of American society.” Alfred Kinsey’s reports suddenly showed us, regarding male sexuality, that a very large percentage of self-defined heterosexual males had had, at least one time in their lives, sex with other men, and that a large portion of those individuals who described as being homosexual had had sex with a woman. Moreover, there were high percentages of both heterosexual and homosexual individuals who had had same experiences far more often. In short, Kinsey returned us, in his real-life studies as opposed to those theoretically-based, that there are a large range of sexual experiences of all sorts in which individuals fell. There were, in fact, relatively few individuals who were simply one or the other, just as we now are discovering about gender. What had been wrong about our thinking is that we had not accounted for the very diversity of human experience when it comes to sexuality.

      Kinsey’s revelations as well as the increasing political rise of the young through the 1960s eventually brought about the far more engaged and committed homosexual and transgender communities which finally forced the police to stop the raids of gay and lesbian bars through Stonewall, and begin the long, very long voyage the LGBTQ+ community has made since then.

     The narrator suggests that scientists once more began to explore a biological explanation, focusing on how our genes affect us not only with regard to gender but to sex as well. But as Reinisch again reminds us the either/or paradigm disregards the fact that environment and nature are completely intertwined, that growing up in a certain environment affects the biology of any growing being. She argues that it is 100% environment and 100% nature simultaneously. Richard Green (The Sissy Syndrome) points to other facts; for example, that children are simply not all the same, some being more aggressive and assertive than others, while some are more aesthetic and passive. If you have a boy who’s more passive and interesting in doll-playing than aggressive, that boy’s relationship with his mother and father will be different than another’s as well as connections to his siblings and peer group. It may then become a kind of socialization tract that as a boy gets on that helps to define his behavior and also influences his later sexual orientation.

      Richard Pittard points to another fascinating experiment. Ken Zucker took pictures of effeminately behaving boys, who Pittard argues, we know will in a larger proportion turn out to be gay men. He mixed in with these pictures of others, typical masculine-behaving boys, and showed them to judges, asking them to pick which ones were the “cutest, prettiest, or handsomest.” The selectors chose almost exclusively the effeminate-behaving boys. What this suggests is not at all clear. Are there other genetic factors that make gay boys into prettier or more handsome men? We have all heard women say, why are all the most beautiful men gay? Of course, much of this depends upon what societally we learn to perceive as beauty and, obviously, upon who these selectors were and how they were chosen. In short, when one enters into the world of homosexuality, one enters a maze of confusing contradictions.

     Reinisch takes us back to reality, moreover, by reminding us that homosexuals come in all types, that there is no one defining characterization that can be applied to the range of men or women who define that sexual definition.

     Paula A. Treichler argues against the notion that any definition of feminine or masculine, male or female, sex or gender has anything to tell us about sexual orientation. Any attempt to define homosexuality, insists another commentator, is not in order to understand it but to either incriminate it or excuse it. Accordingly, the whole medical attempt to define sexuality is basically dangerous in that we have to ask what the different forces are going to do with our understanding.

         This film, produced in a time when the rewards of the political efforts were not yet known, accordingly becomes an important summation of the various pushes and pulls of the scientific community regarding these important matters up until the mid-1990s. But finally, this film argues that the scientific community will not provide those answers, that it is the political struggle that truly matters whether or not there is tolerance and understanding of the many differences we have learned human beings express.

         What this work and others like it continue to make clear to me is precisely why it is so difficult in several films, coded and otherwise, to point clearly to an individual and explain why I perceive him or her to be of LGBTQ interest. As Kinsey intimated, human beings themselves are normal only in their very queerness. What we describe as normal is simply a manner of behavior that the society has agreed to aspire to as opposed it its real everyday actions.

 

Los Angeles, March 5, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2023).