BY PAUL VARNELL

Last week, I used several interviews with gay psychiatrists recently published in “American Psychiatry and Homosexuality” to show how the American Psychiatric Association abandoned its claim that gays are mentally ill.

But some of the interviews discussing the work of other gay psychiatrists contain important observations it would be a shame to lose merely because they do not fit into that narrative.

Psychologist Charles Silverstein, author of “The Joy of Gay Sex,” addresses the covert moral or normative bias of many mental health professonals: “I want to begin speaking out against our colleagues who condemn other people’s sexual behavior. I’m thinking of all of the people who have been diagnosed as having one kind of sexual perversion or other, for no other reason than it’s not statistically normal, and that it is a violation of social mores. I’m thinking of anyone who is involved in S&M, whether you’re a top or a bottom; …people who are into fetishes. Lots of our gay professional colleagues look down upon these.”

Silverstein continued: “For example, many of our colleagues diagnose sexual compulsion. The issue is that anyone who jerks off more than I do is suffering from a sexual compulsion or addiction.”

With regard to psychoanalysts, Richard Isay, the first openly gay member of the American Psychoanalytic Association, comments: “I found analysts generally, when I was involved in official psychoanalysis, rigid, stiff, rather unimaginative and ungiving. I believe that was a product of selection 30 years ago, when institutes tended to select obsessional and mildly depressed people, bright but generally not terribly warm.”

Judd Marmor, one of the earliest critics of treating homosexuality as a mental illness, criticizes the retrograde attempt by some psychiatrist/psychoanalysts to hang onto Freud: “I think many of Freud’s ideas are outdated. The over-emphasis on the initial triad, mother-father-child, and the failure to take into account the equally profound effects of peer group interrelationships, and of social, cultural, and religious indoctrination is a great mistake.”

Interviewed shortly after he published his naive “study” of “ex-gays” purporting to show that a small number of gays can “change,” Robert Spitzer acknowledges that “I have given aid and comfort to the enemy” and adds: “I suppose more people were hurt than might be helped, but I believe the study had some scientific value.”

Nevertheless, he said: “I try to think, ‘Why wasn’t I able to take a more measured approach?’ …When I started the study…there was such rage at me from gay colleagues that I think it stiffened my back, which was unfortunate. …I regret that I didn’t write it up in a more measured way.”

Many psychiatrists challenge the claim by a few biological researchers that homosexuality is genetic. Martha Kirkpatrick, for instance, says: “It seems to me…highly unlikely that homosexuality is genetically determined. It seems much more multi-determined to me. And I do still very much believe that early fantasy life and the way that personal interaction and family life interact in the psyche plays a very important role.”

Kirkpatrick, who has conducted a study of children of heterosexual and lesbian mothers, also observes: “We…discovered that the children who had two people in their parenting environment—whatever their age, sex or relationship—were better off than children with just one parent…not just economically, but also socially. They had more social contacts and had more active, richer lives, were more vigorous and broad-minded in their attitudes.”

Nanette Gartrell has conducted a different study of lesbian parents. She comments: “The moms struggle a lot in the early years with very child-focused lives, to the exclusion of attention to their relationships, so our breakup rate is just the same as heterosexual relationships. Everybody was hoping to see that lesbian moms would do better. My advice to people from what I have learned is to be more attentive to their relationships.”

Early in her career, Gartrell also helped challenge a now-discredited Masters and Johnson study claiming that gay men had lower testosterone levels than straight men. “So Dr. Brodie (her mentor) sponsored another study in which we measured testosterone levels in gay men at Stanford and compared them to straight men at Stanford. Our gay men had higher testosterone levels than straight men! Somehow it didn’t get the kind of publicity that the other study did.”

The last word is Ralph Roughton’s: “Knowing people as individuals is the key to overcoming prejudice.” Roughton recalls that when he came out in a letter to friends, one colleague assured him, “This isn’t going to change the way people feel about you. It is going to change the way people think about homosexuality.”

Some of Paul Varnell’s previous columns are posted at the Independent Gay Forum at www.indegayforum.org. His e-mail address is pvarnell@aol.com.