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121 4 Homosexuality The Stepchild of Interwar Liberalism Just as the life history method was a scientific response to the changing relationship between “us” and “others” in modern America, the science of homosexuality in the 1920s and 1930s reflected the era’s shifting ideas about sexuality, gender, and culture. One striking characteristic of the scientific approach to homosexuality in these decades was a proliferation of different theories about its nature. To be sure, since the beginning of modern sexology at the turn of the century, constitutional and environmental views had coexisted, producing a wide range of theories about the cause of homosexuality, its dangerousness, and a debate over its malleability. But the interwar decades offered a particularly conflicted, challenging setting for medical and social scientists who together tried to make sense of homosexuality . For one, the scientists began to recognize same-sex attraction as a common phenomenon, especially among youth. Some went so far as to argue that homosexual experiences were useful components of a person’s growth, not something that should alert doctors and teachers as a sign of deviation. Although still within the constraining developmental scheme of “maturity,” this approach nevertheless was shaped by the possibility for the reconfiguration of sexual identities and gender relationships that the era embraced. The more visible this possibility became in American life, the more necessary it seemed for scientists to educate youth with realistic information. Moreover, there were scientists who began to define homosexuality in an entirely different cultural light. For them, homosexual men and women were artistic, cultured, and refined people who rose above the ordinary , because of their presumed openness to modernity. Unlike individuals who were sexually tense for whatever reasons, some homosexual persons seemed to represent some of the most exciting, if unsettling, elements of modernity—the pursuit of relationships outside marriage and reproduction, 122 PR I VAT E PR ACT ICES membership in sophisticated urban cultures, and openness to sexual pleasure unconstrained by religious teachings. Although these scientists never spoke for a majority of their colleagues, their voices became more audible during these decades, a change no doubt influenced by growing urban communities of sexual minorities and scientists’ aspiration to integrate diverse experiences of “others” in knowledge. This new model favoring homosexuality over heterosexuality in certain ways contradicted the contemporary view of homosexuality as an illness or a problem peculiar to modern society, suggesting how the science of homosexuality mirrored a transitional, conflicted moment in the history of American liberalism. How can a person be ill and at the same time extraordinary? Drawing on a long-standing cultural imagination that connected creative genius to mental illness, scientists in the 1920s and 1930s developed an astute way of bringing these contradictory images together.1 The defense of homosexuality as possibly the most apt sexuality in modern civilization was done through a discussion of homosexual persons as “others,” exotic rather than real-life individuals who belonged to the United States as full citizens. In their public discussion of homosexuality, then, physicians argued that homosexual individuals had desirable qualities even though the latter were psychosexually immature and possibly pathological. Likewise, anthropologists suggested in their published writings that nonjudgmental attitudes toward homosexuality in “primitive” societies offered a useful counterpoint to sexually rigid America, which was, by consensus, “civilized.”2 While some of these scientists worked to make Americans less homophobic, their argument was cast in terms of “us” speaking about “others,” building on the dualism between the “civilized” and “primitive” and the separation of scientists ’ subjectivity from that of their subjects. Ultimately, these conceptual dualities contributed to an ideological distance that limited liberal science’s influence on achieving a better acceptance of homosexuality in the United States. At the same time, the distance between researchers and their subjects shielded the former from the theoretical flaw that came from simultaneously approving and disapproving homosexuality. This distance between “us” and “others” also protected scientists who were sexual minorities from the danger of being seen as getting too subjectively involved in their research. While some of these scientists—Ruth Fulton Benedict and Harry Stack Sullivan in particular—seemed aware of the meanings of their sexualities in their “private” lives, their “public” discussions of homosexuality continued to keep a certain distance from issues surrounding homosexuality in their contemporary United States. This was striking, particularly in light of the ease and confidence with which these scientists supported a fuller acceptance of sexual minorities when they talked with their partners, friends, and (in...

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