With the passing of famed “60 Minutes” commentator Mike Wallace last week at age 93, his collective work is getting a new look, including a 1967 report on homosexuality.
Is he getting slammed now due to political correctness? Was there truth to what he said, or was psychiatry composed of cranks following the latest social fads and making sweeping generalizations about people they did not understand?
Yes indeed.
“The average homosexual, if there be such, is promiscuous. He is not interested or capable of a lasting relationship like that of a heterosexual marriage. His sex life, his love life, consists of a series of one-chance encounters at the clubs and bars he inhabits. And even on the streets of the city—the pick-up, the one night stand, these are characteristics of the homosexual relationship,” he said in true objective journalistic fashion.
What gives? While parts of that are true, those are also true of heterosexual men and women. He later regretted it. “That is—God help us—what our understanding was of the homosexual lifestyle a mere 25 years ago,” Wallace said in a 1996 interview. “Because nobody was out of the closet and because that’s what we heard from doctors, that’s what Socarides told us—it was a matter of shame.”
He is referring to Dr. Charles Socarides, a psychiatrist who felt homosexuality was a mental illness. Well, most of them thought it was a mental illness. It didn’t stop being a mental illness until DSM III.
In truth, “Because nobody was out of the closet” is the telling part. It is quite easy to demonize people you don’t know and never have to see in the hallway at work – or who are afraid to to talk openly because of a subcurrent of bias and intolerance. That is why silly little miscreants in the humanities, in the social sciences, and in science media find it easy to run around demonizing Republicans often and religious people even more. There are so few of those minorities in academia – and they keep them out, just like homosexuals used to be kept out of jobs – that less militant progressives never get to know conservatives or Republicans, so they buy into propaganda pieces produced by people who claim to be rational but are promoting and rationalizing stereotypes.