Irreversibly Programmed in the First Years of Life?
The infantilism of the homosexual complex generally stems from adolescence, to a lesser degree from earlier childhood. These are the periods to which the homosexual person is fixated. It is not during early childhood, however, that the homosexual’s fate is sealed, as if often contended by, among others, emancipatory homosexuals. This theory helps to justify such indoctrination of children in sex education as: “A number of you are this way and must live according to your nature.” Early fixation of sexual orientation is also a favourite concept in older psychoanalytic theories. These contend that, by the age of three or four, one’s basic personality is firmly formed, once and for all.
A homosexual man imagined, after hearing such a theory, that his inclinations had already been imprinted in the embryonic stage, because his mother was wishing for a girl and therefore at that tender age would have rejected him, a boy. Irrespective of the fact that an embryo’s perception is still restricted to sensations more primitive than the awareness of not being wanted, such a theory has a fatalistic flaw and reinforces the person’s self-dramatization. Besides, if one relied on the memories of his youth, the period of neurotization of this man had rather clearly been adolescence. There is an element of truth in early-childhood theories, though. It is likely, for instance, that this man’s mother had seen him, from his first year onward, more as a girl than a boy and that she unconsciously was influenced by that wish in how she treated him. While character traits and attitudes may indeed take shape even in the first years of life, this is not so for the homosexual inclination itself, not the specific gender inferiority complex from which it springs.
That sexual interests are not unshakably anchored in early childhood may be illustrated by the findings of Gundlach and Riess (1967): in a large group of lesbians, these women were found to be significantly less often the eldest from families with five or more children, as compared to heterosexual women. This suggests that the decisive turn in the lesbian development does not take place before, say, six or seven years of age at its earliest, and probably later, because it is only then that a firstborn girl finds herself in the position that her chance of becoming a lesbian is enhanced (in case she has fewer than five siblings) or lowered (if five or more younger brothers and sisters are born). Similarly, a sudy on homosexual men from families with more than four children reported that they ranked more often than to be expected among the younger half of the children (Van Lennep et al. 1954).
Moreover, even of extraordinarily feminine boys — perhaps the group with the highet risk of becoming homosexual because of their liability to contract a masculine inferiority complex — more than 30 percent did not develop homosexual fantasies in adolescene (Green 1985), while 20 percent moved back and forth on the sexuual-interest continuuum during that phase of development (Green 1987). Looking back on their early childhood, some homosexuals — not all, to be sure — can see the signs (cross-gender dressing, cross-gender games or preferences) that indicated their later orientation, but that does not imply that from these signs one can predict homosexuality in an individual child. They inidicate a higher than normal chance, but not irreversible fate.
Aardweg, G. (1997). The Battle for Normality: A Guide for (Self-)Therapy for Homosexuality. San Francisco: Ignatius Press
