1. • Are Homosexuals Born That Way? Sex on the Brain
• Magazine article by Darrell Yates Rist; The Nation, Vol. 255, October 19, 1992
Are Homosexuals Born That
Way? Sex on the Brain.
by Darrell Yates Rist
Was Schubert Gay? If He Was, So What ? Debate Turns Testy
The New York Times, February 4
Aside from abortion, few social issues-not the nation's illiteracy or poverty or crumbling
healthcare system-rouse such persistent, angry interest among the American populace as
questions of homosexuality. Nor is it only on the vulgar hustings--like the "family values"
Republican convention in August--that the discourse on same-sex love makes people mad.
Just this past February, for example, according to a report in The New York Times, even so
sober an event as the annual weeklong Schubertiade at New York City's 92nd Street Y turned
vitriolic when an assertion of the master's same-sex libido and its effect on his music was
made. While noted feminist musicologist Susan McClary merely argued for the "possible
homosexual character" of the second movement of the "Unfinished Symphony," an even
more strident propagandist in the audience declared that "heterosexuals are more repressed
than homosexuals." One disgusted participant felt at last compelled to ask whether
Schubert's short, fat stature had in any way influenced his music--a response I am
enormously in sympathy with.
In their own way, debates like these over the artistic stamp of Schubert's homosexuality
disturb me more than all the weird ranting over moral decline from the likes of Pat
Robertson, Pat Buchanan, Dan Quayle and George Bush. These arguments among
intellectuals--whether art critics or political philosophers or, say, research scientists--treat
homosexuality more polemically than it deserves and, under the guise of being socially
progressive, go a long way in darkening our already benighted, though deeply believed,
sexual thinking. In the end, such "liberated" views continue to imprison desire in the dark
cells of "gay" and "straight," rather than freeing our hearts and genitals to the fullest
expression of human affection, which ought to be the unabashed ideal of any sexual
liberation movement.
This Schubert debate, for example, cannot pass merely for an innocent argument to
establish a biographical fact-that Schubert was known to favor men in his erotic pursuits.
Rather, in the hands of a certain brand of homosexual ideologue, it is intended to feed the
ridiculous and dangerous assumption that there is such athing as a "homosexual character"
in art and in life, a particular sensibility welling up from the homosexual soul, embedded in
the genes. Behind it is the devout belief that homosexuals are constitutionally different.
This dogma is by no means new. As John Lauritsen and David Thorstad relate in The Early
Homosexual Rights Movement (1864-1935), when a new penal code criminalizing sex
between men (women's sexuality has almost always been treated as trivial) was proposed
for Prussia in the 1860s, one Hungarian activist doctor, under the pseudonym K.M. Kertbeny,
sent an open letter to the Minister of Justice decrying the German state's barbaric intrusion
into all-male bedrooms. Kertbeny justified his position by arguing that homosexuality, a term
he devised, is an "inborn, and therefore irrepressible, drive," consequently incapable of
seducing the majority of men--those born with "normal sexualism"--because it is naturally
alien to them. The pseudonymous Kertbeny's musings were, of course, egregiously political.
As Lauritsen and Thorstad epitomize Kertbeny's argument: "If homosexuality is inborn... it