1970S TELEVISION SHOWS
INTERVIEW RESUMES:
David Susskind
I feel awkward making a brief for psychiatry, which I really, like most of them make out the case that homosexuality is an aberrated response to the dominating mother and the regressive father
Marc Rubin
dangle dangle Dingleberry. You know, like, what does it mean in terms of a lifestyle for years, I was a speech therapist, and my special field of interest was stuttering. There were 460,000 theories for the origin of stuttering. And every every therapist had his own theory. And what it came down to is that each stutter was a stutter because of what made him to stutter.
Ted Van Griethuysen
Good Good, I will address myself to that. How
David Susskind
How does that happen?
Ted Van Griethuysen
First of all, this, I would say, I'm going to go back to something aesthetic realism does not oppress homosexuality. It looks upon a person with that who says they like it with benevolent semi conviction? I would say. However, one can talk oneself about why oneself changed, which is what we're interested in doing
David Susskind
Before you changed? How did you become a homosexual? What would the
Ted Van Griethuysen
well that's part of the changes to understand how you did? It is not a sickness that is quite correct. It is not. It is not physical or mental illness as psychiatry, you apparently permanent long. I would say in terms of myself, it was wrong. That's as far as I'll go for the moment
David Susskind
At what age were you aware that you were
Ted Van Griethuysen
No it wasn't a sickness. I see. I objected to that violently. I went to psychiatrists. I did. I did not like that way of seeing me. I thought I'm not a toad to be looked at simply as a homosexual. I'm a person first of all, and psychiatry did not look at me that way. Aesthetic realism did.
David Susskind
What was that psychiatry because they look at you, the premise is that you're sick, otherwise you
Ted Van Griethuysen
Well, the main thing was, I didn't hear anything very useful. They didn't tell me anything. That was very true or very useful. But I adjust my just I mean, the, the, the, the doctor told me one of the things that the earliest one I went to, after which I had a nervous collapse,
David Susskind
How long did you go
Ted Van Griethuysen
Oh, I was there two or three times and he said the world needs homosexuals because women need men who will understand them. And, and the, but what? In terms of cause I can I can give cause this way? It's what I said earlier, I didn't know this. It's a hard thing to see this matter of liking the world. What in the hell does it mean? How do you like a world? It's got Vietnam going on it and it's got the the race question Is it is and has greed and disease and ugliness and filth? What do you mean like it? It's not a simple namby pamby thing, it's as tough as nails. I didn't know, when I was, let's say, 14, that I had a way to see everything that was not myself. How I saw the world was based, I can put it very simply for myself. It was based on a feeling that the world was essentially cold and unfriendly and aloof. Therefore, the attitude I had to the world could be characterized by an attitude of contempt for the world. I met it with a contempt that seemed to meet me with that affected the essential structure of myself. And it affected how I saw women. Now this is a very swift precis, by the way. Oh I would say much earlier, when I was about four, I would say three or four, I knew I was a homosexual, and I was about 15, I guess, in Midwestern America. Nobody ever used the word I didn't know what it was, I knew I liked boys more than more than girls, the boy walked by be inclined to follow Him and not the girl, I knew something was different about me. But when I thought my attitude to women, was one of simple, you know, live and let live and let live, women are fine. And maybe some of my best friends are women. I didn't know that what was simply an antipathy, an absence of physical response to a woman and you know, a woman comes in the room, you have no physical response, you have no physical response. And I did demand that that absence of physical response was an was ignorance on my part, I had a cultural lapse, I would say that homosexuality has to be considered in the cultural field to be understood, there is something I think, wrong with the relation of sameness and difference in terms of the way a person sees the outside world as like him and also different from him. That is why like, we use the word corrupt, it's wrong. When a person learns more, sees more, that relation can change.
David Susskind
Does the awareness of homosexuality precede the homosexual Act, in your case, by a lot of years? Is there a big gulf between not feeling no response?
David Susskind
As a person that I'd like to say something about psychiatrist in relation to me, this may shock some of my liberated brothers, but my experience in psychiatry was very good. Because at the age of 19, I had decided I was a homosexual and sought a psychiatrist. And fortunately found someone who said to me, at the end of the first session session, you would no more touch Oh, boy than you would a girl. It's nice to be an idealist, but don't be a damn fool. I did. And my psychiatrist made me possibly made it possible for me to be sexual, which I think is the important thing. And, you know, I found that sexual sexuality that I loved was with men. But so in that respect, I thank my psychiatrist, and I think it's the publicity as a psychiatrist that like Hatter and all that we have been getting, which is really damaging to, I mean, when you think it really frightens me when you think of the two or 3% that these people are dealing with are really changing or whatever it is, and the amount of fear that they are instilling in everybody else. And when I find that all,
David Susskind
George, when you are a homosexual, is it always as described by Ted an absence of response to the female?
Randolfe Hayden Wicker
I knew I was a homosexual at the age of 12, or 13. Yet I didn't actually start engaging in homosexual acts until I came out in the village at 17, or 18. For five or six years, I was a very frustrated, inactive but told me, I went to the libraries and read everything I could about in psychology books, case histories. Now remember once was a young boy writing in my diary, if only I could just once meet one other homosexual, which now I sometimes laugh about, because I've discovered that there's a whole world filled with homosexuals. But I wouldn't like to take issue with something nice people say they say that they're not attacking, but putting down the homosexual life style and they are
David Susskind
before you all put down the idea of the mother father syndrome, creating the homosexual. You did that Randy so that your homosexual inclination, years before any activity was that in any way related to your domestic situations?
Randolfe Hayden Wicker
No, it was a positive attraction to boys. I mean, I could I could run with people that that weren't sissies that weren't restricted socially. And what you could talk about or what you could do together and men in our society are much freer than women.
Sheldon Kranz
David, could I say something about that? Because I feel people would like very much to know what is the cause of homosexuality. And aesthetic realism does say there are certain principles, people are different, and it respects individuality very much. But there are principles. One of the things that can be found, as far as we have seen, and this was true for myself, was that at a very early age, I came to feel something about my mother. She was not the only person who was the cause of the homosexuality. But she was crucial because she was one of the first people that I met. She represents... Well, I met my mother when I was born.
David Susskind
there was a point in time at which you came to have a very specific attitude about your mother.
Sheldon Kranz
Yes it came, I think it came before I was aware of it. As a matter of fact, I would say I wasn't aware of what my real attitude toward my mother was until I began to study with Eli Siegel. But what happened, whether I was aware of it or not, you see, I feel as what people would like to know. You can go you can get to Chicago by many roads, and you can get to homosexuality by many roads. But what happened for me, and it seems to be fairly classic, is that at a very early age, I came to feel that my mother was terrifically doting and approving of me. At the same time, I came to feel that I should I didn't deserve all this approval. My mother lavished a tremendous amount of attention on me. What does a child feel deeply conscious or unconscious? What does a child feel who feels that his mother is making a tremendous fuss over him and at the same time, feel she's a little silly to be doing this. What I came to, what when it comes to is you do have even as you love this approval, and as you love your mother making a fuss over you and making you feel you're the most important person to her. You also feel contempt. Now, that contempt for a woman is a sign of beginning point. Many other things can come into make for an Attitude Making for homosexuality. But there is a very deep feeling in a homosexual that women are pushovers very often represented by a mother, perhaps it was an aunt perhaps it was a guardian, it doesn't matter. But at a very early age, women are seen as tremendously approving of you. And at the same time you feel something which you could call contempt.
David Susskind
What was the attitude of your father?
Sheldon Kranz
My father, that was also classical my father was he was more much more of the my mother. My father never approved of me the way my mother did. I always felt frankly, I was not the Son My father wanted. He wanted a boy, you played baseball, I wanted to read books. And so I think
David Susskind
Could it be partially a response to him as well as to your mother.
Sheldon Kranz
Yes, yes. I do think that I also think that in some unconscious way, I came to feel that men, women weren't the pushovers that women were. Mr. Siegel once said to me in this day in an aesthetic realism lesson, he thinks that I was bored with women by the time I'm aware of that, but it happens that in learning these things, something did happen to me one other thing that's important. There's so much said about how society makes homosexuals feel guilty. How it's all society's fault, and if it weren't society, homosexuals would have a simply great time. I simply this is my personal experience. I simply do not agree with that. I believe that homosexuals at their very deepest, do not like being homosexual. I think that if they had the choice, yes, as Merle Miller put it in his article, if he had had the choice, he would have chosen differently. But what is even more important is that aesthetic realism points out that it's not just that you are some victim, you're a victim of your Mother, you're a victim of society. You make choices at the age of three, a child makes choices. They're unconscious, but their choices and aesthetic realism so you can revoke those choices, you do not have to stick with those choices and something else can be
David Susskind
Coming right back aftera brief pause.