Kiss of the Spider Woman
Page 29
As for the question of why in the same home there can be found homosexual and heterosexual children, Doctor Taube suggests that in every social cell there is a tendency toward the division of roles, and for this reason one of the children will take charge of the parental conflict and keep the other siblings in a rather neutralized field.
Nonetheless, Doctor Taube, after evaluating the primary impulse toward homosexuality and pointing out the character of its revolutionary nonconformity, observes that the absence of other models for conduct—and in this respect she agrees with Altman and his thesis concerning the uncommonness of bisexual behavior, due to the lack of available bisexual models for conduct—causes the future male homosexual, for example, after rejecting the defects of the repressive father, to feel anguished about the necessity for identification with some form of conduct and to “learn” to be submissive like his mother. The process is identical for the girl: she repudiates exploitation, and because of that she hates to be like her submissive mother, but social pressures make her slowly “learn” another role, that of the repressive father.
From five years of age until adolescence there occurs in these “different” kinds of children an oscillation in their original bisexuality. But the “masculinized” girl, for example, because of her identification with the father, although feeling sexually attracted to a male, will not accept the role of passive toy that a conventional male would tend to impose, and will feel uncomfortable and therefore cultivate, as the only means of overcoming her anxiety, a different role that will merely permit play with women. On the other hand, the “femininized” boy, because of his identification with the mother, although feeling sexually attracted to a girl, will not accept the role of intrepid assailant that would tend to be imposed by a conventional female, will feel uncomfortable and therefore cultivate a different role that will only permit play with men.
Anneli Taube thus interprets the imitative attitude practiced, until very recently, by a high percentage of homosexuals, an attitude imitative, above all, of the defects of heterosexuality. What has been characteristic of male homosexuals is a submissive spirit, a conservative attitude, a love of peace at any cost, even the cost of perpetuating their own marginality; whereas what has been characteristic of female homosexuals is their anarchical spirit, violently argumentative, while at the same time basically disorganized. Yet both attitudes have proven not to be deliberate, but compulsive, imposed by a slow brainwashing in which heterosexual bourgeois models for conduct participate—during infancy and adolescence—and later on, at the point of adopting homosexuality itself, “bourgeois” models for homosexual conduct.
This prejudice, or perhaps truthful observation, concerning homosexuals placed them on the periphery of movements for class liberation and political action in general. The socialist countries’ mistrust of homosexuals is notorious. Much of the—fortunately, suggests Doctor Taube—began to change throughout the decade of the sixties, with the emergence of the woman’s liberation movement, when the resulting judgments tended to discredit—in the eyes of such sexual marginals—those unattainable but tenaciously imitated roles of “strong male” and “weak female.”
The subsequent formation of homosexual liberation fronts is one proof of that.