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A contribution to a symposium on, "Gays & the Left," points out that sexual relations between men were praised in Ancient Greece & widely tolerated in Christian Europe until the late 12th century. A morality of compulsory heterosexuality emerged during the Industrial Revolution with the extension of the bourgeois family model based on patriarchal supremacy & strictly-defined gender roles. A look at attitudes toward homosexuality among socialists notes that Marx & Engels never actively criticized homophobia & the socialist press avoided the topic of homosexuality until gay liberation was temporarily extolled during the Bolshevik Revolution. However, homosexuality was criminalized under Stalin & gays were persecuted as "asocial" outsiders who represented a potential threat to the new system. This homophobia was reproduced in Communist parties throughout the world. Although much progress has been made, the strong resistance to equalizing marriage rights indicates the struggle for full sexual equality is far from over. Emphasis is placed on the need for socialists to lead the movement toward a populist, anti-capitalist party that advocates for gay rights. J. Lindroth

An examination of Sigmund Freud's relation to homosexuality argues that recent scholarly works calling Freud one of the foremost inventors of contemporary homophobia contain only a grain of truth. It is contended that Freud viewed homosexuality as normalizing vs pathologizing; ie, he considered heterosexuality the normal result of identity formation & did not see homosexuality as a sickness. Further, his view of homosexuality was universalizing, not minoritizing, because he was against isolating homosexuals as a separate class. However, his far harsher treatment of lesbians than gay men is evidence of his misogyny. While he denied any link between homosexual object choice & character inversion (effeminacy) in males, he saw lesbians as always mannish. It is concluded that efforts by analysts to "cure" homosexuality are decidedly anti-Freudian, maintaining that Freud came close to saying homosexuality was not in the range of any therapy. J. Lindroth

It is currently fashionable, in the social sciences & the popular educated press, to see any assessment of a behavior as "abnormal" as representing nothing more than society's view that the behavior is undesirable. This interpretation is examined & found to be logically & empirically indefensible. All of the various causal explanations for homosexuality are examined; none now available can reasonably conclude that homosexuality is normal. Modified AA.

The Sexual Offences Act, 1967, which made private homosexual behaviour between consenting males over the age of 21 years legal in England, marked a significant stage in the gradual change of social attitudes on this topic. A substantial body of opinion, including perhaps most of those personally affected, now takes the line that homosexuality is a common and relatively minor variant from the normal, that its occurrence is inevitable and that it is about time that the community learned to live and let live, recognizing that many ordinary folk, as well as many outstanding citizens, are unalterably homosexual.

SummaryThe origin of preferences and values is an unresolved theoretical problem in behavioural sciences. The Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis, derived from the Savanna Principle and a theory of the evolution of general intelligence, suggests that more intelligent individuals are more likely to acquire and espouse evolutionarily novel preferences and values than less intelligent individuals, but general intelligence has no effect on the acquisition and espousal of evolutionarily familiar preferences and values. Ethnographies of traditional societies suggest that exclusively homosexual behaviour was probably rare in the ancestral environment, so the Hypothesis would predict that more intelligent individuals are more likely to identify themselves as homosexual and engage in homosexual behaviour. Analyses of three large, nationally representative samples (two of which are prospectively longitudinal) from two different nations confirm the prediction.