Men who are sexually attracted to their own gender have been discriminated against long enough. Being Homosexual is a doctor/therapist’s attempt to lift the tremendous weight of that enduring injustice.
According to Dr. Isay, homosexuals are in every way normal people, normal men, who have all the feelings, hopes, sorrows, loves, desires, as every other person on our planet. Because of the desire for same sex couplings, a gay person must not be looked upon any differently than a person who desires to become a sculptor while another may choose to paint, play a musical instrument, or become a banker, or an athlete.
The tendency to exhibit heterosexual or homosexual behavior is innate, just as any other trait or predisposition. And herein lays the issue.
For generations, homosexuality has been thought of as the result of: 1) too much mothering or a domineering mother, 2) too much fathering, or an insufficient father image, 3) playing with girls as a child, 4) not playing with enough boys, 5) an insufficiency of the male hormone, 6) fear of women, 7) lack of self control, 8) giving into sinful temptation. The list could go on and on.
After years of counseling both heterosexual and homosexual men, in Being Homosexual, Dr. Isay provides much clinical insight. While a gay man may exhibit one or more of the tendencies listed above, the observed trait did not cause his homosexuality. Simply put, the man was born gay.
The psychic damage done to the personality of a homosexual man because of continuing societal attitudes, easily explains why numerous gay men seek psychological counseling.
Dr. Isay reports that he counsels men who hide their sexuality, often through traditional marriages, to prove to the world and to themselves that they are not abnormal. One can only imagine what years of denial and loathing can do to a person’s self image who accepts and believes society’s interpretation of normalcy.
Then too, Being Homosexual talks of those men who accept their male erotic preferences. The sad fact is that, psychologically, these men feel they are weird, queer, fag, abnormal, unbalanced, or in someway freaks of nature — even sinful. Dr. Isay discusses how he has led many of his clients to believe differently. But it takes many counseling sessions, sometimes several years of psychotherapy, before these gay men believe that their preferences are N-O-R-M-A-L for them—to hell with ongoing masculine norms often set by biblical beliefs.
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