86
Popular Culture Review
Catholic priests and heterosexual women wiio have sex with male minors, the
rest no doubt do include gay men who, like their heterosexual (and Christian)
counterparts, have serious mental health problems that have little to do with
their sexual orientation.
The “ 1960 Spectator 8 July 69” reference cited in the OED is
particularly pertinent in this regard. The quoted excerpt below is from Penelope
Grilliatt’s lengthy review of the book A Minority: A Report on the Life o f the
Male Homosexual in Great Britain (Longmans, 1960) by Michael George
Schofield (the book was published under his pseudonym, Gordon Westwood).
Ms. Gilliatt makes some critical observations in her review that are as applicable
to America today as Mien they were written in 1960 about the British view of
homosexuality and treatment of homosexuals. (Not only did Britain
decriminalize homosexuality, today the U. K. is poised to legalize same-sex civil
unions.)
It is often said, for instance, that any modification of the law
[i.e. Legalizing homosexuality] would open the flood-gates to
a wave of homosexuality; but Mr. Westwood, like everyone
else who has really gone into it, can find nothing to suggest
that there would be any increase in the incidence of
homosexual behaviour. . . We are also familiar with the
proposition that legalised homosexuality would increase the
threat to young boys, is fear most often being voiced by the
class that self-righteously skimps itself to educate its sons at
all-male boarding schools, Miere homosexuality is innocently
uninhibited as never again . . . Westwood’s research, however,
like the Curran and Parr survey in the British Medical Journal,
shows the paedophiliac to be a type altogether distinct from
the adult-seeking homosexual. (69)
Ms. Gilliatt and Mr. Westwood—in 1960—also had some astute things
to say about the faith-based notion that homosexuals can be “cured”:
. . . the suggestions that the cure for homosexuality lies with
medicine, or psychiatry, or the Church—cheerfully
disregard[s] the fact that the first two have explained that it
really is not possible to cure something that is not an illness,
and t ] H \