The Historical and Cultural Spectra of Homosexuality and their Relationship to the Fear of Being a Lesbian

The cultural spectra of homosexuality are briefly traced in Western and Eastern cultures. Special emphasis is placed on homosexuality in the male, which was a capital offense in the British Navy from 1700 to the early part of the nineteenth century when psychological and medical factors came to be considered of importance. In the American colonies the attitude toward male homosexuality and lesbianism is stated in a clear record of the views of Thomas Jefferson, who proposed in 1779 that "whoever shall be guilty of rape, polygamy or sodomy shall be punished if a man by castration, if a women by cutting through the cartilage of her nose a hole one-half inch in diameter at the least." The growing importance of Freudian theory led to research into child development and the stresses of entering the Oedipal period. Thanks to the insight of female psychoanalysts, Freud's original views were modified to patterns of boys and girls, and the relationship of these differences to the complex systems which may have produced homosexuality in may instances in both sexes. A thesis by Diane M. Greene entitled "Women Loving Women" is reviewed with special reference to the way women adapt to being in the world as lesbians. Prompted by what Bieber and Bieber wrote concerning the use of homosexual themes in males in solving problems related to achievement, e.g., creative success, salary increases, parenting, and drawing on psychoanalytic data, it is considered likely that women exercise similar mechanisms in solving analogous problems. It follows then that a few days delivery, a women could begin to doubt that she could handle this success-the need to mother. This could lead her to doubt her femininity, utilizing the same (hidden) homosexual mechanisms of problem solving in the male. An awareness of this process may assist the physician in management and therapy. Woods' paradigm for the male: I am a failure leads to I am castrated leads to I am not a man leads to I am like a women leads to I am homosexual. For the female, Mayberger and Abramson propose: I am a mother leads to I am successful leads to I cannot handle success because I lack the need to mother my infant lead to I am not a real women, I am like a man leads to I am homosexual.