CHAPTER TWO

The deeply disturbed person of either sex is always narcissistic. Self-love takes the place of the warm, outgoing affection which well-adjusted human beings can feel toward another human being. the narcissist wishes to please only himself and, furthermore, to be so self-sufficient that he reaches a level whereby every want, every wish, including sexual, can be gratified by self.

Discussing the masturbatory practices of the homosexual, Irving Bieber, in “Homosexuality—A Psycho-Analytic Study,” writes, “It is my opinion that homosexuals seek fellatio with other homosexuals only because they are unable to perform auto-fellation—which they would execute if it were anatomically possible. They get a vicarious gratification performing fellatio on someone else, identifying themselves with the person being gratified.”

There are actual case histories, reported by Dr. Frank Caprio and Havelock Ellis of homosexuals reporting to have succeeded in performing auto-fellatio, and we shall have to take their word for it. It would seem, however, to be an almost super-human feat. Meanwhile, the story of every invert begins with a masturbatory experience—sometimes when the subject was as young as four or five years of age, and all too often, as we shall see in a study of the incest factor in homosexuality, performed on the child by a parent!

Heterosexual men and women and even a fairly large percentage of married couples, of course, also indulge in solo or mutual masturbatory activities. The difference is that the homosexual prefers masturbation, whereas to the heterosexual person, it is either something forced on him by loneliness, or indulged in as a complement to the actual, heterosexual love act.

Hirschfield, the German psychiatrist who is credited with being a foremost authority on the life of the homosexual, writes, “A common denominator of all masturbatory activities is the absence of actual physical and emotional contact with a real and present partner—”

There are many ways whereby men achieve sexual gratification through masturbating, relates Edmund Bergler in his, “Disease—or A Way of Life?”. “They include friction of the genitals which can be accomplished by manual manipulation to a point of emission. Or an ejaculation may be produced by rubbing against something with the use of the hand (frottage).”

In psychic masturbation, of course, a person may be sexually stimulated by looking at obscene pictures or reading pornographic literature. Caprio adds to the picture of the masturbatory habits of the homosexual by noting that, “There are also combinations of methods, such as the employment of mechanical devices, accompanied by sexual fantasies. The fantasies may be homosexual, paedophilic, heterosexual, sadomasochistic, or incestuous in nature.”

Freud took note of the fact that, “Masturbation represents the discharge of every variety of sexual component and of every sort of fantasy to which components can give rise.”

In the homosexual—who regularly practices masturbation—the important thing to remember is that, like homosexuality itself, it is part of the general regression to childhood. I once heard a young homosexual, a successful advertising executive, explain his preference for male companionship by saying, “If he does it to me, I'm not responsible. If do it to a girl, I am responsible. I take on a responsibility. I might get her pregnant and have to marry her. As a child, I was always the center of attention in my family. I'm too narcissistic to be able honestly to love another person. So I permit myself to be loved, by another man, who has no legal or social right to ask anything of me.”

Stekel refers to such masturbatory habits as, “psychosexual infantilism.” Bergler prefers the term, “oral neurosis,” reminding us that these people have never, actually, been weaned from the mother's breast. Homosexuality—whether male or female—involves a great deal of sucking. The yearning still to be suckled by the mother also explains why so many homosexuals form non-sexual relationships with older women. As a rule, the older woman is comparatively well-to-do and takes the place of the absent mother by supplying the homosexual with money and other material comforts.

It is true that what causes one person to become a homosexual may not hold true for another. but in studying the case histories of homosexuals who were brought under psychiatric care because of a run-in with the authorities; or why voluntarily sought psychiatric help, early masturbatory habits is seen as a “constant.” Also, awareness of sex in the homosexual usually occurs at a much earlier age than in the better adjusted person.

George William Henry, in “Sex Variants—A Study,” gives an interesting case history of a patient who admitted that he first became interested in masturbating and homosexuality when he was just seven years old, when he already manifested a strong urge to masturbate and longed to place his own penis in his mouth (auto-fellatio). This patient attributed his alter overt homosexuality to a scene witnessed between his parents when he was just five years old.

“I walked past my parents' bedroom and heard my father moaning. I walked into the bedroom and found my mother practicing fellatio on my father. My father was on his back, his arms were spread out, and he was uttering a slight moan. My mother was spread out over my father with her vagina below my father's chin. taking his penis into her mouth. Unable to perform fellation on myself, eager to know what it tasted like, I placed a friend's penis in my mouth for a few minutes and then began to masturbate”

But the obvious incestuous yearning to have his mother do to him what she was doing to his father shows a predisposition to homosexuality. Another child might have been shocked, curious or revolted. With this young man, it sparked the incestuous-homosexual desires that had probably been present since earliest infancy.

An early fascination with men's penises—their size, amount of pubic hair, and so on, is revealed in most case histories, including one by Stekel who had a patient explain that, “I had great feelings of inferiority. I once glimpsed my father's penis when he was taking a shower and was fascinated by the size of it, comparing it to my own rather small one. When I was a yew years older, I became a voyeur. I found a rest room at a large cafeteria which was so situated that by sitting on one of the stools and looking through a hole someone had bored in the door, it was possible to see the penis of every man who came in to urinate. I would watch many men while I masturbated...

Finally, at the age of twenty-five, this patient broke through his repressed homosexual desires and entered into a homosexual relationship with another man. This broke up when the friend decided to leave the homosexual world and marry. After that, the patient drifted from one homosexual relationship to another until he found one partner who was making love to the patient's sister—sometimes on the same night he would perform fellatio on the patient.

“That disgusted me,” the patent admitted. “I decided I had to do something to break my desire for homosexual attachments.”

The analysis broke off, however, midway, and the chances are the patient returned to his original homosexual practices.

Another patient tells Bergler, “Sometime in the years between seven and nine I started masturbating when my older brother performed fellatio on me. Later, I performed fellation on another, younger brother...”

Later, he became preoccupied with the size of his penis (penis narcissism), and in comparing the size with other boys and, later, men. “I remember,” the patient recalled, “masturbating with my best friend during adolescence and feeling jealous and inferior because his ejaculations were of greater volume than my own. I can get an erotic feeling just from looking at a picture of a penis, providing it is not too small.”

The desire to achieve greater and greater satisfaction from the solitary act of masturbation brings some men to perform some extremely bizarre acts. Bieber, in his “A Psycho-Analytic Study of Homosexuality,” had a patient who turned to “outdoor orgies,” after discovering that he achieved much more satisfaction from masturbating outdoors than indoors. This led to a further discovery—that pricking or scratching the penis, scrotum, anus and buttocks was of erotic value.

“I ofter deliberately brought my scrotum into contact with briars while in a state close to the sexual climax. This was always followed by a strong orgasm. I also found that pressing the bristles of a hairbrush or clothesbrush against my scrotum or anus increased the strength of the ejaculation.”

The significance of the desire to masturbate, especially when it first occurs in pre-adolescence, is that we already have a “perverted” personality who, for some reason or another, has developed an unnatural, incestuous attraction to one of the other parent. The “penis fascination” is usually present when the young boy, rejected by the father, longs to be like his father. Loving his father, he wishes to be like him so he can love himself and, through that transference, be loved by the father.

One of Bleuler's patients relates how he developed a sexual crush on his father's best friend. “I was greatly aroused when I saw his penis when he was preparing to put on a pair of swimming trunks. he had a dark, heavy beard and was hairy, like my father. I had an almost overwhelming urge to have him lie on top of me with his penis between my legs.”

This, obviously, is an attempt to replace the mother in the father's life. A man who strongly resembled the father, who was the father,s best friend, would be on top of him and make love to him as the patient had seen his father do with his mother.

It is entirely possible that this penis-fascination can explain why lavatories and urinals are so often the place of homosexual seductions. The homosexual is suddenly overwhelmed with a desire to masturbate while holding or fondling the other man's genitals. In them he sees the genitalia of his father, used for making love to the mother, instead of to the boy. A rule-of-thumb in considering the genesis of homosexuality is that the male homosexual is seeking a father while the female homosexual seeks a mother. Therefore, the female homosexual straps on a dildoe or other device and attempts to make love to another woman as her father once made love to her mother.

But it is ironic and curiously sad that not even when seeking desperately needed sexual outlets can the homosexual find companionship. Everything that goes toward making him a homosexual automatically rules out lasting relationships of any sort. He is fixated at the aoedipal level. He is a kind of Peter Pan, living in his tree, observing but never joining the human race. Again and again, in desperation, he reaches out for some kind of human contact. Here is where the essential danger lies. A young boy will often be paid to follow the homosexual into a latrine, behind a bush, onto a roof-top, and then asked to watch while the man masturbates. Tragedy occurs when and if the child panics, screams, and tries to flee. The homosexual also panics, knowing he will be arrested for his “crime” and the child is unintentionally murdered.

When a child has a pre-disposition toward homosexuality as the previously cited cases show, it is only a step between watching the experienced homosexual masturbate, being asked to take the man's penis into his mouth, and then permitting the homosexual to perform fellation on him. Once started on this path, the young boy—or girl—because of the built-in emotional problems, is well launched on his homosexual career.

But need, dependence, not love, bind the homosexual partners together. Ellis tells of a young homosexual who finally decided that he was “in love” with a man in his office, also a homosexual.

“I wanted to dominate him, and treated him ruthlessly. I resented every move of independence he showed. We argued continually. He was a habitual liar and I hated most of his qualities but I was completely bound to him...”

Loneliness is the constant companion of the homosexual, even in his hours of greatest joy—when he is receiving sexual gratification. Donald Webster Cory, in “The Homosexual in America” puts it poignantly and well when he says, “If the instability and alone-ness of the homosexual are frightening at the moment, something much more so is his fear of the future. Nothing is so pathetic as the spectacle of a man of fifty or sixty, his youthfulness gone but not his youthful desires, his gaiety in the past but not his ‘gay’ self, seeking companionship of any sort no matter where it is to be found. Out of desperation he pays for his pleasure...”

The homosexual, in other words, will go to almost any lengths to defeat the terrible loneliness that is his lot. He will, as Cory says, pay for it—in any number of ways, including taking the crumbs from another's table. It is in his masturbatory activities that the homosexual betrays himself more than in any other phase of his life. So determined is he to prove that he is self-sustaining—known in psychiatric terms as “auto-erotic”—that even when he has consummated a more or less satisfactory relationship with another homosexual via anal intercourse, he will insist upon masturbating—sometimes several times—to prove to himself that he really does not need anyone.

Most homosexuals, in their sexual fantasies, assume the role of the woman. This “acts out” their incestuous jealousy of the father who had been able to make love, as one homosexual put it, “to the woman I loved—my mother.” the penis is the breast substitute for the homosexual. Deprived of his mother's breast—or love—his penis will become his own breast. To act out such fantasies, one of Caprio's patients admitted that he, “tried to produce artificial suction on my penis by various mechanical means. I have done this by means of rubber hose, or tubing, the other end of which i sucked on. This was not very successful however. I found that a water aspirator such as used in laboratories would produce the desired suction, and so I have frequently used this device. The barrel of a large glass hypodermic syringe served as a chamber for my penis. By means of this apparatus I was able to produce controlled suction on penis, scrotum, anus, abdomen or buttocks.”

The female homosexual looks everywhere for a penis-substitute; the male homosexual looks everywhere for the delicious sucking sensation he dreams of having had at his mother's breast. He envies his father for having one the love of this woman and been permitted to have sexual intercourse with her. He yearns to be his father, and at the same time to be himself, the infant, suckled at his mother's breast. While the female homosexual may often have an incestuous love of the father—Medea Complex—the male homosexual longs to be the father in order to be the mother's lover...Oedipus Complex.

Like every other phase in the life of the homosexual, his masturbatory activities are important—1. As indicating the very young age at which the homosexual usually rejects heterosexuality; and 2. As a reminder to parents that while homosexuals are not “born” they do not, on the other hand “just happen.” An aggressive, unconsciously incestuous mother; a meek or, on the other hand, brutalizing father; a realization that his sex was a disappointment to his parents—these form the soil into which the seeds of homosexuality are sown!