Masters of Sex and Homosexuality

Dwight Garner reviews in today's New York Times Masters of Sex - The Life and Times of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the Couple Who taught America How to Love by Thomas Maier (Basic Books, 2009, 432p).

Masters and Johnson became famous after the publication, in 1966, of Human Sexual Response, "their first book, based on more than 10 years of clinical research. It was a best seller, and it rattled the culture in much the same way the first Kinsey Report had in 1948."

Some of their later books though, adds Garner, were "increasingly ridiculed":

In Homosexuality in Perspective (1979), they claimed homosexuality could be cured - a claim that, with their names attached, is still trotted out by some social conservatives. In 1988 they published Crisis - Heterosexual Behavior in the Age of AIDS, a book that said the government was covering up the true extent of the AIDS problem. One critic called it 'a classic of the terror genre.'

If you go to The New York Times take a look at the Op-Ed pages. There is a piece by Lucian Truscott (The Real Mob at Stonewall) on his recollection of the riots which took place forty years ago. Truscott wrote an article in The Village Voice a few days after the event in 1969. His article, because of its tone which was "at times one of derision and insensitivity," infuriated the gay crowds, writes David Carter in The Stonewall Riots, and contributed to a resurgence of the rebellion. It seems Truscott has not changed a lot. He comes back to some of the controversies which in my opinion have been settled by Carter, and ends his paper, refering to Allen Ginsberg, with:

As I turned south on Lafayette Street, he waved and cried out, 'Defend the fairies!' His jolly farewell was obviously meant in jest, because after Stonewall, they didn't need defending any more.

Comments

[Mark Zamen]

The anti-gay attitudes conveyed by Masters and Johnson, and the fact that their work is cited by those who accept their viewpoints, are but further reminders that a large segment of society still regards gay men and women as second-class citizens - or worse. That is the salient point of my recently released biographical novel, Broken Saint. It is based on my forty-year friendship with a gay man, and chronicles his internal and external struggles as he battles for acceptance (of himself and by others). More information on the book is available at www.eloquentbooks.com/BrokenSaint.html.

Mark Zamen, author

[viagra online]

the homosexuality has change a lot these years