*Men and Cupid: A Reassessment of Homosexuality and of Me...

*Men and Cupid: A Reassessment of Homosexuality and of Men's Sexual Life in General by Harold Martin (The Fortune Press, 1965)

 

This book, as its subtitle suggests, is an exploration of and explanation for (male) homosexuality written by an apparently crackpot layman and published during the interval between which the Wolfeden Report was submitted (1957) and its recommendations legally adopted (1967).

Martin proposes there are two distinct types of homosexuality: contingent/optional and positive/independent.  The first includes men who seek sexual relief with other men only because sexual intercourse with a woman is not possible.  The second includes men who have sex with men because they are physically disgusted by women and are naturally attracted to men.  (He also proposes a third category, a sort of combination of the two: heterosexual men whose long-term exposure to their wives renders them impotent from lack of desire and who then turn to sex with men because it is novel and therefore stimulating.)  

Martin does argue that homosexuality is not a disease and cannot be cured, that it is (in the second instance) an innate quality that can be found in any man, disregarding physical attributes and gender-stereotypical appearance.  (He informs that although he is undoubtedly heterosexual, he has a slight, feminine build and a voice that is often mistaken as a woman's on the telephone.)  That is all well and good, but beyond that Martin proposes several theories that are rather absurd.  He posits that there is a natural difference between genders that feminism wishes to negate, resulting in dominate women who are also by virtue of their smaller stature and  softer bodies, incapable of become real adults (like men) but remain illogical, petulant, and selfish children all their lives.  (One wonders about his poor wife, and their "happpy" marriage.)  Because these childlike attributes of women are physically innate, the goals of feminism are doomed and dangerous.  So this is why homosexuality is much more prevalent  in the Western (European) world, where women are not properly subjugated as the inferior creatures they are.

Martin also suggests that Western Christian religion makes sex tabu and that men can not engage in it, especially during their sexual prime (late teens) when they are not yet married.  The preponderance of men with enlarged prostates in the Western world is evidence of this: in other cultures men are sexually active throughout their lives and their prostates are regularly emptied (he doesn't consider how masturbation fits into all of this--he appears to think that if men feel  guilty about having sex, the idea of masturbation is simply too devastating to even contemplate).  Therefore, all Western men become celibates with enlarge prostates.

His theories of the innate physical and mental immaturity of women and the cultural scourge of prostatitis don't seem to have much bearing on his theories of homosexuality, but most of the book, and by far the most passionately argued passages, concern these two irrelevant subjects.