CHAPTER 29. THE PRO-HOMOSEXUAL ACADEMY
Three weeks after joining the party, I became a member of the Gay Student Alliance board. Even now, it seems audacious to me; something like throwing stones when just arrived.
Richard, my shrink, represented a new trend in North American psychiatry. The discipline would be confronted by a series of investigations that questioned the thesis that homosexuality was a disease.
One of the disciplines that would contribute significantly was anthropology. Functionalists, such as Bronislaw Malinowski and Margaret Mead, found evidence in their studies of “primitive” societies, such as the Trobriand tribe or Samoa, of institutionalized homosexual practices that pointed to the particularity of Western rejection. These anthropologists defended the theory of cultural relativism, i.e. that each society has different values and that in many, homosexuality was accepted.
American zoologist Alfred C. Kinsey conducted the first study on sexual practices in 1948. What surprised this zoologist, and all-American society, was the incidence of homosexuality: “50% of men are not exclusively heterosexual during their adult “life”.