Journal of Gay & Lesbian Mental Health
ISSN: 1935-9705 (Print) 1935-9713 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/wglm20
An Interview with George Weinberg, PhD Jack Drescher To cite this article: Jack Drescher (2016) An Interview with George Weinberg, PhD, Journal of Gay & Lesbian Mental Health, 20:1, 87-93, DOI: 10.1080/19359705.2015.1082417 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19359705.2015.1082417
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Date: 02 February 2016, At: 12:49
JOURNAL OF GAY & LESBIAN MENTAL HEALTH , VOL. , NO. , – http://dx.doi.org/./..
ORAL HISTORY SERIES
An interview with George Weinberg, PhD Jack Drescher, MD Editor Emeritus, Journal of Gay and Lesbian Mental Health, New York, NY, USA
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ABSTRACT
George Weinberg, PhD, is interviewed for the Oral History Series by Jack Drescher, MD, editor emeritus of the Journal of Gay and Lesbian Mental Health. Dr. Weinberg, a clinical psychologist in New York City, coined the term homophobia in his 1972 book Society and the Healthy Homosexual. He has been an activist and ally to the gay community for decades and in this interview, he describes his upbringing, education in poetry and psychology, and how he came to be involved with the gay rights movement. Dr. Weinberg has challenged some of the most prominent anti-gay voices of his day, including Irwin Bieber and Charles Socarides. He has been a friend and supporter of some of the community’s most important activists, including Barbara Gittings and Frank Kameny.
George Weinberg, PhD
George Weinberg, PhD, a practicing psychotherapist in NYC, has been an activist for gay causes for half a century. He is best known for identifying the anti-homosexual prejudice of homophobia and naming it. His concept and his 1972 book Society and the Healthy Homosexual offered an alternative to the then-prevailing view that homosexuals, rather than those who fear or hate them, have the psychological problem. His concept served as a springboard to bring about changes in the mental health professions’ view of gays, society’s view of gays, and gay people’s view of themselves. Dr. Weinberg holds an M.A. in English literature from New York University, a doctorate in clinical psychology from Columbia University, and has done extensive graduate work in mathematics at the Courant Institute. He has written diversely for popular magazines such as Glamour, Cosmopolitan, and TV Guide and for technical journals such as Psychometrika. His 13 books include self-help books (Self Creation), a best-selling statistics text (Statistics: An Intuitive Approach), fiction (Numberland, The Taboo Scarf), and a book on William Shakespeare (Will Power). Dr. Weinberg consented to an interview at his Central Park West office in New York City in June of 2013.
CONTACT Jack Drescher, MD © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
[email protected]
West Street, #A, New York, NY USA
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Journal of gay and lesbian mental health (JGLMH)
Tell us something about yourself about, where you grew up, and about your education.
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George Weinberg
I grew up in New York City. I didn’t know my father. He took off when I was very young. I met him much later when he came around to borrow money. My mother was a very hard-working typist/secretary with only a seventh grade education, and ended up being a speechwriter. So I’m proud of her. I was emotionally disturbed as a kid. Public School 173 said, “You’ve got to get out. Too disruptive.” So I went to a school that was supposed to be known as a special school for disturbed children. We were supposed to say “special school” but I always threw in “the disturbed children.” It always got a laugh, and it didn’t affect anything in my life. So that was my first experience with coming out about something. I went to a private school where they worked with me very closely, and I went to perhaps a dozen psychologists and psychiatrists. My mother was good. I didn’t feel like an outsider. But I did very badly in school in everything except math and English. I somehow couldn’t concentrate on anything else. I went to Dewitt Clinton High School, a huge school with two shifts and thousands of kids in each shift, and then I went to City College because money was tough. I did badly in all of those schools, except in math. I got lousy grades in English, but I knew a lot of poetry and loved it. I loved memorizing lines and stanzas. It was in City College, as a lover of poetry, that I first met gay men. Except in those days, homosexuals were not called “gay”—it was not even in the language, except in the phrase “gay bar.” None of them told me they were “homosexual.” I would invite friends to spend evenings with me and girls. I’d say, “I’ve got a great girl for you, Nelson.” And he would say, “I’m busy tonight.” Years later, I would learn how these friends were being bludgeoned by society and terrified. At one point when I was in college, I got a letter from one of my gay friends who had been put in a mental hospital for being “homosexual.” I realized that this was a nightmare scenario for them and, ergo, for me as someone close to them. And I’ve always been oppositional. I’ve always subscribed to Nietzsche’s line, “Society is advanced by those who oppose it.” As a result of my mother’s boss running for mayor of New York, I got into Columbia graduate school in psychology. I went in there terrified that I wasn’t up to the people who earned their way in. But there was great emphasis on statistics, and that’s where I was really gifted and educated. Math was my thing, and soon everyone, including professors, were coming to me for help in designing experiments and interpreting results. After my doctorate, I went into private practice. This was in the 1960s. After graduate school in psychology, I began to go for a Ph.D. in mathematics, but it was incredibly isolating. You sat in a room and did problems. I would have
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done pretty well, but I didn’t pursue that. I didn’t have the great gift that I thought I had, and I immediately missed the interactions with people. I had seen a lot of brutality toward gays and I was starting to see friends—mostly men—but one or two women, confessing to me painfully that they were “homosexual.” One of them asked me to drive her six miles away to a secluded spot, and then she practically whispered that she was a lesbian. I came to realize what gay men and women had gone through. The gay issue tormented me, not only because I was making gay friends who were suffering hideous, marginal lives, and the police weren’t doing anything to help them, but also because I was learning that many of my heroes throughout history had been gay. I thought about Houseman, Shakespeare, probably Jonathan Swift. I didn’t yet know about Newton. So many of these people had to have lived fearful, guarded lives. I think my having been labeled “disturbed” in my own childhood had greatly increased my sympathy and understanding. The minute someone was called “disturbed” or “abnormal;” it became fascinating to me because it meant that this person was being marginalized. In those days, there were literally no psychotherapists who were out as gay in the United States. Of course, every town might have had someone who was known as gay, but that was different from professing to be gay. The activists that I knew—and others like them—were the only ones who were aggressively out. I even tried to get a therapist friend of mine to go to the first gay march. He finally went with me to Sheep’s Meadow, where the parade ended up. A world famous therapist—I thought he was going to pass out. All those people coming up to me saying “Let me give you a hug.” I thought he was going to die. And I was having a hell of a good time. So in 1965 I decided to go to a convention of about 50 homophiles in New York City, a conclave called “The Eastern Homophile Movement.” They had a meeting at the Barbizon Hotel. I heard about it and ended up inviting a lot of the participants to stay at my home for the week. I lived on Madison Avenue, not far from the hotel. I got to meet a bunch of gay activists—Frank Kameny, Barbara Gittings,1 Jack Nichols,2 a half a dozen others—people who were very courageous and very outspoken and very articulate and very loving. I remained friends with most of them for decades. An incident involving Frank Kameny—probably the most educated and influential gay activist ever —stays in my mind. He was in Washington trying to secure the right to assemble for gays. At a hearing, a senator asked him, “Is it true that you have an underground of 50,000 people communicating every day about what we’re doing and the outcome of this hearing?” Actually, at that time, the total of those who were interested in gay rights—or who felt safe enough to show that interest—was roughly 50. But Frank answered, “We hope to, sir.” He inspired me as a man. So I found myself very involved in the movement and speaking at the Barbizon. The speech went over really well but there were other people speaking. Among the speakers were some strong adversaries of gays. Irving Bieber3 was one whom I remember.
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How much contact did you have with people like Bieber and [Charles] Socarides4 over the years? GW
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I had a ton. I had so much contact with Socarides over the years that we could have been married. I debated with him, chided him, kidded him until he said, “I’m not going on the air with this guy.” Socarides told my friend C.A. Tripp,5 who was kind of a formal guy, “I’ll debate with you on the air Dr. Tripp, but not with that screaming faggot, George Weinberg.” Tripp answered him, “How many mistakes can you make in one sentence?” That’s how shaken Socarides was by me. We had a lot of fun. JGLMH
Maybe you had fun... [laughter]. Talk about “homophobia.” GW
I came to invent the word “homophobia” and to define it, in a curious way. Tripp was a Kinsey researcher, and at the time Kinsey was doing his volume on homosexuality and the law. He told Tripp, “I have a brilliant lawyer I’d like to get on board, but I don’t know how he feels about homosexuals.” He asked Tripp to spend two days with the lawyer at Kinsey’s home in Bloomington, Indiana, and then for Tripp to invite his partner, Ollie, to join them. Kinsey’s plan was that the man would get to like Tripp, come to accept Tripp’s homosexuality, and thus become comfortable with homosexuality generally. It worked perfectly. I decided to try taking the same approach with some psychotherapist friends of mine. They too liked Tripp and another gay friend of mine when they met them. They knew I was hetero, and I initially ducked their questions about my gay friends’ private lives, until the time was right. They all liked my gay friends immensely and asked to see them more. But when I actually told them directly that Tripp and my other friend were gay, the psychotherapists became uncomfortable almost to the point of panic. They suddenly found a hundred faults with my gay friends that they had never found before. It was clearly a phobia on their part—a morbid, irrational dread. The idea of homosexuality implied to them that my friends shouldn’t be trusted and shouldn’t be allowed around children—and that they were bad for me to know. These therapists—and there were at least a half dozen of them—were terrifyingly unmoved when I recited the brutalities against gays that all of us in the field knew about. After that, I started using the word homophobia everywhere I could. I used it in speeches. I got my friend, Al Goldstein, to start using it in the underground press. I wrote regularly for the newspaper, Gay, which was sold on the newsstands. I got
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a researcher, Ken Smith, to study the phenomenon, and my book, Society and the Healthy Homosexual, got immense publicity. I asked Frank Kameny, “What’s the best way to get the idea [of homophobia] around?” He said, “Placards, posters—everywhere posters.” So I had the cover of my book copied onto posters. I gave them to gay groups around the country. The Denver Gay Alliance made the most of them. People liked the words, “healthy homosexual.” And the posters put the word “homophobia” everywhere. I used the word “homophobia” in the U.K and France.
JGLMH
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In fact, the word “homophobia” has gained international usage. Do you ever feel that sometimes the word is over-used?
GW
Absolutely. But everything is sometimes “oversaid or undersung,” as the bisexual Edna St. Vincent Millay put it.
JGLMH
How do you think writing about and talking about homophobia and homosexuality played itself out in the early years and in the later years of your professional life?
GW
Interesting question. When I wrote Society and the Healthy Homosexual, people said, “Your practice is shot. You’ve ruined your life.” “You’re saying all this. Why? You don’t have to say this.”
JGLMH
You were warned there would be consequences. Were there any actual consequences?
GW
None. I toured the country debating with people. When I got back, on my answering machine tape, I would have ten new people who wanted to come to work with me. I couldn’t have had a greater flow of people wanting to come to me. I got a bevy of letters, most of them thanking me, and a few threatening to kill me.
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We are doing this interview the day after the Supreme Court found the Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional and refused to hear the overturning of Proposition 8 in California. GW
There’s much to celebrate. One can always say, “Yes, but there’s a lot still to be done.” But we should not avoid celebrating success. JGLMH
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Anything else you want to say? GW
It isn’t whether you are loved, but whether you feel worthy of being loved that counts. And if you feel worthy, and if you feel the world ought to respond to you, you’re way ahead. Notes 1. Franklin E. Kameny, PhD (1925–2011) and Barbara Gittings (1932–2007) were among several major gay and lesbian activists responsible for persuading the American Psychiatric Association (APA) to remove homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). See Bayer, R. (1981). Homosexuality and American psychiatry: The politics of diagnosis. New York, NY: Basic Books; Drescher, J., & Merlino, J.P. (Eds.). (2007). American psychiatry and homosexuality: An oral history. New York, NY: Haworth Press; Gittings, B. (2008). Show and tell. Journal of Gay and Lesbian Mental Health, 12(3), 289–294; Kameny, F. (2009). How it all started. Journal of Gay & Lesbian Mental Health, 13(2), 76–81; and Scasta, D.L. (2002). John E. Fryer, MD, and the Dr. H. Anonymous episode. Journal of Gay & Lesbian Psychotherapy, 6(4), 73–84. In recognition of their contributions, Kameny and Gittings were the first recipients of the APA and the Association of Gay and Lesbian Psychiatrists’ John E. Fryer Award in 2006. 2. Jack Nichols (1938-2005) co-founded the Washington, D.C., branch of the Mattachine Society, a homophile group, in 1961 with Frank Kameny. He led the first gay rights march on the White House in 1965 and was among the activists who prevailed upon APA to reconsider the placement of homosexuality in the DSM. 3. Irving Bieber, MD (1909-1991) was a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and lead author of a study published in 1962 that purported to cure homosexual men with psychoanalysis (Bieber, I., Dain, H.J., Dince, P.R., Drellich, M.G., Grand, H.G., Gundlach, R.H., … Bieber T.B. (1962). Homosexuality: A psychoanalytic study. New York, NY: Basic Books.). Those findings were never replicated and when challenged by C.A. Tripp to do so, he was unable to produce any of the cases claimed as successes (Tripp, C.A. (1975). The homosexual matrix. New York, NY: Meridian). 4. Charles Socarides, MD (1922-2005) was a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and author of many books and articles characterizing homosexuality as a form of psychopathology (Socarides,
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C.W. (1995). Homosexuality: A freedom too far. Phoenix, AZ: Adam Margrave Books). He was a co-founder of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), an organization whose members actively oppose full gay civil rights. 5. Clarence A. Tripp, PhD (1919-2003) was a gay psychologist, writer, and researcher who worked with Kinsey.
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Books by George Weinberg Society and the healthy homosexual. (1983). New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press. (original work published 1972) The action approach. (1974). New York, NY: St. Martin’s Griffin. Self creation. (1978). New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press. The pliant animal: Understanding the greatest human asset. (1981). New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press. Statistics: An intuitive approach. (1981). Belmont, CA: Brook’s/Cole. The heart of psychotherapy: A journey into the mind and office of a therapist at work. (1996). New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press. (original work published 1984) Numberland. (1987). New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press. The taboo scarf. (1990). New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press. Shakespeare on love. (1991). New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press. Nearer to the heart’s desire. (1992). New York, NY: Grove/Atlantic Press. Invisible masters: Compulsions and the fear that drives them. (1993). New York, NY: Grove/Atlantic Press. Why men won’t commit: Getting what you both want without playing games. (2003). New York, NY: Atria Books.
Collaborations with Dianne Rowe The projection principle. (1988). New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press. Will power! Using Shakespeare’s insights to transform your life. (1996). New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press.
