Read today, the report sounds very dated. Clearly, in the 36 intervening years, much has changed in our understanding of sexual orientation. In fact, much has changed in our understanding of human nature in general. In 1964, the behavioural school that came out of B F Skinner's theories still reigned supreme. Put crudely, people thought that humans were like blank pages, and it was through experiences, good and bad, that they became the kinds of persons they were.

This was reinforced by the fact that at that time, the only people interested in the question of homosexuality were psychologists and psychiatrists, so naturally, they sought answers to their questions in the realm of psychology. The LIFE article saw them talking about adolescent experiences, suffocating mothers and distant fathers.

It was only decades later that the possibility of genetic or organic causes were explored seriously by scientists, and their findings have changed our understanding of homosexuality greatly since the LIFE magazine story was published. Yet, in this magazine, there were already hints that the "why" lay beyond psychological experiences, in the realm of biology. But it was only suspicion. At the time, no one had any good evidence.

The sad thing of course, is that much of the hogwash we read below, current knowledge for 1964, is still accepted by broad swathes of society in Singapore today. These psychological explanations -- that homosexuality is the outcome of bad upbringing or bad influences, or some kind of arrested development -- are also convenient, in that they don't threaten the presumption that homosexuality is moral deviance and repugnant, antisocial behaviour. Any other explanation for homosexuality that does not hinge on bad life experiences cannot support a view that homosexuality is bad or ill. A purely biological explanation cannot support a moral judgment. But some people want to make a moral judgment (the joy of indulging in prejudice, remember?); they will find it hard to accept biological explanations.

Anyway, let's see what the article had to say.

The lot of the homosexual … is often furtive, hazardous and lonely. Many homosexuals have gone to psychiatrists begging desperately for help in escaping from a life that they had decided was utterly intolerable.

A little further on,

Says Dr. Paul Gebhard, successor to the late Dr Alfred Kinsey as director of the Institute for Sex Research: "Almost nobody chooses to become a homosexual. More than nine times out of ten, a man becomes a homosexual for the sole and simple reason that he cannot help it."

You see how even a relatively enlightened sentence such as this one sounds today? Terrible. I would never say "a man becomes a homosexual". People don't. Some people just simply are homosexual. There is no threshold, beyond which a "normal" person turns into ("becomes") a homosexual person.

Paedophilia rears its ugly head early on in the article, reflecting, I guess, the way people make top-of-mind associations between homosexuality and paedophilia.

There are, of course, some homosexuals who specialize in seducing young boys. But they are decidedly a minority group: they are the least homosexual of all homosexuals, less active than the others and far more likely to be married… [They] tend to be lone wolves who stay away from the gay society and indeed would be shunned by it. The boys they seduce are seldom lured into the homosexual life, at least not for long.

I am sure many people still do not know this, today. Worse yet, they still won't accept this observation even if they were told so.

Did you find the construction "they are the least homosexual of all homosexuals" strange? I did, and didn't immediately understand what it was saying. Then I realised that the writer saw homosexuality as sexual acts, not as orientation. He was saying that boy-paedophiles rarely engaged in adult homosex. It's such an outmoded idea to see homosexuality as merely sexual activity!

What did they think the causes of homosexuality were, way back then?

If almost nobody becomes a homosexual by choice, what then accounts for homosexuality?

Part of the answer seems to lie in the fact that all mammals, human beings included, are born with an innate capacity to respond to almost any kind of sexual stimulus. Zoologists observe homosexual behaviour in nearly every species of animal; anthropologists find it in human societies in New York City to the South Seas, and historians find records of it in the civilizations of the past. (Among the noted confirmed homosexuals of history have been Plato, Michaelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and probably Alexander the Great.)

The 1948 Kinsey report was mentioned. According to it,

… nearly half of all boys engage in some kind of homosexual play before they reach adolescence; even after adolescence slightly more than a third of them have at least one homosexual experience at some time in their lives.

Then the scientists step in with their explanations that presume homosexuality as some kind of consolation prize, if a guy can't get a girl.

Dr. Gebhard and his present associates at the Institute for Sex Research believe that, given mankind's innate nature and our present social customs and moral codes, this is only to be expected. Boys become sexually mature -- and indeed reach the very height of their sexual capacity and interest -- in their adolescent years. They are discouraged from making any outright sexual overtures to girls, and as a matter of fact few girls that age are interested in sex anyway. On the other hand, boys are thrown together intimately on athletic teams, in boarding schools and in summer camps.

Few girls that age are interested in sex? That statement alone tells you how far off the mark the whole theory is. You'd notice however that this theory is still extant. People still blame single-sex schools as breeding grounds for homosexuality!

More vacuity:

The adolescent has to repress his burning sex drive toward girls, but has considerable opportunity and temptation to turn it into homosexual channels… Numerous studies have shown that boys who mature earliest and have the strongest sexual drives and capacities are the likeliest to experiment with homosexuality and to adopt it as a way of life.

We know today that most gay men knew they were gay even when they were teens. They didn't have to repress their interest in girls and turn their attention to other boys; they never had any interest in girls to repress.

And the article keeps on talking about homosexuality as a behaviour change:

Yet homosexual experience, like a vaccination, may take or may not. Some boys seem to be so susceptible that a single experience sets them in a life time pattern. Others engage in considerable experimentation yet never really take up the homosexual way of life.

One could say the same of men who try to go straight, get married, have kids and so on. For years. Then one day, they still decide, enough is enough, and they throw all pretense away and "go gay". What does that tell you about sexual orientation? It has nothing to do with experience or "experimentation"! Once or however many times!

But over and beyond the influences of happenstance and society, says Dr. Gebhard, there seems to be little question that some boys are predisposed to homosexuality. All medical and psychiatric authorities agree.

Our great-grandfathers, when they dared think about the problem at all, believed that homosexuality was inherited: some men were just born "queer," with a woman's disposition in a man's body; they constituted a "third sex" which was an aberration of nature. This view was based largely on the mistaken notion, still held by many people, that all homosexuals have effeminate, "swishy" manners and would like nothing better, if only they could get away with it, than to dress like women, pluck their eyebrows and use lipstick. In actual fact, there are many effeminate men who are not homosexual at all -- and indeed the Institute for Sex Research has even found that some transvestites, men who like to dress in women's clothes, are happily married and lead perfectly normal sex lives. On the other hand, says the Institute, fully 85% or more of homosexuals, look and act very much like other men and cannot be spotted for certain even by the experts. Often the only signs are a very subtle tendency to over-meticulous grooming, plus the failure to cast the ordinary man's customary admiring glance at every pretty girl who walks by.

Modern tests of physical characteristics and glandular secretions have shown no recognizable differences between homosexuals and other men, yet our great-grandfathers may have been partly right at that. Franz Kallman, a German analyst, once managed to find 40 men, all homosexuals, who had identical twin brothers. In every case, the twin also turned out to be a homosexual, even though the brothers had never confided to each other and had sometimes grown up apart from each other …

Then a sudden turn in the weather:

The psychoanalysts, who have observed and treated many homosexual patients over the years, believe that homosexuality represents a form of arrested development.

After some discussion about Freud's theories, about how a child may want to grow up exactly like his mother, or, in case that idea won't sell, there is a diagonally opposite idea: how he is so frightened of his feelings for his mother, he remains afraid of women all his life …

Freud thought that the tendencies toward arrested development were inborn: some boys simply had less psychological drive than others, or were by nature "passive" and inclined to identify with the feminine -- rather than "active" and inclined to identify with the masculine. But ever since the 1962 publication of a famous study headed by Dr. Irving Bieber, modern analysts have put the blame less on heredity than on childhood experiences.

Dr. Bieber and his research committee, studying the case histories of 106 homosexuals who had been treated by members of the Society of Medical Psychoanalysts, found that a remarkable proportion of them had been reared by mothers who babied them all through their childhoods. Typically, the homosexual's mother regarded him as her favorite, her pride and joy, who must be protected at all costs from the hazards of growing up. She discouraged him from forming friendships with other boys… and jealously protected him from any girls who might show an interest….

… Even with such a mother, Dr Bieber says, a boy can grow up to normal adulthood if he has a warm affectionate father to set an example of masculinity and counteract the mother's influence. But the typical father of the homosexual, far from liking and supporting his son, turned out to be totally uninterested in the boy or actively hostile. Often the father was jealous and given to disparagement and ridicule. They boy feared his father and often intensely hated him. Babied and demasculinized by his mother, despised by his father, he arrived at adolescence "beset by feelings of inadequacy, impotence and self-contempt" -- and was an eager recruit to the "less threatening atmosphere" of the homosexual world.

Just in case any reader is taken in by the above explanations, let me point out a more likely explanation for the reactions of the parents in such situations. The arrow of causation is more likely to be the other way around. The parents' behaviour don't make the child homosexual. The homosexual child induces this kind of response by his parents. The child does not have to be out and proud. No one may even suspect (yet) that the boy is homosexual, but there is mounting evidence that latently-homosexual boys behave differently, have different interests in their childhood compared to heterosexual boys. A mother may sense this subliminally and may find her latently-homosexual son more accessible emotionally, or just simply cleaner, compared to other boys. It will hardly be a surprise if she treats him as her favorite. A heterosexual father on the other hand, may have a hard time adjusting to the disappointment that his son does not share his interests, e.g. football, and he may react by becoming distant from the boy.

In 1964, when people framed homosexuality as something that one "became", it was impossible for people to conceive of this explanation. How could children be homosexual? If people were said to become homosexual only after puberty (and through bad experience or seduction), the arrow of causation had to be adults to children, not children to adults. Unfortunately, the old theory still sticks around and causes many parents to blame themselves.

In Dr. Bieber's view, of course, homosexuals are psychologically sick: the emotionally disturbed offspring of emotionally disturbed parents….

Most of the speculation about the mental state of homosexuals, however, comes from therapists who have treated homosexual patients -- and thus involves the possibility of a built-in bias which worries some of the experts. One skeptic, Analyst Ernest van den Haag, was once told by a colleague, "All my homosexual patients, you know, are quite sick." "Ah, yes," said Dr. van den Haag, "but so are all my heterosexual patients."

Seeking information about the great majority of homosexuals who have never visited a therapist, a Los Angeles psychologist named Dr. Evelyn Hooker once managed to find 30 such men, then matched them as nearly as she could, by age, intelligence and education, with 30 other men. She gave both groups a series of personality tests and submitted the results to a panel of trained scorers -- who could find no significant differences between the two groups. This may only prove that personality tests are unreliable, as many scientists suspect, or it may indicate that homosexuals can be just as healthy as anybody else.

I wonder if the above is news to anybody today. Are there people who still think homosexuality is a personality disorder?

Freud did not believe that homosexuals were necessarily sick; in a famous letter to a mother of a homosexual who had asked him for help, he wrote, "Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness."

The LIFE report then speculates about the prevalence of homosexuality in the population.

How many homosexuals are there in America? Nobody can say for sure. The closest thing to a census was the 1948 Kinsey report, which was based on interviews with 5,000 men. Kinsey estimated that four men in 100 are exclusively homosexual all their adult lives.…

Dr. Bieber believes that the number of confirmed homosexuals is closer to 2% ….

There are also women homosexuals, of course, but the number is much smaller -- by the estimate of the Institute of Sex Research, perhaps only a third or a quarter as high as the figure for men. One reason, some analysts have suggested, is that it is far easier for a woman who is afraid of men to perform adequately in marriage than it is for a man who is afraid of women.

Lesbianism, like male homosexuality, is seen as a sexual act. If you don't do it, you're not one. Notice also how homosexuality, whether the male or female kind, is phrased as being "afraid" of the opposite sex!

Can society do anything about homosexuality? Not a great deal. Freud felt that most homosexuals could not be changed even through prolonged psychoanalysis. Dr. Bieber's attitude is considerably more optimistic; he found that 27% of the homosexuals in his study led normal sex lives after analysis. But even 27% is a low figure, and it would be impossible for provide analysis for all the homosexuals in the U.S. anyway.

This is all history now. Psychology professionals in the U.S. and other western countries today do not consider homosexuality to be a condition that requires therapy. "Conversion therapy" , which some fringe religious groups still promote, has been found to be akin to stalinist brain-washing.

The laws against homosexual acts have certainly not stopped the confirmed practitioners. As Dr. Gebhard and many others have pointed out, sexual behaviour is one of the most compulsive of all human traits, and the man who is in the grip of homosexuality is likely to practise it regardless of the risks or penalties.

"In the grip of homosexuality"? Ah, the language of the times!

Law officials and psychiatrists who have tried to make international comparisons do not believe that homosexuality is any more widespread in places like France, the Netherlands and Sweden, where it is not punishable under the law, than in other nations like ours where it is considered a crime.

Most people who have studied homosexuality believe that the laws against it are what Freud once called them, "a great injustice" and "cruelty" -- unjustly penalizing the few who are unlucky enough to be caught. Indeed some observers think that the legal penalties and social stigma which threaten the homosexual's life may cause him more emotional disturbance than homosexuality itself….

What a refreshing, modern statement from 1964! But it was too good to last, for immediately afterwards, the report backpaddled:

But certainly society's powerful disapproval, if not necessarily the law's, serves to deter at least some young men who are wavering between the two worlds.

There we go, back to seeing homosexuality as choice!