"Incurables didn't pay attention to these women at all. If they made advances they turned away with disgust ....The ones who were to be discharged were once more given the possibility for homosexual relations but they refused the advances of the genuine homosexuals. There were, however, borderline cases who used both opportunities. Whether or not one can call them bisexual I can't judge. To be able to observe the life and habits of the homosexuals of all varieties, in connection with their incarceration, was highly informative for me."


While I, obviously, do not approve of the methods used by the Nazis to effect this change in sexual behavior it is nevertheless clear that some homosexual individuals can be motivated to abandon this "lifestyle." I sent the Höss information in a letter to the professor but he was apparently to busy to respond and seemed to follow the rule: My mind is made up, don't bother me with facts.

As mentioned earlier, like most everything else which involves human behavior there are gradations in the expression of a given trait and to deny those can only serve political purposes rather than lead to an understanding of the underlying condition. Numbers translate into votes and this is all that counts, never mind the facts. This attitude has also led to the medical absurdity that HIV-AIDS which is for all practical purposes, in this country, a preventable disease by simply abstaining from unhealthy practices, is actually the only politically protected infectious disease for which a cure must be found immediately. Since research money is limited this stance comes at the cost of removing valuable financial resources from other truly unavoidable and more common illnesses. Currently the AIDS epidemic in Africa is receiving a great deal of attention and the solution is also to be billions of dollars for research. But even in Africa the epidemic is caused by promiscuous sexual behavior. The plague could be eradicated worldwide by abstention from homosexual practices, by engaging in heterosexual intercourse with one partner only, and avoidance of intravenous illicit drug use. In contrast to nearly all other diseases AIDS (with few exceptions e.g. children of infected mothers, or recipients of tainted blood transfusions) is self-inflicted and preventable by adhering to a healthy life-style.

These verities are, of course, highly unpopular. Therefore, an attitude is fostered by the political and media establishments where even the use of the term homosexual is frowned upon and the word "gay" has been substituted. This is truly a perversion of language. Hardly any one of us, regardless of sexual orientation, is gay in the true meaning of the word for any length of time. Life has too many vicissitudes to allow us "gaiety" for more than short periods. To dignify sexual practices, which involve acts that are distasteful to the majority of people in our culture, with this euphemism is unconscionable. Homosexual activists may call themselves whatever they want but the much larger non-homosexual community should not be swayed by this misuse of language and call the behavior by its proper name.

Nevertheless even here a caveat is in order. To label somebody " a homosexual" as if this were the "be all and end all "of the individual's life, is just as uncalled for as using other potentially pejorative terms without some qualification. For instance, when I started my professional neurologic career it was common practice to talk about "the epileptic" or "the schizophrenic." I abolished these terms from my personal vocabulary because they are adjectives and should not be used as nouns. Instead I talked and wrote about patients (by the way, even this term has lost its meaning, because nowadays physicians, just like lawyers, tend to have "clients") with epilepsy or schizophrenia, or whatever the condition was. This retains the personhood of the individual and allows for a change in the condition, which can and does occur at times. I had to disagree with one of my professors early on whose favorite dictum was "once an epileptic always an epileptic." The statement was not only pejorative but simply factually wrong. I am glad indeed that my terminology, which was news in the fifties and sixties, has now been generally adopted by my colleagues.

This brings me to one of the major pitfalls in the thought processes of the human race and is clearly illustrated by the two mentioned newspaper articles. It is the inappropriate use of the "all or nothing," principle as it is called in neurophysiology. The law refers to the propagation of the electrical activity in a nerve. Once an impulse is strong enough to be propagated, the size of the response, and the speed of its conduction will be independent of the intensity of the original stimulus. Once fired up the nerve gives its all. This is how the peripheral nervous system works. But we also have a central nervous system which allows us to give graded responses before we put our nerves into action. In the present context for Mr. Thomas there are apparently only monolithic Palestinians who have to be expelled and for the professor of educational psychology there are only homosexuals who are incapable of changing. This is the same type of thinking which declared "the Jews" enemies of the German people, and which condemned "the Germans" as "the Nazis" when in fact only a small subgroup in these categories had engaged in undesirable or even outright criminal activities. Unless we stop thinking in terms of classes of people and hold only individuals responsible for their actions there will be no end to hatred in this world with concomitant injustices.