ABSTRACT
Homosexuality was seen as particularly threatening to the post-war cult of the family and domesticity. Catholic pronouncements on homosexuality provoked violent debate in the post-war world. In the context of the Cold War, attitudes towards homosexuality were, in Andrew Hodges's view, to recreate 'the highly traditional equation between sodomy, heresy and treachery'. A bridge with more radical discourse came in a study of homosexuals by Michel Bon and Antoine D'Arc, psychiatrists, themselves homosexual, and so were able to speak from the inside, in contrast to the majority of earlier, psychiatric, commentators on homosexuality. They believed that because of the Oedipus and the castration complexes, there were always a homosexual minority, but they conjured up a vision of non-repressive society, along Fourierist lines, where this minority 'were accepted as such by society and lived in open expression of its homosexuality in a balanced but not distressed way. For the radicals, this remained too much of a compromise position.
