ABSTRACT
Covert homosexuals are persons who are well aware of an erotic interest in members of their own sex, but keep their thoughts to themselves, and don’t put their ideas into practice. In a survey among male students at Cornell University, Braaten and Darling [40] found that covert homosexuals were almost as numerous as the overt types, but they tended to be more seclusive, socially introverted, prone to day-dreaming and to complaints of shyness—in a word more generally inhibited. One can imagine the inhibiting process going a stage further and ending in conscious denial of homosexual feelings, in spite of continued indications of active homosexual drives in the individual’s choice of companions and friendships. An unstable state of incompletely repressed homosexuality has been held responsible for much neurotic illness. The affected person experiences considerable anxiety and tension in situations that threaten to evoke his unacceptable homosexual feelings. Psycho-analysts have suggested that men who evince extremely emotional attitues towards homosexual offenders, advocating castration or the gas chamber, are really compensating for their own insecurity by rooting out the evil in others. Some repressed homosexuals, if placed in a situation in which they can no longer deny homosexual thoughts, break out into a feverish panic amounting almost to temporary manic insanity. This condition, called homosexual panic or Kempf’s Disease, is well recognized in American text-books of psychiatry [192]. It explains some of those curious episodes in which a young man who has been solicited, or perhaps allowed himself to be seduced, by an older homosexual, will suddenly turn upon the older 217man in a fit of murderous rage. He will say afterwards that he was overcome by disgust or revulsion, but the irrational fury of such attacks, in utter disregard of the consequences, reveals how deeply disturbed the assailant must have been at the time. The American psychiatrist A. J. Rosanoff [317], who was particularly interested in the various reactions a person might have on becoming aware of his own homosexual tendencies, believed that panic flight from homosexuality could lead to suicide, alcoholism, drug addiction and even madness. [48]
