"The Homosexuals" is a 1967 episode of the documentary television series CBS Reports. The hour-long broadcast featured a discussion of a number of topics related to homosexuality and homosexuals. Mike Wallace anchored the episode, which aired on March 7, 1967. Although this was the first network documentary dealing with the topic of homosexuality, it was not the first televised in the United States. That was The Rejected, produced and aired in 1961 on KQED, a public television station out of San Francisco.Three years in the making, "The Homosexuals" went through two producers and multiple revisions. The episode included interviews with several gay men, psychiatrists, legal experts and cultural critics, interspersed with footage of a gay bar and a police sex sting. "The Homosexuals" garnered mixed critical respons. This is a recap version. The full documentary can be found here.
It’s weird how as we learn more things over time, some people like to cling to the previous misconceptions, and then as we learn even more, some things are proven wrong, some are confirmed, but people still cling. They understand now (as in the first bit of that video) that sexuality is determined sometime between conception and birth. Through experience - many of those experiences awful, they’ve figured out that it’s genetically ingrained, not a choice. Of course, some people are in a place on the scale where they find male and female equally attractive, where heterosexuals are attracted only to the opposite sex, and homosexuals only to the same sex. I’m not using the word gender on purpose because gender has become a very different animal - sticking with sex, because there are only two, people with penises and people with vaginas. Also not taking into account anomalies in sex, being transgender (not common, but more than rare) and people born with both (hermaphroditism, not as rare as we’re lead to believe, but still rare). No idea how many people are born without genitalia, but I’d imagine it’s very rare. I’m actually more interested in the regressive views, people who cling to ideas that have been debunked, who ignore evidence that puts their beliefs into question regardless of how concrete it is. There are many different places this happens, not just gender, and it’s terrifying for a lot of reasons.
It’s hard, almost impossible to make people change their mind, if they can justify their views with a “holy book”, even or especially when they just cherrypick from that book.
A book based on ideas that have been mostly debunked, much of it hundreds of years ago. Can you imagine if men were required to marry victims they raped? There’d be a shit ton of deformed white christians with 20 wives that hated them Oh... mormons?
