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Martin Hoffman, MD
San Francisco

JAMA. 1970;213(9):1495-1496.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.—

Readers of Charles Socarides' article, "Homosexuality and Medicine," may come away with the impression that it represents a view that all psychiatrists or all students of human sexuality hold to be correct. This is not the case. There are many statements in it which are highly questionable, and the overall tone of the paper is that of an editorial rather than a scientific discussion.

Socarides' central point is that "homosexuality is a form of mental illness... a dread dysfunction, malignant in character, which has risen to epidemiologic proportions." This view is not universally held by scholars in the field. Freud, for example, did not consider homosexuality an illness. In my own book on the subject (The Gay World: Male Homosexuality and the Social Creation of Evil, New York, Basic Books Inc, 1968), I argued at some length that this view is incorrect. It probably arises from the . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

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