Growing Up Straight (1968 book)

Growing Up Straight: What Every Thoughtful Parent Should Know About Homosexuality
Cover
Authors Peter and Barbara Wyden
Country United States
Language English
Subjects Homosexuality
Parenting
Publisher Stein and Day
Publication date
 1968
Media type Print (Hardcover and Paperback)
Pages 265
ISBN 978-0812810721

Growing Up Straight: What Every Thoughtful Parent Should Know About Homosexuality is a 1968 guide for parents, by Peter and Barbara Wyden, on how to prevent their children from becoming homosexual.[1]

Summary

The Wydens offer advice for parents on how to prevent their children from becoming homosexual.[1] A popularization of the psychoanalyst Irving Bieber's theories about homosexuality, their book contains an introduction by Stanley Yolles, then director of the National Institute of Mental Health, which concludes, "with broadened parental understanding and more scientific research, hopefully the chances that anyone's child will become a victim of homosexuality will eventually decrease."[2]

Reception

Journals

James Colton reviewed Growing Up Straight negatively in Tangents. He ridiculed the Wydens' advice on how to prevent homosexuality, and accused them of making contradictory and inconsistent claims and of citing experts such as Evelyn Hooker and Judd Marmor only when it served their purposes to do so.[3]

Evaluations in books

The gay rights activist Dennis Altman, writing in Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation (1971), compared Growing Up Straight to the journalist and social critic Vance Packard's The Sexual Wilderness, Patricia Sexton's The Feminized Male, and Hendrik Ruitenbeek's The Male Myth, describing them as part of a trend to attack the collapse of American masculinity and femininity and connect it to "an alleged growth in homosexuality." He wrote that the book, "makes very explicit the connection between the fear of a declining sex role dichotomy and increased homosexuality; mothers and fathers are counseled to act out all those she-woman and he-man stereotypes as a model for their growing children."[4]

The neuroscientist Simon LeVay, writing in Queer Science (1996), described Growing Up Straight as an example of psychoanalytic ideas influencing general attitudes toward homosexuality.[2] The reparative therapist Joseph Nicolosi, writing with Linda Ames Nicolosi in A Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality (2002), stated that Growing Up Straight has been seen as a classic.[1]

References

Footnotes

  1. 1 2 3 Nicolosi & Nicolosi 2002, p. 14.
  2. 1 2 LeVay 1996, pp. 79–80.
  3. ↑ Colton 1968, pp. 7–8.
  4. ↑ Altman 2012, pp. 172–173.

Bibliography

Books

  • Altman, Dennis (2012). Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press. ISBN 978-0-7022-4937-2.
  • LeVay, Simon (1996). Queer Science: The Use and Abuse of Research into Homosexuality. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-12199-9. OCLC 34471415.
  • Nicolosi, Joseph; Nicolosi, Linda Ames (2002). A Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality. Downers Grove, Illinois: IVP Books. ISBN 0-8308-2379-4. OCLC 50023340.
Journals

  • Colton, James (1968). "Growing Up Straight (Book)". Tangents. 3 (1).  – via EBSCO's Academic Search Complete (subscription required)
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