Homosexuality As Perversion / Segregation and Relocation of Homosexuals
In the years before his move to the United States, Osho apparently supported and even encouraged homosexual sannyasins, stating, "No condemnation, no judgement, no evaluation. If you are a homosexual, so what?! Enjoy it! God has made you that way."
However, in the early to mid-1980s, Osho came to a much more condemning and judgemental assessment of homosexuality. He stated, "homosexuals, because they were perverted, created the disease AIDS". It was never clear what he believed about any biological mechanism by which a sexual orientation might create an infective virus. He suggested that homosexuals should be given different localities: "They can live in their own world, in their own way, and be happy, but they should not be allowed to move in the wider society, spreading all kinds of dangerous viruses." When asked by gay sannyasins to explain his new view of homosexuality, Osho followed with, "As a homosexual, you are not even a human being . You have fallen from dignity." He never changed or retracted these public announcements.
Famous quotes containing the words perversion and/or segregation:
“The heart-throb for the welfare of humanity therefore passes into the ravings of an insane self-conceit, into the fury of consciousness to preserve itself from destruction; and it does this by expelling from itself the perversion which it is itself, and by striving to look on it and express it as something else.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“Segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever!”
—George C. Wallace (b. 1919)