Scientology and Sexual Orientation - Classification of Homosexuality

Classification of Homosexuality

In 1950 Hubbard published Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, introducing his "science of the mind," Dianetics. He classified homosexuality as an illness or sexual perversion, citing contemporary psychiatric and psychological textbooks to support his view:

"The sexual pervert (and by this term Dianetics, to be brief, includes any and all forms of deviation in Dynamic II such as homosexuality, lesbianism, sexual sadism, etc., and all down the catalog of Ellis and Krafft-Ebing) is actually quite ill physically... he is very far from culpable for his condition, but he is also far from normal and extremely dangerous to society..."

Hubbard further defined perversion in his 1951 book Science of Survival: Prediction of Human Behavior. Here he introduced the concept of the "tone scale", a means of classifying individuals and human behaviour on a chart running from +40 (the most beneficial) to -40 (the least beneficial). Sexual perversion, a category in which he included homosexuality, was termed "covert hostility" and given a score of 1.1, "the level of the pervert, the hypocrite, the turncoat, ... the subversive." Such people were "skulking coward who yet contain enough perfidious energy to strike back, but not enough courage ever to give warning."

He characterized "promiscuity, perversion, sadism, and irregular practices" as well as "Free Love, easy marriage and quick divorce" as being undesirable activities, "since it is non-survival not to have a well ordered system for the creation and upbringing of children, by families." Sexual perverts engaged in "irregular practices which do anything but tend toward the creation of children" and "efforts tend not towards enjoyment but toward the pollution and derangement of sex itself so as to make it as repulsive as possible to others and so to inhibit procreation."

Hubbard's 1951 book Handbook for Preclears likewise classified homosexuality as "about 1.1 on the tone scale", along with "general promiscuity". He set out what he saw as the cause of homosexuality: a mental "aberration", with the result that "an individual aberrated enough about sex will do strange things to be a cause or an effect. He will substitute punishment for sex. He will pervert others. Homosexuality comes from this manifestation and from the manifestation of life continuation for others." The "aberration" was caused by a child trying to "continue the life" of a dominant parent of the opposite sex.

Hubbard's views on homosexuality were given a fuller explanation in a 1972 book by Scientologist Ruth Minshull, How To Choose Your People, which was published through the Church of Scientology, copyrighted to Hubbard and given "issue authority" by the Scientology hierarchy. Scientology churches sold the book alongside the works of Hubbard until 1983. Minshull described the "gentle-mannered homosexual" as a classic example of the "subversive" 1.1 personality, commenting that they "may be fearful, sympathetic, propitiative, griefy or apathetic. Occasionally they manage an ineffectual tantrum." They were claimed to be social misfits:

"Homosexuals don't practice love; 1.1s can't. Their relationships consist of: 1) brief, sordid and impersonal meetings or 2) longer arrangements punctuated by dramatic tirades, discords, jealousies and frequent infidelity. It could hardly be otherwise since the tone is made up of suspicion and hate, producing a darling sweetness interspersed with petty peevishness. Their "love" turns to deep contempt eventually."

Homosexuals had no redeeming "social value," in Minshull's view. She cautioned that "homosexuals should not be abused or ridiculed. But a society bent on survival must recognize any aberration as such and seek to raise people out of the low emotion that produces it."

Jon Atack notes that L. Ron Hubbard's son Quentin Hubbard was homosexual. According to Atack, L. Ron Hubbard had repeatedly announced that his son Quentin would succeed him after his death, but Quentin died of an apparent suicide in 1976.