Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [220]
Liberalization, however, was neither easy nor automatic. In the fifties and sixties, despite the Kinsey reports, police continued to make arrests for homosexual behavior, at least in certain cities—more than a thousand a year in the District of Columbia in the early fifties. There were sudden sweeps of police enforcement in the fifties and raids on gay bars in New York, New Orleans, Miami, San Francisco, Baltimore, and Dallas. 97 A major scandal in Boise, Idaho (of all places), led to a crackdown on homosexuals in that city, vigorous police action, a wave of hysteria, and some extremely punitive sentences.98
A definite tide, nonetheless, was running in favor of sexual freedom. A number of states quietly dropped some or all of the punitive laws from their books. Fornication is, generally speaking, no longer a crime. Connecticut repealed its law in 1967. In New Jersey, in 1977, the state supreme court declared its fornication law unconstitutional.99 Adultery hung on as a crime in a few states; the high court of Massachusetts upheld its law in 1983. Texas allowed a kind of private death sentence into the seventies: homicide was “justifiable” and no crime if a husband killed a man “taken in the act of adultery” with his wife.100 But adultery itself was on its last legs, penally speaking, in the age of the sexual revolution. In April 1990, when a district attorney in northern Wisconsin actually brought a prosecution for adultery, the story made the front page of the New York Times.101
The changes in the penal laws of sexual behavior were dramatic, even though plenty of men and women thought they did not go far enough and there were also many who thought, to the contrary, that Satan was having a field day. The question naturally arises: Where did the changes come from? The obvious answer is: from the power of the sexual revolution itself, and its influence on legal culture. And where did the revolution come from? Why had attitudes toward sex changed so radically?
In the nineteenth century, doctors told people, as we have seen, that heavy sex was a danger to body and mind. They preached “moderation,” that is, sexual discipline and repression. A man (or woman) who went in for too much sex (a point easily reached), risked disease, debilitation, delirium, and death. The twentieth century turned these ideas on their heads. New knowledge played a role. The Kinsey reports told “deviant” people that they were not alone. The emperor was not the only one without clothes; there were naked people under every bush. A certain dosage of Sigmund Freud trickled down into public consciousness.102
But basic changes in character, in personality, in social norms, were far more important; it was these that made the era receptive to Freud in the first place. The age of individuality, of “self-realization,” meant an open door for sex, along with other aspects of the self. It was in consequence that sex attitudes turned turtle. The finger of doom now pointed at repression, not moderation. “The sexual impulse,” after all, was an “insistent force demanding expression.” Overindulgence in sex, if there was such a thing, was not what caused physical and psychological damage. On the contrary: it was unhealthy repression that curdled the psyche. It was dangerous to bottle up or squash natural instincts. Sex was healthy; self-denial was not.
In the 1977 New Jersey case that struck down fornication laws,103cq Dr. Richard Green testified solemnly as an expert witness that the sex drive was “a central factor ... in personality development.” If you repress it, “guilt and anxiety problems can arise.” In the male, these problems could be devastating: “inability to achieve erection,” or “premature ejaculation,” among other horrors. In the female, one result could be “frigidity,” the product of “years of guilt and taboo,” leading to “painful intercourse, or if not painful, just not pleasurable to the point of sexual climax.”105 In the case itself, the court referred