Fare well, Mike Wallace

I wish to say that I'm saddened Mike Wallace has passed and I truly hope he's in a better place.

I found it interesting that "The Homosexuals" was Mike Wallace's controversial 1967 report that aired on CBS.  Wow, 1967, that was a long time ago!

The hour-long program, which predated "60 Minutes" and was anchored by Wallace on "CBS Reports", took on the then taboo topic of homosexuality in America.  Homosexuality is still not accepted by this society today, but it's not so much a taboo topic either!

Wallace said in the piece, "The average homosexual, if there be such an average, is promiscuous.  He is not interested in, or capable of, a lasting relationship like that of a heterosexual marriage.  His sex life, his love life, consists of a series of one-chance encounters at the clubs and bars he inhabits.  And even on the streets of the city, the pick-ups, the one night stands, these are the real characteristics of the homosexual relationship."

No wonder being viewed as a homosexual was so depraved.  It was being told that it was both wrong and dirty!  Perhaps that's why so many of us became Trans!  No, I actually don't think so.

Wearing a dress was NOT the result of being brainwashed by our own televisions!  We felt it.  I wore dresses as a simple way of justifying my personal homosexual feelings and I saw wearing a dress as a way of adding value to my self.  I was still going to do what I wanted.

The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf wrote, the report is "impossible to watch without cringing."  IMO, change has always been around but acceptance of that change has not!

Wikipedia has a pretty good back story on the episode, which Wallace later regretted doing, "I should have known better," he said in 1992.  Two decades ago!  That's almost as long as most trans-persons have been breathing.

Wallace also lamented that the report relied, in part, on Charles Socarides, a psychiatrist who felt homosexuality was a mental illness.  Wallace said in a 1996 interview, "That is, God help us, what our understanding was of the homosexual lifestyle a mere 25 years ago, nobody was out of the closet and because that's what we heard from doctors, that's what Socarides told us, homosexuality was a matter of shame."

A mere 25 years before!  Says a lot about this "open" and civil society.

It is said that being gay is OK, but dressing like a common female is not.  No one questions what you do as a gay person and everyone questions what you do as male to female.  After all these years not much acceptance or understanding has reached the multitudes of humanity.

God bless you, Mike.