Question: Did Mormon leaders ever teach that masturbation can cause someone to have a homosexual orientation?

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Question: Did Mormon leaders ever teach that masturbation can cause someone to have a homosexual orientation?

Introduction to Criticism

Critics of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints aver that President Spencer W. Kimball asserted that masturbation causes one to be attracted to the same sex in his 1969 book Miracle of Forgiveness.

President Kimball wrote the following:

Most youth come into contact early with masturbation. Many would-be authorities declare that it is natural and acceptable, and frequently young men I interview cite these advocates to justify their practice of it. To this we must respond that the world's norms in many areas — drinking, smoking, and sex experience generally, to mention only a few — depart increasingly from God's law. The Church has a different, higher norm.

Thus prophets anciently and today condemn masturbation. It induces feelings of guilt and shame. It is detrimental to spirituality. It indicates slavery to the flesh, not that mastery of it and the growth toward godhood which is the object of our mortal life. Our modern prophet has indicated that no young man should be called on a mission who is not free from this practice.

While we should not regard this weakness as the heinous sin which some other sexual practices are, it is of itself bad enough to require sincere repentance. What is more, it too often leads to grievous sin, even to that sin against nature, homosexuality. For, done in private, it evolves often into mutual masturbation — and thence into homosexuality.

This article will examine this charge and conclude that the notion that masturbation causes one to have a homosexual orientation is not and never has been taught by the Church.

Response to Criticism

Masturbation, according to President Kimball, may lead to the practice of homosexuality rather than a homosexual orientation

Commenting on President Kimball's claims above, Gregory L. Smith wrote:

This purported link between self-stimulation and homosexuality has often been ridiculed. O’Donovan refers to Kimball’s “absurd theory that masturbation leads to homosexuality.” And, such skepticism is justified if one reads homosexuality as homosexual orientation in the modern sense. Most people masturbate sometime, and few of these are gay.

Such an analysis assumes and relies on modern definitions, however. As I have shown, leaders’ use of the term homosexuality in this period — especially the homosexuality that they sought to discourage — was almost exclusively concerned with behavior.

Seen in this light, Kimball’s claim becomes both more plausible and more understandable. It is important to remember that he had long experience counseling practicing homosexuals (19, 68–70). He would likely have learned that solo masturbation while entertaining homosexual fantasies would often precede acting on those fantasies with another person. From that perspective, Kimball’s claim is less controversial and may even be valid.

Kimball was not alone in these realizations. Clinicians with exposure to the homosexual demi-monde had long remarked that homosexual masturbatory practices tended to precede homosexual acts with others, though the former did not always lead to the latter.

At the turn of the twentieth century, early sexologist Havelock Ellis wrote of a correspondent “who went to a French school, [and] told me that all the older boys had younger accomplices in mutual masturbation. … At my school, manual masturbation was both solitary and mutual; and sometimes younger boys, who had not acquired the habit, were induced to manipulate bigger boys. … In after-life they showed no signs of inversion [i.e., homosexuality].”

In Albert Moll’s Sexual Life of the Child (1912), he wrote:

It is an indisputable fact that many boys … readily take to sexual practices with others. Examples of this constantly occur in [same-sex] boarding schools … they begin sexual practices very early in life (mutual masturbation and intimate physical contact, especially contact involving the genital organs).

In an effort to reassure the reader that co-education of boys and girls would not be unduly risky, Moll pointed out that “even if we believe that in isolated instances coeducation may lead to unfortunate results in the way of [hetero]sexual practice. … We have to think of the fact that by the separation of the sexes during childhood we may favor the development of homosexuality.”

Moll and Havelock evidently did not think that masturbation inevitably lead to homosexual behavior, much less what is today called orientation. But, Moll would draw precisely the same conclusion as Kimball regarding behavior in the dry prose of academic German science:

The German Imperial Criminal Code … assert[s] that homosexual tendencies appearing in the child necessarily indicate the future development of permanent homosexuality. [Moll disagrees.] …

The chief danger associated with the appearance of sexual perversions lies in the fact that the child thus affected … endeavors again and ever again to revive these pleasurably-toned sensations … and … as soon as the genital organs are sufficiently mature, the boy or girl obtains sexual gratification by masturbating simultaneously with the imaginative contemplation of perverse ideas. Such perverse psychical onanism, accompanied or unaccompanied by physical masturbatory acts, is eminently adapted to favor the development of the perversion. Obviously, the actual performance of the corresponding perverse sexual act will be just as dangerous as its perversely associated masturbation. Thus, a boy who is homosexually inclined may masturbate while allowing his imagination to run riot upon homosexual ideas; or he may take to homosexual acts with one or more other male persons. Every sort of gratification that is associated with perverse images is dangerous; and no less dangerous is the spontaneous cultivation of such perverse sexual images.

Moll saw a risk related to masturbation among the “homosexually inclined” — it would encourage unwanted behavior, but not create most inclination to that behavior. Kimball, with more brevity, would write “masturbation too often leads to grievous sin, even to … homosexuality. For, done in private, it evolves often into mutual masturbation — practiced with another person of the same sex — and thence into total homosexuality.”

This was, in fact, precisely what a study of “non-patient” adult male homosexuals “drawn from the community” found in the same year that The Miracle of Forgiveness was published:

Of the homosexual men, all of them had practiced self-masturbation at some time during their lives. … Even during the peak of their sexual outlet by homosexual means between the ages of 20 and 29, almost all of the subjects (97%) were engaged in self-masturbation...

Homosexual behavior

Cognitional Rehearsals — Those were reported in almost all of the men (99%). In 97% it was stated that cognitional rehearsals had already started before age 20. …

The majority of the subjects (86%) had already had homosexual contacts before the age of 15. …

Of the men that were engaged in homosexual activity before age 15, the large majority (93%) practiced mutual masturbation … [and] a minority (19%) practiced [homosexual] intercourse. …

Mutual masturbation was abandoned by the majority of the subjects after the age of 29. Even those who practiced it between the of 20 and 29, tended to engage in it only occasionally.

For this population, Kimball was right — one started with fantasies (“cognitional rehearsals”) ultimately accompanied by masturbation, progressed to mutual masturbation, and eventually abandoned that for greater intimacies. One can quibble about whether masturbation “caused” these homosexual acts in a technical sense, but it is hard to see the behaviors as utterly unrelated. And behavior was what concerned Kimball.

In fact, he would have said that the person chose solo acts that simply made it easier to later choose other acts with someone else — one sin “leads to” another (71). He did not see the relationship as deterministic:

Small indiscretions evolve into larger ones and finally into major transgressions which bring heavy penalties. … Warning signals and guidelines are given to reduce the danger of one’s being blindly enticed into forbidden paths. …

Those who yield to evil are usually those who have placed themselves in a vulnerable position.

And, he saw other similar sins as preludes to heterosexual ones in the same way: “My beloved young folks, do not excuse petting and body intimacies. I am positive that if this illicit, illegal, improper, and lustful habit of ‘petting’ could be wiped out, that fornication would soon be gone from our world.”

Smith cites "a present-day queer studies author" that further contextualizes how President Kimball understood homosexuality:

Once the patient’s will-power or reason was compromised by masturbation [it was thought] … “reversion” to the primordial bestial type would be the result. … the slide from masturbation to homosexuality seems bizarre from a twenty-first century perspective. However, that is partly because current definitions of masturbation are very narrow compared to the definitions operative in the nineteenth century. We think of masturbation as self-stimulation only,” while the nineteenth century did not consider anything but intercourse to be a homosexual act, even if it involved same-sex genital play.

The same author observes that nineteenth-century thinkers thought that

There were two categories of inverts [i.e., homosexuals]. First, there were those whose condition was a result of self-induced degeneracy through willful vice. … However, increasingly influenced by the personal disclosures of inverts themselves, many nineteenth century physicians began to believe there was a second group. … Maybe some people are born with the gonads and genitalia of one sex but the brain and neurological system of the other. … But it might not be fair to punish [these] congenital inverts, many physicians and sexologists believed, because their actions were not truly voluntary. As James Kiernan put it, “There can be no legal responsibility where free determination of the will is impaired.” Congenital inverts were naturally weak of will … unable to resist the perverse urges that their degenerate condition aroused. Such individuals might undergo episodic periods of organically produced sexual furor during which they were entirely devoid of self-control.

Thus, as Smith concludes:

If these distinctions are understood, then Kimball’s argument makes further sense. Some believed that those with an in-born attraction for the same sex could not control their actions. Other homosexuals “learned” such behavior via a free-will choice to engage in masturbation, which, in some, could progress to group masturbation and ultimately to homosexuality (i.e., intercourse).

The nineteenth century theorists might not condemn those who were “innate” homosexuals who had not brought their habit upon themselves through masturbatory habits. But they did not believe this group could control themselves either — their compulsive activity would be almost a type of madness. (By analogy, today’s society would not condemn a schizophrenic for her hallucinations, though it might well institutionalize her against her will if she sought to harm others as a result of those hallucinations.)

Church doctrine, however, revolted at the idea that any normal person was unable to control their behavior, however they might be tempted. So Kimball focused on avoiding the acts that could strengthen temptation and lead to further unwanted behavior.

Like Kimball, neither Ellis nor Moll saw same-sex mutual masturbation as fully “homosexual,” per se but observed that it could (in some cases) precede homosexual intercourse. This is a different conceptual world than ours.

Conclusion

Thus, President Kimball is not saying that masturbation causes one to have a homosexual orientation. President Kimball says that masturbation could lead to the practice of homosexuality. The church rarely (if ever) talks about the causes of a particular sexual orientation. The church is much more interested in learning to control our thoughts, feelings and behaviors rather than sexual orientation. Many other leaders have also cautioned about preoccupation with sex and about arousing sexual feelings that should only be expressed in marriage. Masturbation arouses sexual feelings outside of marriage. This could lead to sexual acts performed outside of marriage. If a person has opposite-sex attractions, it may lead to the practice of heterosexuality outside of marriage, which is considered just as much of a sin as the practice of homosexuality.

Notes