User talk:Skoojal

this version don't have the links, but boy, they'll be coming! I attack Wikipedia on Wikipedia! Lock this page now you fools!

Frederick C. Crews: The Story of a Wikipedia Article

Foreword

Since JzG1, the administrator who indefinitely blocked me from Wikipedia, has apparently misinterpreted this article as an attack "against Wikipedians", let it be known that I have no interest in attacking individual editors, including him. I mention individuals only because of what their behaviour shows about Wikipedia as a whole, and the way its failings allow even open attacks against living people to be tolerated for a long time.

The Beginning

I began editing the Frederick Crews article in February 2008, with the intent of exposing Crews's intellectual dishonesty by juxtaposing his deliberately offensive comments about homosexuality in his essay Analysis Terminable (published in 1980 in the neoconservative magazine Commentary, well known as an antigay publication2) with his politically correct comments about homosexuality in The Unknown Freud (published in 1993 in the liberal New York Review of Books, a gay-supportive publication). These quotations, carefully selected and arranged to discredit Crews, were eventually removed3, but they remained in the article long enough to come to his attention, producing a reaction that reveals something important about him.

The way this happened was unusual, and deserves a full commentary. I believe it was only possible for me to manipulate the article this way because it was undeveloped and neglected in February 2008: it was short, contained little information, was not especially well written, and was not being improved or expanded. I was therefore far more free to add material than I would have been had the article provided anything like proper coverage of Frederick Crews's life or work: its obvious need for expansion meant that, within reason, anything I added would be likely to be seen as an improvement.4

My first edits were relatively minor. This edit, on February 3, removed the suggestion that Crews would be best remembered for his 1963 parody of literary criticism The Pooh Perplex. This change was appropriate in terms of Wikipedia's policies, but I made it because I wanted to shift the focus of the article to homosexuality.5 My third edit, made on February 9, removed part of a misleading account of Crews's abandonment of psychoanalysis (the reference to "Crews's abandonment, fairly early in his career, of Freudian methodology")6 and added, "Crews expressed his rejection of psychoanalysis most forcefully in his article Analysis Terminable, first published in Commentary in 1980 and reprinted in his collection Skeptical Engagements in 1986." I wanted to emphasise the importance of this article because it contains some of Crews's most offensive comments about homosexuality.

Homosexuality

My fourth edit, on February 14, added the first material about homosexuality: "Analysis Terminable criticised psychoanalysis for what Crews considered faulty methodology. In a postscript to the original article, Crews criticised psychoanalysis for blaming parents for their children's psychological problems, writing 'I would like people to know that the guilt dispensed by psychoanalytic theorists to striving women, and to the parents of homosexuals, "neurotics" and psychotics can be plausibly declined.'"7 I added this quotation to show that Crews had implied that if Freudian theories which suggest that homosexuality is caused by the way parents treat their children are correct, then parents responsible for causing their children to become homosexual should feel guilty, just as they should feel guilty if they cause their children to become neurotic or psychotic, because homosexuality is a psychological problem, like neurosis or psychosis (this violated BLP policy, but I saw nothing wrong with violating BLP policy to point out the truth).8

My seventh edit, made on February 22, added another quotation about homosexuality: "Crews decried what he saw as the harmful effects of psychoanalysis on American society, writing, for instance: 'Thanks to the once imposing prestige of psychoanalysis...gays have been told that their sexual preference is a mental disorder.'" Crews had of course criticised psychoanalysis on numerous grounds. I added this particular piece of information to show that Crews's apparent views on homosexuality in the early 1990s directly contradicted the views on homosexuality he held in the early 1980s.9

My eighth edit added a mention of Crews's criticism of Judith Butler: "Crews's views have provoked controversy, and a number of writers more supportive of psychoanalysis have made critical comments about him. At the Symposium Whose Freud? The place of Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture, held at the Whitney Humanities Center in 1998, Judith Butler remarked that one of Crews's comments sounded homophobic, a comment which Crews described as an example of how 'ideological imperative can override empirical concern, even covering the very idea of evidence with suspicion of being socially oppressive.'" This was a mistake: Judith Butler never used the word "homophobic" to describe Crews. I made this error because I relied on Crews's misleading account of his exchange with Butler (which I found here at the Human Nature Review), instead of referring to the original.10

My tenth edit pointed out that Commentary was a neoconservative magazine, in order to show Crews's connection with neoconservatism. This edit also added the third quotation about homosexuality: "Crews also criticised what he considered political influence on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association, remarking that, 'when smoking replaces homosexuality as a mental aberration, more of the credit must go to caucuses than to new findings.'" I added it to expose the fact that Crews had implied that the American Psychiatric Association's decision to declassify homosexuality as a mental disorder was a politically motivated mistake (and that he had insultingly called homosexuality a "mental aberration").11

Shell Kinney Stubbifies

These edits completed my plan of exposing Crews's contradictory statements about homosexuality, but my wording allowed for some ambiguity about the meaning of his comments about political influence on the American Psychiatric Association: clearly Crews had criticised the APA, but what exactly had he implied? Intrigued by the failure of my edits to generate controversy, I eliminated the ambiguity and made everything explicit, stating that Crews believed there had been a "politically influenced decision by the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality as a mental disorder."

This was presumably what caused Shell Kinney12 to revert my edits, first partially, and then completely.13 I complained about this on the talk page, pointing out that if a literary critic wrote about Henry James and E. M. Forster his comments about homosexuality were certainly relevant14, but cautiously did not revert Shell Kinney's edits. Perhaps I was more cautious than necessary, since Shell Kinney did not warn me on my talk page about my edits (she warned me only in June, describing her comment as a "final warning", even though she had not issued me any previous warnings15).

Perhaps Shell Kinney did not warn me in February because she was not yet sure that she was on strong ground in reverting me. Part of her edit summary read, "Removed text per WP:BLP concerns, this is considerable undue weight being given to one sentence of a book." That Shell Kinney referred to "BLP concerns", instead of simply saying that I was violating BLP policy, may indicate that she believed there was only a possible violation, not an indisputable violation. Shell Kinney may have believed that my view of Crews might be partially correct: she commented on February 23 that, "there's lots of places those opinions would be welcome." Presumably she would not have written that had she thought my opinions completely without basis. On February 25, 2008, Shell Kinney decided that more drastic measures than reverting my edits were required and stubbified the article, reducing most of it to a single sentence. On March 8 Shell Kinney (in response to a question from me) accepted that Crews's exchange with Butler, including his claim that she accused him of homophobia, could be mentioned in the article if there was a reliable source and it was not of excessive length.

Xxanthippe Destubbifies

The article remained a stub until April 9, 2008, when Xxanthippe reverted Shell Kinney's edits. She did this without consulting Shell Kinney or any other editors and without any prior discussion on the talk page, even though the article had been stubbified by an administrator due to violation of one of Wikipedia's fundamental policies, BLP, which is intended to protect the reputations and public images of living people.16 I pointed out on the talk page that the material Xxanthippe had restored contained a significant factual error (eg, that Judith Butler had used the word "homophobic" to describe Frederick Crews), but she showed little concern about this and certainly no remorse. Xxanthippe simply told me to correct the error, which I did.

That Shell Kinney did not reduce the article back to a stub again may have been because she had failed to pay attention and did not know what had happened. Alternatively, it is possible that Shell Kinney was aware of what had happened but was insufficiently sure that her first decision to stubbify had been correct to do so again. That the article was not stubbified again was a major failure on Shell Kinney's part, and of the Wikipedia community of administrators as a whole.17 Wikipedia's failure to enforce its policies properly at this stage was very helpful to me, since it allowed me to continue my campaign against Crews. I began editing the article again, at first cautiously, but later, encouraged by how much I had gotten away with, cavalierly.

Kukini Tidies

On May 14, I created a criticism section, which is strongly discouraged in articles about living people. Moments later, Kukini, a subscriber to Wikipedia's gay and lesbian newsletter, made a minor edit, tidying my addition instead of removing it. Despite the fact that Kukini must have been monitoring my edits closely, since he had blocked me due to concerns about my behaviour, he did nothing to enforce BLP policy, which I was deliberately violating. Kukini's edit to the Crews article came one day after he posted a comment on Cailil's talk page, when it still contained a post by me saying that I was attacking Crews and explaining why (I made this post on May 13; it was a BLP violation, but Cailil removed it as "trolling" only on May 25).18 It is difficult to believe that Kukini did not see this post or realize what I was doing. Kukini's extraordinary behaviour raises questions about his objectivity.19

Maniac

On May 17 I inserted a comment about Crews by gay writer Andrew Sullivan, from a review of Crews's 1998 book Unauthorized Freud: Crews "gives every indication of being a maniac." I did not consider Sullivan's questioning of Crews's sanity an important part of the case I was trying to make against Crews. I added it simply for the fun of it: it was probably almost as much fun for me to add Sullivan's comment as it was for him to make it in the first place.20 As a homosexual, it felt good to me to call someone who had insultingly implied that homosexuality was a mental disorder a maniac. It is further proof that there is little interest in Crews on Wikipedia and that few people were paying attention that this comment was not removed immediately.

Opportunism and Disingenuousness

On May 23, I added a long comment by Crews about Henri F. Ellenberger's The Discovery of the Unconscious from his article The Verdict on Freud. The full passage about Ellenberger in The Verdict on Freud was,

"Priority in time belongs to the late Henri F. Ellenberger's The Discovery of the Unconscious (1970), whose long and learned chapter on Freud demolished the myth, carefully nurtured by Freud himself and his Boswell, Ernest Jones, of the master's utter originality, his facing up to disturbing truths unearthed in his clinical practice, and his solitary defiance of his contemporaries' prudish hypocrisy. By displaying Freud's all-too-human opportunism and disingenuousness and by bringing him down from the clouds into 19th-century intellectual history, Ellenberger tacitly invited other scholars to inquire whether the vast cultural successes of psychoanalysis rested on any actual discoveries."21 I added a long extract from this bombastic comment to expose Crews's amazing arrogance and hubris. Crews's shifting, unexplained, and contradictory comments about homosexuality provided evidence to alert readers that whatever might be true of Freud, Crews himself was guilty of "all-too-human opportunism and disingenuousness." That Crews would accuse Freud of something he was guilty of himself shows the worthlessness of his judgments.

McCarthyism

Later on May 23, I restored the mention of the exchange between Butler and Crews, which I had deleted a few days earlier because I was having qualms about using Human Nature Review as a source. Soon afterwards I changed the source to Peter Brooks and Alex Woloch's Whose Freud? I expanded Crews's remarks about Butler's supposed accusation, adding his comparison of it to McCarthyism. The added text also included the words, "It is now considered acceptable and even chic to ascribe a backward, repressive sociopolitical attitude to those with whom we in fact disagree only intellectually." I was aware of the irony of adding this observation. Crews would probably find the way I edited the article about him another example of the "McCarthyism" he accused Butler of: why not let Crews say what he thought of my behaviour, I thought. I added Crews's most eyebrow-raising and tendentious claim about his exchange with Butler: "I won't pause here to protest that Butler would find nothing obnoxious in my social views if I were to submit them for her approval; that would be to play the very game I am deploring."22 That remark showed Crews's lack of connection with reality, since his books (which Butler may have read) obviously provide abundant evidence of his social views, especially where homosexuality is concerned.23

Xxanthippe Intervenes

On May 26, Xxanthippe removed Sullivan's description of Crews. The next day, I restored it, and did something devious: I removed the statement that Crews's criticism of political influence on the American Psychiatric Association was in regard to declassifying homosexuality as a mental disorder. I did this because I could see that my behaviour had become so outrageous that it might be impossible for me to edit the article in future. I reasoned that if I toned down the criticism of Crews, it was likely that at least some of it would remain in the article in some form, while it would probably be removed entirely otherwise. I explained that I had not changed the article this way to protect Crews, but because it was unnecessary to point out the obvious: it was so clear that Crews had implied that homosexuality was a mental disorder that this did not have to be stated directly. On May 28, I made a similar change, replacing the statement that Crews had criticised psychoanalysis for blaming parents for their children's psychological problems (which implied that he thought that homosexuality was such a problem) with the statement that he had criticised psychoanalysis for inflicting suffering on parents.

Shortly afterwards, Xxanthippe again removed Sullivan's description of Crews from the article. This time, I was too cautious to restore it, since I was worried that Wikipedia might finally get around to enforcing the policies that I was brazenly violating. As a replacement, I added a different and less inflammatory comment from Sullivan. I then added some of Crews's remarks on Freud's view of homosexuality from a 1999 PBS interview with Susan Dentzer. I removed them on May 29, because on reflection they seemed like another overly obvious attempt to focus the article on homosexuality.24

Cailil Intervenes

On May 31, Cailil made his first edit to the article, removing most of Crews's comments about The Discovery of the Unconscious, reducing the length of Crews's comment about Butler by about half, and removing the second comment about Crews by Sullivan. I was not especially happy with these changes, but since Cailil did not remove the quotations from Crews about homosexuality, they did not make a fundamental difference. I aggressively made it clear that I thought Cailil's edits made little difference and that the most important parts of my case against Crews had remained intact.

I also accused Cailil of wanting to protect Crews, but I now think protecting Butler was probably his strongest motivation.25 That Cailil did not remove Crews's comments about homosexuality suggests that his sympathy for him was quite limited. Cailil wrote, "I don't hold or agree with any of Crews's ideas or views, as you have expressed them - quite honestly I understand your position . . .", perhaps implying that he privately thought my view of Crews was correct.26 Cailil also wrote, "this public service crusade against Crews however noble or otherwise is not what wikipedia is for", leaving open the possibility that my crusade against Crews was noble. Cailil did not stubbify the article, even though he suggested stubbification might be needed.

Even though I had openly announced that I had added the quotations about homosexuality to attack Crews and destroy his reputation, a blatant attempt to violate Wikipedia's fundamental policies, Cailil failed to remove them, thereby handing me a temporary victory.27 I suspect this was possible only because I had removed my editorial commentary pointing out that Crews once considered homosexuality a mental disorder. Had it remained, the quotations would probably have been removed early in June. On June 2, Xxanthippe cut the article back again, removing the last of Crews's comments about Butler28. The same day, Cailil removed biodispute templates from the article, indicating that its content was uncontroversial and acceptable.

The OTRS Request

On June 29, Shell Kinney finally removed the quotations about homosexuality. She did this in an edit with the comment, "thorough review of sources shows that the actual references are being distorted by editor with agenda, please talk with me before reverting, OTRS 2008022210016585").29 She also removed all mention of the fact that anyone had made any kind of criticism of Crews30, and added information about his honours and awards. OTRS is a system which allows people related to articles to complain about them; the OTRS number was mentioned by Shell Kinney in her edit summary to show that it was made in a response to a request to change the article's content. Only Crews or someone acting on his behalf could have made this request.31 The information about Crews's honours presumably came from him or someone close to him.32 Crews did not make the same foolish mistake as the editors who thought that the quotations about homosexuality were not dangerous. Crews clearly saw that there was a real danger to him in the content of the article about him, even though it no longer stated, or directly suggested, that he had ever believed homosexuality was a mental disorder.

Crews apparently regarded the quotations from him about homosexuality as harmful even though they were simply his own words, an extraordinary development. If Crews insisted on having them removed, this must have been because he believed that people might interpret them the way I said they should be interpreted (presumably Crews read what I wrote about him on the talk page, or was informed of what I wrote there by others).33 I consider his demand that the quotations be removed an effective admission of guilt: had I been wrong, there would have been no reason to remove all of them.34

Block Evasion

In October 2008, I began editing the Frederick Crews article again, first without a user account, and then using a sock-puppet account, Taste of Tears. None of the material I added this way was defamatory or otherwise objectionable, but it was nevertheless motivated. My second anonymous edit expanded the list of Crews's works. This was an innocent change in itself, but I had my own reasons for making it: one of the books added was Crews's 1970 anthology Psychoanalysis and Literary Process. This interesting book contains a remarkably large amount of material about homosexuality. The other two books added to the list of Crews's works were The Patch Commission and Starting Over: a college reader. They contain much less discussion of homosexuality than Psychoanalysis and Literary Process, but neither of them is insignificant and they were not added simply for the sake of completeness. The Patch Commission is a work of fiction. One of its characters refers to homosexuals as "fags." This comment, taken together with a range of other evidence, suggests that this was how Crews privately thought of homosexuals in the 1960s.35 Starting Over: a college reader contains material suggesting that homosexuality should be prevented, and even that is a spreading social problem that needs to be entirely eliminated.36

Because I wanted to look like a good editor, I made this anonymous edit, removing some of my own, previously added original research. This edit corrected a misleading account of Crews's abandonment of psychoanalysis. This edit, made as Taste of Tears, added the first mention of criticism of Crews to appear in the article since Shell Kinney censored it at his request. This Taste of Tears edit added a brief description of Psychoanalysis and Literary Process (had Taste of Tears not been blocked as a sock-puppet I would have described what Psychoanalysis and Literary Process says about homosexuality in as much detail as possible: since Crews later vehemently rejected these views, without explaining why he had ever supported them or even mentioning that he had, this information is worse than embarrassing).37 Since I made these edits while both blocked and banned, they should all have been reverted, but so far none of them have been, another example of Wikipedia's notorious inability or unwillingness to enforce its own policies.

An Edit War on the Talk Page

Though it happened after I stopped editing the article, an incident in late December 2008 deserves mention: an edit war on the Frederick Crews talk page between Xxanthippe and Lulu of the Lotus Eaters (real name David Mertz: "Formerly an academic philosopher who specialized in postmodernism", according to the Wikipedia article about him; he is noted for his interest in Lacan). Mertz made several comments, one of them expressing his view that Crews probably was homophobic: "From my limited knowledge of the matter, I tend to believe that Crews is indeed homophobic." Xxanthippe removed this part of Mertz's comments, calling it "defamatory", Mertz restored it, Xxanthippe removed it again, and Mertz restored it again. Xxanthippe stopped removing Mertz's suggestion that Crews was homophobic after he threatened on her talk page to start a request for comment on her behaviour.38

Though Xxanthippe and Mertz may not see it that way, I found their brief edit war extremely amusing: to me it is a sign that my arguments against Crews will not be forgotten, and my views will continue to influence events, even though I am no longer free to edit Wikipedia. Perhaps all future discussion on the Frederick Crews talk page will be restricted to the question of whether Frederick Crews is a homophobe: if so, I am proud.

Footnotes

1. Real name Guy Chapman. Chapman has been accused of being homophobic, so he may have felt some personal sympathy for Crews, just as he may have been uncomfortable with my open homosexuality. I do not know whether Chapman is homophobic or not, but it is interesting that he was the administrator who finally gave me an indefinite block. I had no contact of any kind with Chapman until he blocked me; several administrators I went out of my way to provoke (by making comments about them on my user page, for instance) dealt with me much more leniently. On January 22, 2009, Chapman stated that it was "neutral" to have a userbox declaring that one is opposed to same-sex marriage: one wonders from whose perspective.

2. See Gore Vidal's essay Pink Triangle and Yellow Star, reprinted in his collection United States: Essays 1952-1992, p. 595-611: "Elsewhere I have described the shrill fag-baiting of Joseph Epstein, Norman Podhoretz, Alfred Kazin, and the Hilton Kramer Hotel. Harper's magazine and Commentary usually publish these pieces, though other periodicals are not above printing the odd expose of the latest homosexual conspiracy to turn the United States over to the Soviet Union or to structuralism or to Christian Dior." p. 598 Vidal dissects Midge Decter's The Boys on the Beach, a long attack on homosexuals published in Commentary two months after Analysis Terminable. Vidal identifies Decter and Norman Podhoretz as Freudians and Freudianism as anti-homosexual, but fails to note that Commentary published an attack on psychoanalysis driven partly by anti-homosexual sentiment.

3. I was well aware of Wikipedia's BLP policy, so this was the outcome I had expected (it did not worry me, since I knew the quotations would remain in past versions of the article, easy to find for anyone willing to look). Yet it is amazing how long it took for the quotations to be removed, which must have been due to a combination of factors, including Wikipedia's pro-gay bias. On this subject, see the Conservapedia article Examples of bias in Wikipedia. I do not endorse Conservapedia, but its assertion that Wikipedia is biased in favour of homosexuality is correct: articles dealing with homosexuality usually take sides against people seen as anti-gay. This is generally deplorable, and I often tried to resist it (successfully, in the cases of the articles on Joseph Nicolosi and conversion therapy; the first was full of inappropriate and undue quotations, the second full of original research and misinterpreted sources).

In the case of the Crews article, however, Wikipedia's pro-gay bias worked to my advantage: it is otherwise difficult to understand how quotations about homosexuality selected to discredit a living person could have remained for any length of time. I should explain that I was not so much concerned by Crews's scorn for homosexuality as by the way it lead him to reject psychoanalysis and by his dishonesty in adopting apparently pro-gay views at a later stage of his career, without admitting his past views. My main motive was the wish to throw light on the reasons why Crews repudiated psychoanalysis.

4. This situation (which is a serious problem for anyone who wants Wikipedia to be genuinely neutral towards living people and a boon for anyone who wants to use it to attack and discredit living people they do not like) is not unique to the article about Crews, as experience with editing other articles (especially the Jeffrey Masson article) has taught me. The problem is not necessarily restricted to undeveloped articles, though that is where it is most acute. Despite the pious rhetoric about BLP on Wikipedia, "building the encyclopedia" is usually a higher priority. Extreme examples aside, one is thought to be a good Wikipedian if one puts something in an article and gives at least some justification for the addition, even a flimsy justification.

Administrators are frequently inconsistent or hypocritical in determining what does or does not count as a violation of BLP policy, sometimes basing such judgments more upon whether they personally dislike the editor who added the alleged BLP violation than anything else. Administrators also frequently take an interest in articles about people whose work they know nothing about. To some extent, this may be forced on them by the nature of Wikipedia, but that is a poor excuse. Some administrators appear to be more willing to behave this way than others. Will Beback, for instance, has a positive disdain for the idea that reading people's books is relevant, or necessary to be able to decide what should be included in articles about them. This widespread anti-intellectual attitude frequently leads to poor decisions, including the inclusion of very slanted and inappropriately written material. People succeed in becoming administrators mainly because of their ability to work within organizations, which is a product of personality traits that do not necessarily relate to intelligence. This does not mean administrators are necessarily stupid, only that intelligence is not their defining attribute.

5. The Pooh Perplex does contain references to homosexuality, but I did not know this at the time.

Here is Crews's "Myron Masterson", in Poisoned Paradise: The Underside of Pooh:

"Alas, poor Tigger! Nothing in the forest is fit for him to eat but Roo's extract of malt, which must be administered by Kanga. And could we reasonably expect this matriarch to stand by idly and watch her household being overrun with sheer maleness? She sinks her hooks into Tigger at once:

"Well, look in my cupboard, Tigger dear, and see what you'd like." Because she knew at once that, however big Tigger seemed to be, he wanted as much kindness as Roo.

As much kindness as Roo, forsooth! Sinclair Lewis, Wright Morris, and Evan S. Connell, Jr., all working together could never nauseate us half so successfully as does the picture of Kanga waving good-by to Roo and Tigger as they take their water-cress and extract-of-malt sandwiches off for a sexless dejeuner sur l'herbe. It is when things have reached this sorry pass that the inevitable homoerotic alternative to compulsory innocence suddenly offers itself to Kanga's victims. Already in Winnie-the-Pooh Piglet had reached a point comparable to Huckleberry Finn's satanic resolution to prefer hellfire to the female-dominated world he has thus far inhabited. Now, in the excitement over getting Tigger and Roo down from a heavily symbolic tree, Piglet flips:

But Piglet wasn't listening, he was so agog at the thought of seeing Christopher Robin's blue braces again. He had only seen them once more, when he was much younger, and, being a little over-excited by them, had had to go to bed half an hour earlier than usual . . .

Christopher Robin is flattered and attracted by this fetishistic response to his little striptease, but he is naturally reluctant to enter into serious relations with a Pig. Doubtless he has designs on one of the tiny scholars with whom he is now learning spelling and mathematics. Piglet, therefore, is thrown into the willing arms of Pooh, who at the end of the book welcomes him into his house as permanent roommate. Nor should we omit Tigger and Roo from this account. What, after all, did Roo have in mind ascending that tree on Tigger's back, squeaking, "Oo, Tigger-oo, Tigger-oo, Tigger"? What is the meaning of Tigger's compulsion to "bounce" upon all his male friends? Roo, at least, gets the point even if innocent readers have not done so: "Try bouncing me, Tigger", he passionately pleads." (p. 48-50)

This is obviously meant to ridicule homosexuality: it is because homosexuality is ridiculous to Crews that he finds "Masterson's" interpretation of Winnie-the-Pooh laughable. Perhaps explaining the behaviour of Winnie-the-Pooh characters as expressions of homosexual lust is laughable whether homosexuality itself is ridiculous or not: even so, this passage would be much funnier if homosexuality is itself ridiculous. Something else that is laughable, and a subject of Crews's amused scorn, is the idea that Kanga is responsible for the homosexuality of Roo and possibly Tigger as well. Yet if this is amusing it is because it is about Kanga, and not because the idea that parents are responsible for homosexuality is itself somehow amusing: on the contrary, as a Freudian, Crews would have found that idea at least plausible. It is not directly stated, but appears to be hinted at in his previous book E. M. Forster: The Perils of Humanism. Crews seems to have equal contempt for parents who make their children homosexual and their homosexual children. He shows no concern for either party; his view seems to be that parents are responsible for homosexuality and deserve his scorn. The title of "Masterson's" paper is presumably intended as a coy reference to backsides ("underside"), identifying homosexuality with the anus or anal intercourse.

There is also a reference to homosexuals as "fairies", intended to be funny. "Murphy A. Sweat" in Winnie and the Cultural Stream: "You've got Pooh and Christopher Robin at the top - that's right, "Christopher Robin", I admit he sounds like a fairy but it's too early to tell..." (p68). That Crews personally thought of homosexuals as "fairies" and was not parodying anti-gay attitudes is shown by his view of homosexuality in his previous book, E. M. Forster: The Perils of Humanism, which associates it with effeminacy and weakness (see the chapter on The Longest Journey, p. 50-70). Note how Crews treats the issue of whether a boy will become homosexual, something with extremely serious consequences for his life, as a joke: "Sweat" is interested in whether Christopher Robin will become a "fairy" only because if he does that will make him an object fit for his contempt, not out of any concern for him.

6. The material I removed suggested that Crews abandoned psychoanalysis in Out of My System, published in 1975. In fact this was a transitional book. Crews made his doubts about psychoanalysis clear, but also defended it to a limited extent in essays such as Can Literature be Psychoanalysed? and Anaesthetic Criticism, reprinted from Psychoanalysis and Literary Process. One of the sources of Can Literature be Psychoanalysed? was A Methodological Study of Freudian Theory, a 1959 article by Abram Kardiner, Aaron Karush, and Lionel Ovesey, better known for his writings on homosexuality. Crews gave a book by Edmund Bergler, also better known as a writer on homosexuality, as an example of Freudian literary criticism gone awry. The reprint of Anaesthetic Criticism included a new introduction, in which Crews described Psychoanalysis and Literary Process as "a collection of essays by Berkeley graduate students", neglecting to mention that he was its editor, perhaps an attempt to distance himself from something he was beginning to find embarrassing. In Offing Culture: Literary Study and the Movement (p. 122-144), Crews expressed alarm at Herbert Marcuse:

"It was Marcuse, with his vulgar-Hegelian notion of historical transformation, who most encouraged the Movement to overrate its counter-cultural style. Defining the existing system only in terms of its puritanical ideals, he could consider every instance of deviance as at once a negation of the negation, a return of the repressed, and a concrete argument against his bete noire, scientific positivism. At various points in the sixties Marcuse dallied with the hope that long hair, rock lyrics, homosexuality, even psychosis were signs of capitalism's imminent demise." (p. 128-129)

Offing Culture is not a strongly anti-gay essay, but it still disparages homosexuality: the best that Crews can find to say of it is that it is not quite as bad as psychosis. Crews wrote of Offing Culture, "Although I didn't address Freudian criticism in this essay, the reviewing of one blatant kind of reductionism did force me to think more sceptically than before about closed interpretive systems in general. In this sense the present chapter and the two that follow it make a consistent series." (p. 121) This appears to be a euphemistic way of saying that literary criticism must now be held to a political test and that psychoanalysis should be rejected for being similar to leftism. It certainly shows that, due to the events of the 1960s, literature was no longer necessarily the foremost concern in Crews's mind. The two essays that followed Offing Culture were Anxious Energetics and Reductionism and Its Discontents.

Anxious Energetics was about Wilhelm Reich, and mentioned homosexuality only in a footnote: "From his third ex-wife we learn that he especially despised and avoided homosexuals." (p. 205). This remark is perhaps favourable to homosexuals, but not necessarily to homosexuality: it is perfectly possible to criticise someone for despising and avoiding homosexuals even if one sees homosexuality as only slightly better than psychosis.

Reductionism and Its Discontents, about Freudian criticism, was the only one of these linked essays in which homosexuality was of central importance. Crews wrote: "In order to meet the real issue of reductionism without dismissing legitimate applications of psychoanalysis, it is necessary to realize that the mere proposing of a reductive idea doesn't in itself constitute reductionism, the effective denial or denigration of all meanings but the reductive one that is being revealed. Reductive inferences are normal, though not equally prominent, in many schools of criticism. A critic is reducing - that is, diverting attention from the text to something that purportedly lies behind the text and helps to explain it - whenever he asserts that a work can be understood in relation to its author's social background or didactic intent or cultural allegiance, or even his literary tradition. Reductionism proper is a certain bigoted way of advancing such points, with the result that the work in its singularity is sacrificed to the interpretive scheme instead of being illuminated by it.

Thus it is reductive, but possibly quite justifiable and helpful, to maintain that a common current of homosexual feeling for "the Handsome Sailor" runs between Claggart and Vere in Billy Budd; although the point might not originally occur to anyone but a Freudian, he could show other readers that his reduction makes sense of otherwise obscure features of the text. If the same critic were to say or imply that homosexuality is "the meaning" of Billy Bud, he would be not only reductive but reductionistic as well." (p.169)

The only example of "reductionism" Crews gives in Reductionism and Its Discontents is the suggestion that the meaning of a work of literature is homosexuality. This was an odd example, since it is totally unclear what could be meant by declaring that "homosexuality" itself is the meaning of any work of literature. It would still be unclear even if the work of literature in question was explicitly and primarily concerned with the homosexual behaviour of homosexual characters. Even that kind of literature could not be understood to mean "homosexuality" itself, since homosexuality itself is an abstraction, a category covering numerous distinct phenomena and therefore not necessarily involving sexual behaviour or desire or anything else (not involving, that is, any phenomenon that a work of literature dealing with homosexual characters behaving homosexually is concerned with describing).

Unusual as this example was, Crews obviously did not choose it at random. Crews had shown both interest in and discomfort with homosexuality since the early 1960s. Crews's second book, E. M. Forster: The Perils of Humanism, published in 1962, explains Stewart Ansell and Rickie Elliott's behaviour in The Longest Journey as an expression of their homosexual feelings. Published one year after this book and perhaps partly a reaction to it was The Pooh Perplex, where Crews shows an awareness that explaining literary characters' behaviour as an expression of their homosexual feelings could affect even the most innocent works of literature. So one might suppose that explaining the behaviour of literary characters in terms of their homosexual feelings is what Crews means by the idea that the meaning of a work of literature is homosexuality, but since he finds it acceptable to suggest that Claggart and Vere are both driven by their homosexual feelings for Billy Budd that cannot be the case. Crews seems not to know what he means by the idea that the meaning of a work of literature is homosexuality: he denounces it but cannot explain what it suggests. Yet this meaningless idea, which few if any literary critics would endorse no matter how reductionistic they were, is his one example of "reductionism", and one must ask why.

Crews may have been thinking of David Leverenz's article on Moby-Dick in Psychoanalysis and Literary Process when he wrote about a possible reductionist analysis of Billy Budd. Psychoanalysis and Literary Process, published in 1970, was to a large extent about homosexuality, and this subject was clearly still weighing on Crews's mind five years later. Crews may have felt that the focus on homosexuality in Psychoanalysis and Literary Process (which is sufficiently great that it must have been deliberate) had been a harmful mistake. In any case, the extensive treatment of homosexuality in Psychoanalysis and Literary Process shows that to Crews it was closely connected with both criticism and psychoanalysis. The upheavals of the late 1960s and early 1970s had politicised homosexuality and made it an increasingly uncomfortable topic. If Crews had to change his attitude to homosexuality, that would in turn force him to change his attitude to criticism and psychoanalysis. Homosexuality may not have been Crews's main interest in Reductionism and Its Discontents, but the way he uses it as an example shows that subjects other than literature were concerning him.

7. Skeptical Engagements, p. 41. Crews's original response to his critics in the October 1980 issue of Commentary included an angry remark about how Freud identified his patient Dora as a female homosexual. This remark, which clearly expressed contempt for homosexuals, was not reprinted in Skeptical Engagement, although it did reprint Crews's attempt to rebut Seymour Fisher and Roger P. Greenberg, who argued that some of Freud's theories, including those on the family pattern basic to male homosexuality, had emerged with fairly good scientific support. Crews quoted Hans Eysenck and Glenn Wilson pointing out the need to ". . .consider alternative hypotheses which might equally well, or better, explain the results found", but did not suggest any such hypotheses. The way Crews lumps homosexuals with psychotics in this postscript is similar to what he did in Offing Culture almost a decade earlier, except that here he places their conditions on the same level rather than grant that psychosis is worse even than homosexuality.

It may be asked who the "psychoanalytic theorists" Crews refers to are. Seymour Fisher and Roger P. Greenberg are not strong candidates for the simple reason that they were researchers testing psychoanalytic theories, not psychoanalytic theorists. Crews could have been thinking partly of Fisher and Greenberg, but it would have been highly tendentious for him to identify them as "psychoanalytic theorists." Conceivably Crews was thinking of psychoanalysts such as Irving Bieber and Charles Socarides, but the term "psychoanalytic theorists" would suggest writers influenced by psychoanalysis rather than practicing psychoanalysts, especially to a literary critic. I believe that the after effects of Psychoanalysis and Literary Process are visible here: Crews was probably thinking of Sheldon R. Brivic and Richard L. Stein, who both contributed to that volume. Neither Brivic nor Stein directly blamed parents for homosexuality in their essays in Psychoanalysis and Literary Process, which in any case were not offered as advice to parents. Yet both of them, simply by taking a Freudian view of homosexuality, could be deemed to have supported the idea that parents are somehow responsible.

The unusual rancour and bitterness of Crews's remarks about theories of homosexuality require special explaining: granted that Freudian ideas might cause suffering to parents, why write as though creating suffering was their intended purpose? That Crews felt guilty for having supported those theories is the most plausible explanation for his extraordinary tone (other reasons are possible, but that would take us into the realm of pure speculation). So while Crews may have had Fisher and Greenberg partly in mind, he could hadly have forgotten his tacit endorsement of Brivic's and Stein's views on homosexuality. Crews should have identified them as the subjects of his remarks, but doing so might have been both personally and professionally costly.

Crews's suggestion that if parents are responsible for their children becoming homosexual they should feel guilt is evil (Crews does not say in so many words that parents should feel guilt under such circumstances, but that does not alter the fact that his comments are inexplicable unless they are based on that assumption). Since parental guilt will not cause children to become heterosexual, it accomplishes nothing. No one could suggest guilt was an appropriate reaction unless he was driven by sadism. If Crews had any concern for parents, he would have made it clear that they should not feel guilt even if they are responsible for their children becoming homosexual and even if homosexuality is a bad thing. Yet this common sense approach would have left him unable to condemn psychoanalytic theories about homosexuality as pernicious. Crews's determination to attack psychoanalysis appears to have made him willing to seize any opportunity to condemn its possible effects on parents, even at the cost of all common sense and genuine compassion.

Two other things show that Crews was not genuinely concerned with the well-being of parents.

The first is Crews's suggestion that parents' guilt for causing homosexuality can be "plausibly declined." This expression makes it sound about equally likely that parents are responsible for their children becoming homosexual as not. Parents who believe that they are responsible will not be convinced otherwise by being told that this theory is about equally likely to be right or wrong: that would more likely reinforce their belief. For that matter, it is hard to see why Crews would write that parents' guilt can be "plausibly declined" unless he felt that they might indeed be responsible for their children's homosexuality. Otherwise, he would say that this theory was untrue. The "plausibly declined" part of Crews's remarks suggests that he is more concerned with trying to make light of an issue he had come to find deeply disturbing than with preventing suffering to parents. This is not only not the same thing as concern for parents, it is the reverse, since it implies that it does not matter how they feel or what they suffer if the theory is correct.

The second is Crews's apparent unawareness that telling parents that their homosexual children are mentally disordered might upset them: most people would realize that parents might be distressed if someone suggested that their children are suffering from a mental disorder, but that thought does not seem to have passed through his mind. The only thing that could make Crews's suggestion that homosexuality is a mental disorder consistent with his apparent stance that theories that cause suffering to parents should be rejected is the idea that parents do not care if their children are mentally disordered just so long as they are not responsible for that disorder. If Crews did not believe this, then either he must have regarded suggesting that homosexuality is a mental disorder as more important than preventing suffering to parents or else he somehow failed to see that his position might cause such suffering. The second of these two theoretical possibilities can hardly be accepted, so Crews must have accepted one of two different but equally morally callous assumptions. Note that while Crews was ostensibly very concerned about the effects psychoanalytic theories about homosexuality have on the parents of homosexuals, even though he obviously had little or no real compassion for them, he did not even attempt to suggest that he was concernced about the effects of those theories on homosexuals themselves. Crews showed an interest in homosexuals only as a problem to their parents.

8. I had then read only a few of Crews's books (I think Out of My System, Skeptical Engagements, and The Memory Wars were the extent of my reading) and therefore was not aware of the full range of what he had written about homosexuality. I have since read all of Crews's books. Had I known more, I would probably have proceeded quite differently: the first material about homosexuality added would have concerned Crews's views about Rickie Elliot in E. M. Forster: The Perils of Humanism. I would also have added much material from Psychoanalysis and Literary Process.

9. Crews appears to have been an anti-gay Freudian from the early 1960s until the publication of Analysis Terminable in 1980, by which time he had become an anti-gay anti-Freudian. Crews seems to have changed his views a second time in the late 1980s, adopting a superficially politically correct position on homosexuality. Crews wrote in a review of Kenneth S. Lynn's Hemingway in August 13 1987 issue of The New York Review of Books (discussing the behaviour of Hemingway's characters in For Whom the Bell Tolls and Islands in the Stream): "Such passages make it difficult to doubt that an imagined switching of sex roles constituted the heart of Hemingway's erotic ideal. And, as Lynn goes on to show, the nonfictional record is entirely consistent with the fictional one. This is not to say that the strident homophobe Hemingway was disposed to literally bisexual activities" (p. 101). From the same review: ". . .in 1947 he startled his Cuban hangers-on by giving his own looks a henna-rinse - a practice which, in Death in the Afternoon, he had explicitly and contemptuously associated with homosexuality" (the review was reprinted in The Critics Bear It Away, p. 89-112). Crews did not, of course, discuss his own history of making comments expressing contempt for homosexuals, for instance in Commentary. Given that history, it was disgraceful for the editors of The New York Review of Books to permit Crews to publish a comment criticising someone else for being a homophobe.

Crews still refered to "homosexuals" in his review of Hemingway, but by the early 1990s, they had finally become "gays" to him (see The Memory Wars, p. 71). There would have been nothing wrong with Crews changing his mind about homosexuality on any of these occasions if had admitted his past views and explained why he had abandoned them, but he never did so: just as Crews did not mention in Analysis Terminable that he had previously supported the same psychoanalytic theories about the origins of homosexuality he now denounced, so in The Unknown Freud he did not mention that while an anti-Freudian he had implied that homosexuality was a mental disorder, a notion he now condemned and blamed on Freudians. Crews's failure to mention his past views on homosexuality in The Unknown Freud was thus part of a pattern of dishonesty stretching back more than a decade.

The full sentence about homosexuality in The Unknown Freud is, "Parents have agonized about having caused their children's homosexuality, and gays have been told that their sexual preference is a mental disorder." Crews here denounces the idea that homosexuality is a mental illness with much the same mixture of amazement and indignation with which he had previously denounced the idea that homosexuality is not a mental illness, although with rather less prurient scorn. Crews apparently assumes that homosexuals and their parents have completely different concerns when it comes to theories about what causes homosexuality: parents do not want to be repsonsible for homosexuality, but do not care whether it is a mental disorder or not, while homosexuals care about whether they are mentally disordered, but do not care about whether their parents are responsible for their homosexuality. Crews's remark looks like an awkward attempt to please two parties with fundamentally different, even opposed concerns. Telling parents that they are not responsible for homosexuality suggests that there is indeed something wrong with it, even though Crews's ostensible position was the reverse of this.

10. I later apologized to Judith Butler for this mistake on the Judith Butler talk page. My apology was deliberately provocative, since it was offered only to Butler, and not to Crews. That Crews would make it sound as though Butler had used the word "homophobic" to describe him shows very little about her, but it does reveal his extreme sensitivity to such accusations. Considering his past views on homosexuality, this sensitivity may be the result of guilt.

Crews states in Unconscious Deeps and Empirical Shallows, the article reproduced on Human Nature Review (and in Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays, p. 71-87) that he was "seduced by Freud myself around the age of thirty-two. But by thirty-seven I was over it [psychoanalysis]." Since Crews was born in 1933, he was thirty-two in 1965, by which time he had already published E. M. Forster: The Perils of Humanism, which was his first book to draw on psychoanalysis and also his first book to mention homosexuality. So Crews appears to have been "seduced" by Freud a few years before he suggests. Crews was thirty-seven in 1970, the same year he published both Psychoanalysis and Literary Process, which was strongly supportive of psychoanalysis and very focused on homosexuality, and Starting Over, which also contained a number of essays by writers favourable to psychoanalysis and showed some interest in homosexuality. How Crews could have done this if he was already "over" psychoanalysis in 1970 is unclear. Did Crews publish two pro-Freudian books and then suddenly and completely abandon support for psychoanalysis? Perhaps embarrassment over Psychoanalysis and Literary Process' Freudianism and focus on homosexuality motivated Crews's incorrect statement about when he abandoned psychoanalysis.

In a footnote to Call Me Liberal, another essay in Follies of the Wise, Crews writes that Freud was "disastrously wrong" about overbearing mothers being responsible for boys becoming homosexual (p. 377). This is strange for several reasons. Despite what Crews seems to suggest, Freud never claimed to have a complete understanding of what causes homosexuality and did not attribute it to any single factor. Since Crews does not claim to be an expert on homosexuality, it is unclear how he could know that any of Freud's suggestions about what factors may be relevant to its development are wrong.

More importantly, the values that underlie Crews's claim that Freud's supposed error was a disaster are either confused or not what he claims they are. It is easy to understand why someone who wants to prevent homosexuality would think it disastrous that a theory about its origins was wrong: that might lead to mistaken advice about how to prevent it being given. It is incomprehensible why someone concerned only with preventing parents from suffering from guilt about causing homosexuality would care whether Freud's theories about its development are wrong or not: parents who believe that they are responsible for their children becoming homosexual will suffer just as deeply whether that belief is correct or totally mistaken. The only conclusion I can draw is that Crews does want to prevent homosexuality, but is unable to admit this openly, and perhaps not even to himself, which is a woeful situation for a self-identified liberal wanting to defend liberal writers from charges of hypocrisy from academic leftists to be in. Anyone who considers that conclusion unfair should examine Psychoanalysis and Literary Process and Starting Over (which show that at least in the early 1970s Crews found Freudian views about the origins of homosexuality plausible and thought it worth reprinting articles suggesting that homosexuality was a social problem which should be somehow solved) and the confused values Crews expresses in Analysis Terminable and The Unknown Freud.

11. This observation is in a footnote following the sentence, "One of the central concepts of Freudianism, neurosis, has been pronounced devoid of meaning by the canonical Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association", which was the first real evidence produced by Crews to support his claim that psychoanalysis was falling out of favour in the United States. The full footnote reads, "Critics have pointed out that the third edition of the DSM (1980), like its predecessors, reflects political as well as medical and scientific opinion. Quite true: when smoking replaces homosexuality as a mental aberration, more of the credit must go to caucuses than to new findings. For that very reason, however, we can safely regard the DSM's demotion of "neurosis" as a sign of waning psychoanalytic influence." This passage is an unattractively smug, self-satisfied attempt at cleverness. Crews's suggestion that homosexuality was a "mental aberration" (as opposed to simply a mental disorder) shows that he thought that it was amusing or clever to sneer at homosexuals for being mentally ill. Analysis Terminable is an article seething with contempt for mentally ill people.

12. Real name apparently Michelle Kinney.

13. Had anyone been paying proper attention, my edits would probably have been reverted before then. It was partly the near universal lack of interest in Crews (apparently not considered very exciting) at Wikipedia that explains why this did not happen sooner. It shows something that the only person in the world interested in expanding the article (me) was also intent on attacking Crews. No one favourable to Crews has ever worked on it seriously.

14. I could have mentioned Crews's interest in Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, James Joyce, Walter Pater, and William Shakespeare, but I had not yet read Psychoanalysis and Literary Process.

15. Shell Kinney also censored my talk page, removing this part of my comments: "Crews's comments about homosexuality expose his moral corruption and intellectual emptiness, and will certainly destroy his reputation in the end, whatever happens here." I complained, but did not restore that remark.

16. Xxanthippe may simply not have understood what she restored: even though it stated that Crews had thought that homosexuality was a mental disorder, she commented on June 1 that she thought Crews was not guilty of this and had been saying the exact opposite: that homosexuality was not a mental disorder. On August 31, I asked Xxanthippe to explain her strange behaviour. Her response was to remove my comment from her talk page.

17. Strictly speaking, it was a failure on the part of all editors who did not want to see Crews discredited. It was an especially serious failure on the part of the administrators, since their ability to block users means they have greater responsibility for enforcing BLP policy. Shell Kinney's behaviour might look like laziness, but in early April 2008 she was dealing with a Request for Mediation over the "Jewish lobby" article, which may have distracted her.

18. I do not consider my comments on Cailil's talk page "trolling", since I was simply being honest. Note that the essay on "trolling" Wikipedia links to tries to smear anyone who uses the expression "political correctness" as a racist, a typical politically correct manoeuver.

19. I was certainly not being objective (in the sense of editing the Frederick Crews article in a neutral way), but I made it perfectly clear I was not trying. Kukini's behaviour did not altogether escape the attention of other administrators. I drew attention to it on DGG's talk page, but DGG did not comment. Will Beback, whose real name is apparently William F. McWhinney, commented on September 25 (referring to the version of my user page deleted by Shell Kinney), "I do see that you complain that other editors (Cailil and Kukini) should have undone your work. So you were not only breaking the rules but criticizing those who don't enforce them strictly enough. It's a very odd statement and while the candor is useful it still affects your credibility."

Yet this was not really a contradiction, given what I was trying to accomplish: to attack Crews and at the same time to attack Wikipedia itself by showing how it lets rogue editors get away with attacks on living people. Anyone who wanted the article to conform to BLP policy should have stubbified it. Though he avoided criticising Cailil or Kukini directly, McWhinney's comment indicated that he thought they had not done enough to enforce the policy.

McWhinney is rumoured to be a gay activist in California. I already suspected that he was gay on the basis of his edit history (notably his involvement with the articles about Lyndon LaRouche and Aesthetic Realism) before discovering the rumours about him at Wikipedia Review. If McWhinney is a gay activist, then I hope that my candor (explaining that I was attacking Crews by exposing him as anti-gay) would be helpful to him in more ways than one, but I have little optimism about this, considering his anti-intellectualism and disdain for reading. It would certainly make much of his strange behaviour at Wikipedia, including the use of evasive, circular arguments to try to win editing disputes over issues involving homosexuality, easier to understand.

20. This comment was probably a BLP violation, but it still may not have been totally unreasonable to add it, since Crews has frequently complained that supporters of Freud have implied that he has psychological problems, and this was an especially dramatic example of what he was complaining about. What it shows about Andrew Sullivan that he would call someone who had implied that homosexuality was a mental disorder a maniac is a good question. It might be assuming too much to suppose that he was aware of Crews's remarks in Analysis Terminable and took umbrage, but who knows?

21. I originally found this comment in the Wikipedia article on The Discovery of the Unconscious. Whoever added it there presumably did so because he or she endorsed Crews's views; that made it all the more enjoyable to able to able to use it against Crews.

22. I also added a brief mention of Crews's criticism of Leo Bersani, to show that he had directed his remarks against other gay writers in addition to Butler, but removed it again, since it might look like a too-obvious attempt to focus the article on homosexuality.

23. See Whose Freud?, p 26-27, and 57. For the benefit of anyone who feels that I am reading too much into Crews's comments, let it be pointed out that Crews managed to interpret vague comments by Butler about his "interesting desire for respectability" as a McCarthyite accusation of homophobia: the evidence that Crews once did, or still does, have anti-gay attitudes is much stronger than the evidence that Butler ever accused him of holding them. If Crews wants to examine people's statements so closely, that is his look out. Crews's implied denial that anyone could decide what his opinions about homosexuality were on the basis of his published work is a retrospective distortion of his career and views, something he has accused Freud of doing.

Crews has accused Freud of such distortion most memorably in The Memory Wars, so it is worth examining his claims there. Crews writes in the introduction to this book, "Back in the late Sixties and early Seventies, a collision with the writings of philosophers such as Michael Polanyi, Karl Popper, Sidney Hook, and Ernest Nagel brought me to the painful realization that Freudianism in its self-authenticating approach to knowledge constitutes not an exemplification of the rational-empirical ethos to which I felt loyal, and to which Freud himself had professed allegiance, but a seductively mythic alternative to it." (p. 8) While some of Crews's essays written in the 1970s show an interest in the writers he mentions, his contributions to Psychoanalysis and Literary Process written in the late 1960s certainly do not. Things may well have been happening in the late 1960s that helped to undermine Crews's support for psychoanalysis, but a random "collision" with Michael Polanyi and Karl Popper cannot have been one of them.

24. Crews gave a misleading and over-simplified account of Freud's view of homosexuality in that interview, suggestive of a lack of scruple in dealing with psychoanalytic theory. Crews states that Freud called homosexuality a perversion; Freud called homosexuality an inversion, which he regarded as distinct from a perversion (see eg, Kenneth Lewes, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Male Homosexuality, p. 29). Crews claims that Freud believed that homosexuality is always and only caused by parental behaviour; Freud accepted that homosexuality might have biological causes in some cases.

25. Cailil, a politically correct editor heavily involved with editing articles about feminism, gender studies, and Michel Foucault, had earlier insinuated that I was trying to attack Judith Butler by mentioning Crews's criticism of her in the Butler article. This understandable, but completely incorrect, assumption angered me. Despite the danger that I would be blocked for my honesty, I explained that I had mentioned Crews's criticism of Butler to attack Crews (a counter-intuitive approach open to misunderstanding, but in my judgment, although what Crews said about Butler was partly right, the way he tried to criticise her was so flawed and dishonest that it made him look worse than she did). Cailil unconvincingly denied that he had been implying something about my motives. Note the hypocrisy of his behaving this way and then complaining when I made suggestions about his motives.

26. The "as you have expressed them" qualifier was added later, perhaps precisely because Cailil didn't want it to look as though he agreed with me. That the qualifier was an afterthought probably shows that he did privately agree, perhaps explaining why he did not remove the quotations.

27. Cailil never explained why he did not remove the quotations, or why he considered them legitimate article content. Cailil was later made an administrator, despite his poor handling of the Crews article, which failed to stop me from using Wikipedia to make a point. DGG, a well known administrator (real name David Goodman), also mishandled the issue by failing to remove the quotations. Goodman suggested that the quotations were not a big deal, commenting, "I simply can not see the implications of the quotations that you think so important." That was an amusing remark, since it was about comments by someone who read scandalous meaning into the comments of someone else, but I did not point out the irony. Considering Crews's later insistence that the quotations be removed, Goodman's comment shows a lack of appreciation for the extreme sensitivity of the issue.

28. Xxanthippe first suggested removing Crews's remarks about Butler in May. Xxanthippe described the exchange between Crews and Butler as "trivial", showing little knowledge of what had happened and elevating her personal judgment over that of the main participant in the incident. That Xxanthippe waited until June to remove the record of this exchange shows that she was remarkably slow to understand what was happening.

29. The "thorough review of sources" part of this edit summary is good, if it suggests that by June Shell Kinney had finally done the homework she should have done months ago and actually read some of Crews's books. One wonders what she was doing editing the article back in February if she was ignorant of his work then: how could she possibly judge whether his comments about homosexuality were important enough to be worth including?

"The actual references are being distorted by editor with agenda" part is rather puzzling, however: was Shell Kinney trying to suggest that it was untrue that Crews had criticised political influence on the American Psychiatric Association (whether or not this related to homoesxuality being declassified as a mental disorder), or that Crews thought psychoanalysis had inflicted suffering on parents? Both of these claims were obviously correct, and it was not necessary to agree with me about anything else to see that. The "distortion" referred to must therefore have been my comments on the talk page, with their supposedly incorrect interpretation of Crews's attitudes; it is hard to see why they should be relevant to what should be included in the article. Shell Kinney's purging of the article seems to suggest that she and Crews were both hyper-sensitive about the effects my past behaviour there might have.

The "please talk with me before reverting" part may indicate that Shell Kinney was worried that someone might think that she was going too far in removing all criticism of Crews, along with potentially relevant and encyclopedia-worthy comments about homosexuality. She may have been concerned that someone would undo her edit, just as Xxanthippe undid her previous stubbification of the article. Shell Kinney's failure to revert Xxanthippe back in April (which would have brought my campaign against Crews to an end, and saved him pain and annoyance) must have embarrassed her considerably.

The ultimate irony of this situation is that shortly before Shell Kinney made these edits, I was having second thoughts about my behaviour on Wikipedia and was toying with the thought that it was wrong to leave quotations in the Crews article that had been selected to discredit him. I briefly considered e-mailing Cailil to ask him to remove them. In the end, I decided against this, concluding that Crews deserved my attack after all: the point of this is that it should have been clear to any intelligent observer that the article still amounted to an attack on Crews, even after Cailil's and Xxanthippe's edits.

30. By then, the mention of criticism of Crews consisted of a single unremarkable sentence: "Crews's views have provoked controversy and several writers more supportive of psychoanalysis have criticized him." Why Crews found this neutrally worded and surely true statement objectionable is difficult to say. It may be that Crews did not want any kind of criticism whatever of him in the article, no matter how tame, but it is more likely that it was because one of its sources was Peter Brooks and Alex Woloch's Whose Freud?, which contained an account of his 1998 dispute with Judith Butler.

Crews's desire to have anything even indirectly connected with Butler removed from the article about him is striking, since back in 1998 he had been clear that her supposed accusation against him was of major importance. It is understandable that Crews wanted to remove all traces of an attack against him, but it was pathetic for him to first suggest that this incident was very important and a decade later demand that anything relating to it be censored.

31. It is never normally disclosed who makes an OTRS request, but their anonymity is a joke in cases when it is obvious who must have made the request. Crews might as well have told Shell Kinney to mention his name in her edit summary: "This article censored at the request of Frederick Crews."

32. I suspect this even though part of Wikipedia's policy states that, "We will not add content through e-mail. We have no staff to read documents, review official biographies, or add information to articles on request. " There is no guarantee that Wikipedia will actually function according to its policies; Shell Kinney may have felt that the ferocity of my attack against Crews demanded that he be compensated somehow.

33. The comments by Shell Kinney and Cailil implying that my views might have some basis showed this fear was reasonable, and the more recent comments by David Mertz underscore the point.

34. If this conclusion seems too extreme, consider what the unstated rationale behind keeping those quotations in the article must have been: Xxanthippe, Shell Kinney, and DGG must all have reasoned that the best way to respond to my attack against Crews was to deny that his comments could possibly mean what I thought they meant, to insist on their innocuousness (Kukini and Cailil may have had other reasons for not removing them). The moment it became clear that Crews found it essential to have his own comments removed, the credibility of this position collapsed: if Crews's insistence on removing the quotations was not a direct admission that my interpretation was correct, it was at least an admission that I had a case.

It may be argued that the quote from The Unknown Freud should have been removed because it was undue: it was, after all, only a brief aside in a longer work. This is probably correct. The quote from Analysis Terminable was not undue, however, and its removal meant that information without which Crews's rejection of psychoanalysis could not be properly understood was denied to readers of the article because it might embarrass or harm him.

35. Crews's references to homosexuals as "fairies" (The Pooh Perplex, p. 68) and "fags" (The Patch Commission, p. 170) may be evidence of borderline homophobia, but labelling him a homophobe would still probably be unjustified. These books are works of fiction that satirize the attitudes of their characters, but it would not be reasonable to assume that Crews was trying to criticise anti-gay attitudes: this simply would not have been done in works by a major literary critic before Stonewall. Crews's later, more apparently positive references to homosexuality are mainly an indication of his confusion.

The full passage in The Patch Commission dealing with homosexuality:

"Comm. Rubble: And let me level with you, I'll tell you a father's woe. You remember those two kids of mine in Toronto who send telegrams? You thought they were asking for money, right? They wire me flowers! I know you must think they're a couple of fags, but to the best of my knowledge . . . Comm. Patch: Well, sometimes it's hard for a parent to face the truth about these things. Comm. Rubble: The missus is worried, I can tell you." (p.169-170)

This passage is rather similar to the sixth paper in The Pooh Perplex, where "Murphy A. Sweat" treats the issue of whether a boy will become a "fairy" as a joke. Much like Sweat, Rubble and Patch are interested in whether children will become homosexual mainly because of their amused contempt for homosexuality. They show not concern for the children in question, but astonished bemusement at them. If the children become homosexuals, Rubble and Patch will be disappointed and disgusted, but not seriously worried about their well-being; indeed, they appear to have no real interest in their well-being. Crews recognises that parents may be unhappy if their children become homosexual, but considers it sophisticated to treat this as a joke: he implies that only buffoons like Rubble and Patch would be concerned about the feelings of parents dismayed at the homosexuality of their children.

36. Published in 1970, Starting Over included extracts from a number of essays that took a negative view of homosexuality. Among the material Crews and Schell saw fit to include was this naive and confused observation from Geoffrey Gorer, in Man Has No "Killer" Instinct: "What seem to me the most significant common traits in these peaceful societies [the Arapesh of New Guinea, etc] are that they all manifest enormous gusto for concrete physical pleasures - eating, drinking, sex, laughter - and that they all make very little distinction between the ideal characters of men and women, particularly that they have no ideal of brave, aggressive masculinity. Men and women have different primary sexual characteristics - a source of endless merriment as well as of more concrete satisfaction - and some different skills and aptitudes. No child, however, grows up with the injunctions, "All real men do . . ." or "No proper woman does . . .", so that there is no confusion of sexual identity; no cases of sexual inversion have been reported among them." (p. 28)

If Gorer's assertion is meant literally, he appears to be saying that because boys and girls in these societies are not told that men and women should behave differently, homosexuality is thereby prevented. Gorer does not consider that "All real men have sex with women" is probably one of the strongest messages about "all real men", just as "no proper woman has sex with other women" is probably one of the strongest messages about all real women. So without realizing it, Gorer is asking his readers to accept that not telling boys that all real men have sex with women will prevent them from becoming homosexual and that not telling girls that no proper woman has sex with other women will prevent them from becoming homosexual.

Gorer's fatuous remarks prove nothing about homosexuality, but everything about his own queasy sentimentality. He is in effect praising the Arapesh and other societies for supposedly avoiding something (homosexuality) that his own claims about the desirability of there being no expectations about male and female behaviour or character should suggest there is nothing wrong with. That Gorer's bizarre observations on homosexuality were included by Crews in Starting Over is revealing, since Crews's own work also tends to express poorly considered value judgments about sexual matters that undermine and destroy themselves. Such incoherent judgments are strongly evident in his key articles Analysis Terminable and The Unknown Freud.

Other material about homosexuality in Starting Over included the following remarks by Bruno Bettelheim in Growing up Female, all but equating homosexuality with contagious disease: "Mutually disappointed, it is natural that each sex seek out its own company; for only then can they really be themselves on a truly equal basis, freed of anxiety, disappointment, or inferiority feeling. Who has not observed the tendency of the sexes to segregate themselves in certain married circles? However, when relations between the sexes are so plagued, then a kind of homosexuality may also become rampant. And indeed, psychiatrists have recently been noting an alarming rise in both female and male homosexuality." (p. 57)

Similar to Betelheim is Jason Epstein's view in Living in New York, "To be without money in New York is usually to be without honor. The stately bankers, forever raising the ante, seem determined to destroy the very civilization that they feed on. They are making family life in New York impossible. Marriages increasingly become financially hopeless traps from which one barley escapes alive, or they become business partnerships to which children are extraneous. In such circumstances homosexual or other more solitary arrangements become preferable or even obligatory." (p. 147-148)

Along with Psychoanalysis and Literary Process, Starting Over shows that homosexuality was a major concern for Crews at the start of the 1970s and that he saw nothing wrong with reprinting material that supported or was compatible with a Freudian view of its origins. None of the articles in Starting Over invoked strictly psychoanalytic theories about homosexuality, but Gorer and Bettelheim were both supportive of psychoanalysis and would not be likely to express views that they believed contradicted the established Freudian theories about its causes. It is disturbing that Crews reprinted essays suggesting that homosexuality was a social problem which should somehow be eliminated in the same year he published a literary anthology focusing on homosexuality: Dickens, Melville, Joyce, Pater and Shakespeare would not have been what they were if homosexuality had not existed. Starting Over included testimony before the US Senate from openly homosexual writer Allen Ginsberg, but it was about drug use and did not mention homosexuality.

37. Psychoanalysis and Literary Process perhaps took the form it did because Crews's previous Freudian book, The Sins of the Fathers, had failed to resolve certain issues for him. Homosexuality was only a minor aspect of The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne's Psychological Themes, but it shows what happens when interest in homosexuality and discomfort with it co-exist: Crews resorts to euphemism and evasion. This happens first in the chapter on Giovanni's Garden, where Crews implies that there is a homosexual undertone to the relationship between Arthur Dimmesdale and Roger Chillingworth in The Scarlet Letter, but manages to do so without using the word homosexuality. Crews offers a negative value judgment on homosexuality in this chapter, suggesting that it is the abnormal preference of people who have failed at heterosexuality, and all but identifying it with sadism (p. 125-126). More interesting but also more evasive is Crews's discussion of Septimius Felton, where he deals with material (a man turning away from heterosexuality and drinking semen, which Crews, drawing on Ernest Jones's Essays in Applied Psychoanalysis, considers the meaning of the "elixir" in Hawthorne's story) that suggests homosexuality, but avoids this conclusion, choosing to label it "masturbatory." (p. 252-255)

Crews's interest in homosexuality is more strongly evident in Psychoanalysis and Literary Process, ironically because most of it was written by other people. That all of its articles deal with homosexuality except for Crews's may show that he wanted to explore homosexuality in relation to literature, but preferred to leave this task as much as possible to others. Crews had effectively handed homosexuality over to those more capable of dealing with it.

Albert D. Hutter's Crime and Fantasy in Great Expectations does not use the word homosexuality, but nevertheless deals with the subject, since it is closely related to its main theme of anality. The clearest reference to homoesxuality is on page 30: "The language of these warnings implies that Magwitch's strength is phallic and that he threatens Pip with both castration and a sexual attack on the passages of Pip's body."

David Leverenz's essay on Moby-Dick contains numerous references to homosexuality (pages 75, 82, 99, 108, 109, 111, 113, 114). The tone of some of Leverenz's comments, including "Even at the height of homosexual gratification, the sperm they squeeze is never their own" (p. 109), suggests that he cannot resist the temptation to deal with homosexuality as a joke, even in a serious work of literary criticism.

More significant than the contributions by Hutter and Leverenz is Sheldon R. Brivic's James Joyce: From Stephen to Bloom, which takes a Freudian position on the causes of homosexuality:

"We must also consider Stephen's homosexual aspect. According to Freud, all children start out in the early Oedipal and pre-Oedipal periods with ambivalent attitudes toward both parents. Thus, for a boy, in addition to the primary or normal Oedipus complex, which consists of love for the mother and a desire to be rid of the father, there is also initially a secondary or reverse Oedipus complex which combines love for the father with a desire to be rid of the mother and to supplant her. Ordinarily, the secondary complex grows weak at an early age, but where normal heterosexual development is obstructed, the secondary complex may revive. Stephen's homosexual component is first introduced when he hears a boy named Simon Moonan referred to as the prefect's "suck" (P 11). This means that Moonan is a scyophant, teacher's pet. But "suck" also means other things to Stephen:

Suck was a queer word . . . the sound was ugly. Once he had washed his hands in the lavatory of the Wicklow Hotel and his father pulled the stopper up the chain after and the dirty water went down through the hole in the basin. And when it had all gone down slowly the hole in the basin had made a sound like that: suck. Only louder.

To remember that . . . made him feel cold and then hot. There were two cocks that you turned and water came out: cold and hot . . . and he could see the names printed on the cocks. That was a very queer thing. And the air in the corridor chilled him too. It was queer and wettish. (P 11)

Stephen's disgust with Moonan's feminine role reminds him of his disgust with his mother's castrated genitals, "the hole in the basin." According to Freud, such a traumatic horror may lead either to fetishism, as it does in Stephen's case, or, if the horror of the female is insurmountable, to homosexuality. The description of the father pulling the stopper out of the hole seems to constitute a screen memory for the primal scene, the child's earliest vision of sexual intercourse between his parents. Pulling the plunger out may stand for putting it in, but it also suggests castration. This vivid memory indicates that Stephen conceives of sex in terms of violence. The washbasin scene is given a dense homosexual atmosphere by the repetition of the words "queer" (three times), "suck" (three times), and "cocks" (twice). It is a vision of the primal scene laden with anxiety about being forced into the feminine role.

One indication of what lies behind Stephen's inability to develop a normal masculine attitude is seen in the Christmas dinner scene. There Stephen sees his father as essentially a weak man, rendered impotent and defeated. The Christmas dinner argument breaks down into a conflict between the sexes: on the one hand are Simon Dedalus, John Casey, and Parnell, and on the other, Dante, the old lady from Arklow who is reported to have insulted Parnell, and Stephen's mother. Mrs. Dedalus is supposed to be neutral in this scene, but she seems to be aligned with the religious Dante rather than with the men. Stephen later feels that she is betraying him by her religiousness. At the end of the Christmas dinner conflict, Dante is triumphant and the men are all crushed. Stephen is terror-stricken to look up and see his father reduced to tears (P 39). Boys need a strong father to identify with, and the image that Stephen has of his father as essentially weak is related to Stephen's inability to assert proper masculinity. But even while this castrated image of the father is present, there is also another, threatening aspect of the father coexistent in Stephen's mind. Because Stephen has an unconscious Oedipal desire to destroy his father, he feels guilty whenever he sees his father injured. Therefore, every evidence of weakness in the actual father causes the separate, threatening image of the father to loom more terrifying before him." (p. 130-131)

James Joyce: From Stephen to Bloom contains other passages about homosexuality (pages 126, 148, 158) in addition to that quoted above. It does not directly blame parents for their children's homosexuality, but its claim that boys need a strong father to develop a "normal masculine attitude" (and by implication heterosexuality) could be read as suggesting that a father who is "weak" for some fault of his own might cause his son to become homosexual.

Richard L. Stein's The Private Themes of Pater's Renaissance is also concerned with the origins of homosexuality. It proposes a "direct examination of the nature of Pater's sexual inversion." (p. 175) Stein claims that for Pater, ". . .heterosexual love inevitably implies grave potential dangers, threats of castration, as a result of its incestuous connotations." It ". . . implies failure . . . and . . . environmental hostility." (p. 176) There are more references to homosexuality on pages 177 to 179, 193-194, 197 (where Stein quotes Freud writing that the discovery that women do not have a penis can turn Oedipal love into its opposite, creating disgust and causing "psychical impotence, misogyny and permanent homosexuality"), 198, 200, 202, and 208-212.

Murray M. Schwartz's Between Fantasy and Imagination: A Psychological Exploration of Cymbeline was less concerned with homosexuality than the other essays, but mentioned it in a footnote on page 272, and on page 274:

"Cymbeline is a regression in the service of Jupiter as superego, a god who takes care of humanity because it cannot take care of itself. The sheer power of such an internalized father would make homosexual submission and mother-identification almost inevitable."

The timing of Psychoanalysis and Literary Process must have been a disaster, since it came just as the gay liberation movement was exploding on American culture. The Stonewall riots had already happened when Crews wrote his preface in 1969. The theories that informed Psychoanalysis and Literary Process's approach to homosexuality came under increasingly intense attack in the 1970s, which could only make it an embarrassment. Crews seems not to have commented on Psychoanalysis and Literary Process since 1975, but its legacy can be seen in several of his subsequent essays.

When Crews wrote his postscript to Analysis Terminable in 1980, he was haunted by theories he had supported a decade earlier. Crews's claim that "the guilt dispensed by psychoanalytic theorists to . . . the parents of homosexuals . . . can be plausibly declined" does not show that he believed that Freudian theories about the causes of homosexuality are mistaken, or that his real concern was to prevent parents from feeling guilt. Rather than indicating disbelief in Freudian theories about homosexuality, those were the words of someone horrified at the thought that they might be true and angry at parents for causing their children to become homosexual. Crews's parodies from the 1960s, The Pooh Perplex and The Patch Commission, had already shown his belief that parents were responsible for their children becoming homosexual and his scorn for them: writing a fictional paper expressing outrage at Kanga for making Roo and Tigger homosexual would hardly be worth doing unless one believed parents were responsible for their children's homosexuality and felt disdain at them. Analysis Terminable expresses the similar sentiments, except that here the disdain for the parents of homosexual children in Poisoned Paradise has become deep rage and Crews is attempting to shift this anger onto Freud and psychoanalysis instead.

Freudian theories about homosexuality contaminate the sexual identity of parents by connecting their behaviour with homosexuality. That contamination is intolerable because of how it makes Crews feel, not because of its effects on parents. The implication that there is something abnormal about parents and their sexual identity, which is inextricably connected to that of their blood relatives, could only be be unbearable for someone who esteems parenthood or identifies with parents, so unbearable that it overwhelms all rational considerations. Had Crews been able to approach the issue rationally, he would have realized that theories about how parental behaviour influences sexual development could help prevent the homosexuality for which he had such contempt, but his horror at the thought that parents had any connection with homosexuality ruled out that approach. Some knowledge is intolerable to a certain kind of mind whatever its possible applications.

Crews would deny that behind his rage at psychoanalysis for suggesting that parents make their children homosexual lies a deeper rage at parents for making their children homosexual, but his long history of shifting and contradictory claims about homosexuality (fallout from the unpleasant effects that gay liberation had on the editor of Psychoanalysis and Literary Process) shows that he is unable to understand his own motives.

38. Had Mertz done this, it would have been very convenient for me, because it would inevitably have lead to further publicity for my views about Crews on Wikipedia. ==