It was more acceptable to be homophobic back then so you have to cut him a little slack. They wouldn't publish a new article like that today. There isn't some fundamental truth about good and bad things to write - it depends on how people judge you, which depends on the arbitrary changes in culture.
The same author in a 2015 article I linked to elsewhere in this discussion:
“In 1970, some 45 years ago, I wrote an essay in -Harper’s on the subject of homosexuality. The chief points of my essay were that no one had a true understanding of the origins of human homosexuality, that there was much false tolerance on the part of some people toward homosexuals; that for many reasons homosexuality could be a tough card to have drawn in life; and that given a choice, owing to the complications of homosexual life, most people would prefer their children to be heterosexual. Quotations from that essay today occupy the center of my Wikipedia entry. In every history of gay life in America the essay has a prominent place. When I write something controversial, this essay is brought up, usually by the same professional gay liberationists, to be used against me. That I am pleased the tolerance for homosexuality has widened in America and elsewhere, that in some respects my own aesthetic sensibility favors much homosexual artistic production (Cavafy, Proust, Auden), cuts neither ice nor slack. My only hope now is that, on my gravestone, the words Noted Homophobe aren’t carved.”
> It was more acceptable to be homophobic back then so you have to cut him a little slack.
No, I don't.
This guy was not writing from an era where homosexuality was hidden and secret and accurate information was impossible to find. By '89, the gay rights movement was in full swing. Any intelligent adult who was still ignorant about what it meant to be gay chose to be ignorant.
