magazines, and many educated people lived for decades without any awareness of it. Historians of the American scene have even been deluded into believing that the complete cloak of silence existed because there was no homosexuality at the time, and they denounce those who interpret in this manner the writings of Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Henry James, as being inconsistent with the prevailing puritanical codes of nineteenth century America.

This change that has taken place is not so much one of greater acceptance of the homosexual on the part of American society, but rather an acknowledgment of the existence of the minority and of the problem involved therein. Once "homosexual" was the most unmentionable, the most unprintable, of any word, except for the so-called obscenities, in the English language. Today it is mentioned and printed everywhere, but, to use the expression of Menninger, it is today the "most electric" word in our language. From silence to discussion, even without enlightenment, is progress, for enlightenment becomes inevitable through discussion, and impossible without it.

Within the most advanced cultural circles, it is today rare to find outright condemnation of homosexual activities. Whether one looks to Kinsey, who reaches an audience far wider than any other leader in sex thinking in the history of America (and possibly in world history, save for Freud), or whether one looks to psychiatrists, church leaders, and others, it is today not at all uncommon to find the homosexual defended by men of the highest intellectual integrity.

For example, on the question of arrests, Kinsey recently spoke before the National Probation and Parole Association, and stated that there are cities in the United States where more than half of the alleged sex offenses are initiated by police intent on obtaining blackmail. Furthermore, he said, "there are cities in which there is no greater blackmail racket than that operated by police against homosexuals." This statement received wide publicity in the newspapers, and it is a statement that is of utmost importance because it is characteristic of a new thinking and a new approach: namely, the homosexual is no longer a pariah without his intellectual defender.

Permit me to cite a few other examples. Dr. Robert W. Laidlaw, speaking before the Section on Marriage and Family Counseling of the National Council on Family Relations, stated: "It happens that I act as psychiatric consultant in a theological seminary, where one finds a very high type of individual particularly in the music school who is beset by homosexual conflicts. . . A few months ago, in a seminary with the faculty of this seminary, we had quite a discussion in regard to whether homosexuality, per se, should disqualify a man from the ministry. I steadfastly upheld the platform that it should not."2 (Emphasis in original).

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