Arthur B. Krell

WE NEED

A GREAT LITERATURE

To satisfy his basic needs in the world, a man may try either to adjust himself to his environment, or so to change the environment that it supplies more of what his nature demands.

In practice, we each make efforts in both directions, a process which tends to build what we call character in the individual and culture in the race. Such interplay between inner and outer adjustment is especially trying for the homosexual, whose environment denies some of his most basic psychic needs.

Generations of tribal effort have superimposed on our geographic landscape a friendly psychic landscape, to surround at least a majority with an atmosphere conducing to their best work. Man depends on this psychic manna of warm human assoiation for a vital kind of learning. Through countless media, the heterosexual youth discovers the patterns that make for successful living. The tribal wisdom is at hand, even in the crassest film or fiction, to help him discover his nature, relate himself; to guide him to the prevailing and approved male outlooks; to show him hero-ideals to emulate; to put him on the road to becoming a man of integrity.

The homosexual has no such guidance, not even a romantic literature to suggest ideals, nor any suitable biographical literature relating his self-knowledge to the lives of others. At first, he assumes he is like the tribe in his needs, capacities, desires. Awakening from this error, he may stumble on for the rest of his days trying to develop piecemeal the patterns that may help him live in society as a whole man.

The Negro or Jewish individual does not stand alone; he is guided by group tradition and linked in warm human relationships.

The homosexual finds no bond between his love feeling and the familiar values about him. The emotion that can seem to him the very gleam from his soul, he finds despised. Either he must reject himself or be rejected by his esteemed peers. And that spurned love nature is the sole material from which a human can forge strong bonds to the society around him.

The wonder is that many do become good, useful and sometimes great men. With social antagonism, it is easy for the homosexual to start by despising himself and to end by despising those social institutions which need his loyalty almost as much as he in turn needs their support.

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