Toynbee notes how a challenge in the environment can be so overwhelming that men go under and are destroyed; but if adequate response is within their resource, they not only survive, but become greater for the experience. Any homosexual in our culture who has made a good life for himself and others may properly feel quiet pride, and thank God for the resources of character that enabled him to meet the challenge.
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For the first time since St. Paul's pathologic views on sex set the pattern for Christian taboos, we can contemplate the possibility of a literature to guide the homosexual toward a good life. Few of us may do the writing, but we can encourage the writers to appear, and indicate what we most need from them.
The basic problem of the average homosexual today is not his conflict with the law, but his conflict with prevailing community ideals. standing behind the law of what makes the good man.
The ideals are our first and chief order of business.
Laws and dogma that set the values of a society for two millenia do not succumb to a mere 50 years of change. Our Western legal code primarily serves to maintain, in public, the prevailing ideas of decorum. It is a great new freedom that the enforcers now rarely follow people into their homes. As community ideals and outlooks change, it is not so much the basic law that changes as the ways of interpreting and enforcing it and that, chiefly in this last generation.
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Our new freedom to discuss homosexuality (but not to advocate a fine distinction) arises in an epoch when, for the first time since the Elizabethan age, the code permits speaking of practically anything on the stage, in a book or in a specialized magazine but not in the movies, press, radio, T.V. or general magazines.
It is still a precarious freedom
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anyone identifying publicly with it risks loss of social and economic status. We are not yet near the freedom that permitted Shakespeare to dedicate love sonnets to a youth, or a prominent man of Leonardo's time to write glowing love letters to another without fear or shame, or an ancient Greek to proudly announce he had been chosen by another man.
This new freedom of speech frees none of us of the need for making obeisance to all the ancient idols in all the market places. We must not risk all our gains by blind impulses to run away with the bit.
The early Christians were not sent to the lions for merely proclaiming a new ethic, nor for denying the ancient gods, which all intelligent Romans doubted. They went to gaol and to the arena for refusing to pay lip service to those doubted deities. They missed an important fact: when the ancient dogmas that have held a society together are themselves falling apart, the insecurity of the masses demands increased public homage to the idols-ceremony to give the anxious millions the passing illusion of stability.
No individual may rely on law to protect him in an anxious, doubtridden society if he openly flouts required ceremonials. Constitution and theory notwithstanding, no individual enjoys inherent rights in any tribe or nation, save those society accords him, in line with current interpretation of its own interest. In practice, law will always be interpreted to permit prevailing sentiment to feel itself served. In this age of tottering taboos, our new opportunity to openly express homosexual outlooks may itself arouse new public apprehensions. It should be more necessary than ever for us to observe in public the ancient esteemed proprieties.
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