We already have in American tradition a world-esteemed foundation stone for a homosexual literature the CALAMUS section of Whitman's LEAVE OF GRASS. Whitman wrote CALAMUS in his youth; he felt it necessary to deny, in his old age and fame, the meaning of those extraordinary pages:

"For an athlete is enamored of me, and I of him,

But toward him there is something fierce and terrible in me eligible to burst forth. I dare not tell it in words, not even in these songs."

With the unprecedented means of mass communication now in our hands, it is uniquely possible for millions of men to consider together the meaning of their homosexual impulse. This is a responsibilty to be used well, lest it be withdrawn, for ourselves and for countless unborn.

*

The literature we need is not chiefly to serve the future; the need is now. When writers use their new freedom to show the homosexual impulse in man as like fire, neither good nor evil in itself, but applicable to good ends, and when they show such expression linking a man to humanity's noblest aspirations then we shall be on our way out of the homosexual woods.

Every man's basic problem is to establish relatedness with others. Psychic health is impossible to the emotionally isolated. ONE is establishing some lines of communication between a few thousand humans who many of them have felt quite alone. Like men come together on the ramparts in the night, we may talk freely, taking courage and inspiration from one another.

-

-

Society is filled with those who are desperately sick just because they are walled off from the life currents that can flow into each of us only when they can flow onward through us. Many regard homosexuality as a psychic sickness. A homosexual is not sick because he is homosexual, but because he is an isolate.

In the word of C. P. Cavafy: (*)

"Without thought, without remorse, without shame, they built thick and high walls around me.

and now I sit despairing here.

I think of nothing else: this fate gnaws at my mind . . ."

The promiscuous ones, moving through life unrelated, are as much isolates as is the man who sits in prison alone. Sex relates us to others only when there is a communication at all psychic levels.

Small wonder there are so many starved ones, unrelated ones, sick ones in a withdrawn society where only the heterosexual can find ready appreciation for his whole self where only he can live safely and carelessly, receiving guidance from the codes, where the homosexual can scarcely find even a book to help his self-awareness.

-

The recent novels, and most of Gide's and Wilde's work, like case histories in psychological texts, finish as ugly tragedies. TEA AND SYMPATHY, packing in houses along with THE IMMORALIST, is saved from tragedy by the hero's discovered ability to make love to a woman at the end the one sure way an accused homosexual might prove to today's public he is a good and desirable man.

—

*Modern Greek Poetry, An Anthology.

page 21