In our May issue Arthur B. Krell ("We Need A Great Literature") introduced one of the biggest challenges ONE has ever offered to serious-minded homosexuals. Now one of our own staff takes up the discussion. Striking out boldly, he demands that you ACT and predicts what might happen if you do!

LITERATURE

TERATURE AND HOMOSEXUALITY

david I. freeman

While society pronounces homosexuals degenerate and psychiatrists usually consider them emotionally unbalanced, many homosexuals believe themselves. to be uncommonly gifted, intelligent or sensitive. Contemporary literature by and about homosexuals, however, seems to verify the general opprobrium, for almost without exception it is morbid, bohemian, introverted, unrealistically romantic and perverted. Without more than one or two exceptions it is also badly written. There are several reasons for this, but none confirm the belief that homosexuals are either degenerate or mentally ill.

In evaluating homosexual literature it is necessary to glance briefly at Western literature generally, for our homosexual writers, participating as they do in the dominant culture, inevitably adopt the conventions and styles of their contemporaries. Never in history have so many tons of pulp and slick paper as reach the newsstands daily been given over exclusively to malignant scribbling designed to sell but devoid of anything approximating elevation of mind or soul-classical goals of the artist. The so-called serious literature, while often on a high artistic level, seems afflicted with chronic emotional depression. Highly introspective, it concentrates its genius on rehashings of Platonic idealism, Korzybskyism, existentialism, Vedantism, neo-Catholicism, warmed-over Freudianism.

Where are the lusty humor, the honest tragedy one finds in the literature of young robust peoples-nations in birth, cultures struggling for survival or striving toward eras of their greatest flowering? We find this literary honesty— this author's identification with his audience in Marlowe (rise of the Elizabethan Age), Hawthorne (emergence of a great, new nation), Dickens (flowering of British capitalism) and Dreiser (America as a world power). Whitman describes, lives and is part of the era of the American Civil War, one of the greatest conflicts for liberty in all of human history. What has happened to the simple but very moving beauty of poetry to life, nature and love? Where are our Wordsworths, de Maupassants, Sudermanns, Heines, Whittiers? Are there no more socially-conscious, poetically ACTIVE writers-Whitman, Zola, Dostoevski, Czechov?

It is true that most of these lights of Western literature were occasionally introspective, confused or downright morbid at one time or another. It might be argued, also, that many of them are inferior to or no better than some of our contemporaries. Why is it, then, that all the writers above were in some

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