We know that animals, children and other cultures are less finicky on this subject than our own culture.

We know there aren't enough prisons or psychiatric wards to handle all homosexuals, nor enough moral fiber in all the world to prevent all of them from doing what homosexuals are impelled to do. We know that current puritan attitudes encourage fear, guilt, hypocricy and blackmail. Few homosexuals in our society are permitted to be healthily adjusted, yet few, if any experts can cure any but borderline cases, and most homosexuals will remain that for the rest of their lives. We know that a few homosexuals seek converts. Under certain circumstances, many men are receptive enough, without any loss of their usual heterosexual power or preference.

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Beyond this, it seems probable that there may be discovered important connections between homosexuality and the aesthetic impulse, as well as the feminist (woman's-place-is-not-necessarily-in-the-home) impulse in women. It has also been suggested that since men and women in our culture have grown so unlike as to lack mutual understanding, homosexuals may provide a sort of bridge of sympathy. However, we do not know (having little relevant data) whether it is safe or desirable for society to release the restrictions on homosexuality, however, obviously our own personal interests might seem to demand this.

It was noted earlier that the dichotomy between liberty and utility holds society together, while permitting change and growth. One provides the good hard work, the other originality. Individuals dominated by one principle or the other will often despise their opposites, yet they are mutually indispensible.

The independents are prone to deprecate the solid and conservative work, while they themselves, seeming more brilliant, are more profligate of their talents. For every artist, inventor or new thinker, there are a thousand poseurs, cranks and cheap cynics. Yet it is in the nature of liberty, variation, creativity, that the impulse cannot be fettered, channelized, standardized or scheduled.

The heterosexual drive is obviously basic to the utilitarian impulse-procreation and the family are at the root of the conservative part of human life, but as Francis Bacon noted in Of Marriage and Single Life:

"He that bath wife and children bath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises."

I should say, somewhat as Gide maintained in Corydon, that the homosexual impulse is an integral part of the libertarian drive, which is the wellspring of art and innovation. This does not mean only overt homosexuals are artists or inventors, for as both Freud and Kinsey have shown, the homosexual impulse is not limited to overt homosexuals. Rather, it is probable that all humans, if free from the worst of their repressions, would find both a homosexual and a heterosexual side to their personalities. And each side would determine, in a healthy way, certain parts of one's interests and activities.

This theory, in part, is commonplace to the man in the street who assumes that all artists, be they even so assertively masculine as a Hemmingway, have a queer streak, an effiminate streak.

But this is hypothetical, an attempt to show that homosexuality might be useful to society. But we cannot at this stage say that we know enough about homosexuality or about society to judge finally whether homosexuality can or ought to be eradicated, tolerated or considered natural.

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