some personal observations

Luther Allen

Human sexuality, all of it, is an obscure, Protean and complex affair. Beyond a certain point in our thinking the problems of homosexuality merge with the problems of sexuality in general. Consider the extent of the ramifications of sex in everyone's life. There is the raw sexuality which appears in our dreams when we are asleep and in our most unguarded day-dreams. There are the overtones and undertones of sex which appear in both our most casual daily contacts and our most idealistic works of art. There is the sexuality of the Song of Songs, which St. Bernard of Clairvaux interpreted as symbolical of the longing of the soul for the love of God, and the union of the soul of man with God. Physiologically, sex seems to involve one's entire nature; it works powerfully upon our endocrines, our sympathetic nervous system, our central nervous system, including the sensory and motor apparatus, neural and mus-

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cular. Sexuality involves memory to its deepest layers, our faculty for the association of ideas in elaborate patterns, and that greatest of our psychic endowments, imagination. One's sexuality engages his moral feelings to the utmost and has deep effects upon one's social outlook, attitudes and behavior. Sexuality is woven through and through the fabric of our humanness. All this is true for homosexual and heterosexual alike.

I suppose mankind has been discussing sex ever since there have been languages to discuss it in. And of one thing we may now be sure the last word never will be said. Sex is a complex, Protean, mysterious kind of thing. So let's not expect any simple formulae to explain away homosexuality.

Everyone in the past half century has been obsessed to discover the causes of homosexuality. There hasn't been nearly enough concern for its effects.