There is nothing good to be said in favor of the effects of cancer. Cancer kills. Cancer is altogether an evil. Therefore, science seeks out the causes of cancer in order to exterminate it.

Science has also sought for the causes of homosexuality in order to exterminate it. Somewhere Freud wrote that psychoanalysis is psychic surgery, or words to that effect. Now, homosexuality can certainly cause a man great unhappiness. But so can heterosexual love, and frequently does! On the other hand, although I have suffered much because of unrequited homosexual love, I have also known enormous happiness. I would not willingly permit my homosexuality to be amputated. A cancer patient could not conceivably feel that way towards his disease.

We can point to a few marvelous human achievements which were indubitably homosexually inspired. Whitman's best poems, Michaelangelo's most powerful and characteristic works, to mention a couple of well-known examples. It is at least possible for the homosexual, by means of those very homosexual emotions which society condemns, to enrich his culture greatly. It seems to me that such effects are quite the opposite of the effects of illness.

Who knows, at this stage of the game, how much of positive value in personal relations, and in social and cultural contributions unknown or disguised homosexuals have had the ability and strength to give. It is certainly important to seek for the causes of homosexuality, but it seems to me more pertinent to the larger human issues involved to study its effects. Questions of value do not arise when a disease such as cancer is concerned. There can be no question there. But questions of value must be raised and discussed before any social solution to the homosexual problem can be found.

It is of little importance to adult human experience or to our social and cultural life, to discover what happened to Walt Whitman when he was an infant causing him to be homosexual in later years. It is of great importance to evaluate Walt Whitman as an adult homosexual male.

To many a homosexual the very thought of heterosexual coitus is as repugnant as the various modes of homosexual intercourse are to the average heterosexual. Both homosexual and heterosexual forget one thing in judging one another, and I think I can make that thing clear by means of a neutral illustration which both homosexual and heterosexual understand. To most of us the odor of a

baby who has vomited or otherwise soiled itself is quite unpleasant, but to the child's mother, not so. Her love for the baby is so strong that it largely obliterates the unpleasantness. Love of every sort invests its object with a powerful glamor and the greater emotion obliterates the lesser one. Where the details of physical love are concerned, no third person can rightly criticize two lovers' acts, from the aesthetic point of view, for everything depends upon the subjective vision of the two. At one time or another all of us have asked, or have heard others ask, "What in the world does he see in her?" or "How the hell can she see anything in him?" These are essentially aesthetic questions, and a young man might blithely paraphrase the cliché usually applied to art and reply, "I don't know anything about women but I know what I like!" and may well be within his rights. No doubt when the heterosexual male becomes aware of a pair of homosexual lovers he experiences a similar mystification, vastly intensified: "What in Christ's name does he see in him?" The objection is still predominantly an aesthetic one, and as in the other examples, irrelevant, immaterial and out of bounds. However, it might be possible for the protesting heterosexual to find an answer to his question were he to employ the psychic tools of intuition and empathy, just as he would do in achieving an appreciation of a work of art.

To me the very odor of anchovies or sardines is nauseating. It is utterly incomprehensible how so many other persons can devour those stinking little fish with such zest. I am forced to admit, however, that the delight of the fish-lovers is perfectly genuine, their taste for those edibles does me no harm, in short, it is none of my business what other people eat as long as they do not attempt to force their preferences upon me. And now, let's be frank for a moment and also admit that most of us have, at one time or another, felt that the religious beliefs and practices of persons whose faiths differed from our own were pretty ridiculous, and we wondered and marvelled that otherwise sane and responsible adults could be found engaging in preposterous pantomime which made no more objective sense than playing "Patty-cake". And what of the individual eccentricities of our neighbors? If old Mrs. Merriweather next door rises at dawn each day and stands on her head in the back yard for fifteen minutes, should we call out the Vigilantes? Mrs. Tucker is incensed because Mrs. Merriweather shows her legs.

5