(Recently LOOK magazine has been running a series on "human nature." There have been such articles as "How Much Do We Know About Men?" and "How Much Do We Know About Women?" ONE's editors do not know what other articles are planned for the series, but they are sure it will not include one with the above title. Here Mr. Freeman makes some points omitted by the Cowles publication.)

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Homosexuals have existed in all parts of the world, among all peoples and all cultures, since man's emergence in the watered valleys of our young planet. The roles they have played in the history of our Earth have varied greatly. At one time we find they were revered, at another hunted down like beasts of prey, at yet another more or less tolerated. Somewhat like the Eternal Jew, the homosexual has lived in all parts of the world, been a part of all cultures while maintaining an identity of his own. It would take a thousand treatises to discuss his life in all the cultures in which he has participated. In this article I shall devote myself to some observations on the male homosexual in the United States today.

Whether the American homosexual was brought up in a rich family or a poor one, whether his father was the owner of a grocery store on Main Street in North Platte, Nebraska, a street railway motorman from 145th Street in East Cleveland or a yachtsman with a 100-foot boat docked at Balboa, California, it's a safe bet that the homosexual son of this father had experienced more of the gamut of human emotions at the age of eighteen than the father had in his entire life.

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H

omosexual male?

by david I. freeman

Let us imagine a case (typical of thousands reported by researchers in the field) of a boy who realizes at the age of fourteen or fifteen that he is homosexual. He may not know the meaning of the word, but he knows that he is "different from the other boys" that, for reasons he couldn't explain if asked, his orientation to life is different from that of the people around him. Undoubtedly he has a Great Love Affair at the age of fifteen or sixteen. It may or may not be consummated, but it is almost invariably with a heterosexual boy of nearly his own age. It almost always ends disastrously, and at a very tender age he knows both the joy of love and the bereavement of rejection (or -even worse-discovery by a disapproving society).

While the heterosexual of the same age plays around (in a way completely approved by society) with many members of the opposite sex, experiences success here, failure there but maintains his masculine confidence undisturbed because he knows he's doing the socially-acceptable thing, the homosexual is very unsure of himself. In his earliest childhood he has experienced rejection-on the school ground, in a Boy Scout camp, among boys everywhere

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