constant fear of a "raid" or vice squad "plants." Under less restrictive conditions (such as exist in most of Europe) few homosexuals show any affinity for such places.

Police raids involving homosexuals have had many questionable and some ridiculous aspects. Men were charged with homosexuality on Miami Beach for wearing "flimsy bathing attire. There and in Santa Monica men have been arrested for being on a part of the beach "habituated by homosexuals." In Baltimore recently, the Pepper Hill Club was raided and everyone present (162) was taken in and booked. This has been common practice, though frowned on by some courts, as was true in the Baltimore In Charlotte and Boise the discovery that some homosexuals were involved in acts with minors (the adult, though responsible, is not always the agressor) led to general rests of homosexuals in the community.

We do not deny the necessary function of police powers. We recognize the areas of natural conflict between those powers and the "pursuit of happiness." But we question whether the thoroughgoing discrimination against the homosexual is necessary to the preservation of social order. We maintain on the contrary that this very discrimination threatens order, in encouraging unwarranted excesses of the police power, in unnecessarily making a large class of potentially useful citizens anti-social, in creating festering spots of fear and hatred, in thwarting the lives and natural development for millions who have no alternative and in magnifying dangerous guilt feelings in other segments of the population.

Public hysteria and attacks on homosexuals have increased as the subject comes more into the light. David Riesman has suggested that as the Negro progressively escapes his role as public scapegoat, and as the Communist hunt grows stale, bigoted are likely to turn more to homosexuals for attack.

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What would be the consequences of relaxing some parts of the restrictions? Would the walls of morality come tumbling down? Would men desert heterosexual monogamy? Would the birth rate fall disastrously? We think not, and in this, the British Medical report agrees. Such consequences could follow only if heterosexuality itself were assumed to be unnatural and enforced only by restrictive law. Most men,being basically heterosexual, will remain so without legal force. Likewise the homosexual minority will remain generally as it is despite prejudice, laws or mores. In no society, past or present, no matter how restrictive, has homosexuality been absent. In no society, no matter how permissive, has the natural impulse of the majority been impaired by granting freedom to inverts.

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Objection may be raised to classifying homosexuals as a minority denied its natural outlet discriminated against and persecuted. Some will say this discrimination" is society protecting its moral integrity; that the "persecution" necessary police action against gross indecency; that what we call a natural outlet for a minority is a most unnatural outlet for anyone. The popular view of homosexuals is as willful perverts who choose to live a corrupted life. Since even scientists often begin with premises generally accepted in the

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