As to the genesis of homosexuality, Dr. Lindner tells us: "Given this picture of a sex-rejective and sex-repressive society, inversion must be ... a pattern of sex orientation adopted by certain individuals as their solution to the conflict between the urgency of the sexual instincts and the repressive efforts brought to bear upon sexual expression by the reigning sex morality. The condition is, then, in essence a reaction of non-conformity, a rebellion of the personality that seeks to find-and discovers-a way in which to obtain expression for the confined erotic drives." The anti-sexualism and conformism of our society, then, is the very cause of homosexuality in the first place.

But at this point, Dr. Lindner displays a characteristic of his work which is evident in many places: underneath his advocacy of "creative rebellion," obscured by his hard-hitting criticisms of all aspects of conformism, there lies a view of the good life and the good society which is scarcely distinguishable from the ideals of many of those he so severely criticizes. Still speaking of homosexuality he writes: "While the condition is doubtless a reaction-pattern of rebellion, it is . . . a negative one. In this respect it takes its place with the neuroses, criminoses and psychoses, all of which, as I have declared repeatedly, are destructive rather than constructive expressions of that protestant, lifeaffirming instinct which has set humanity at the crown of creation."

"Presently, homosexuality is the source of immense quantities of unhappiness and frustration to large numbers of individuals and a chronically irritating generator of intrahuman hostility." This, to me, is like advocating that all Jews should be brainwashed into becoming gentiles because being members of a disliked minority in a gentile world causes much unhappiness, and besides, the presence of Jews in our society is a "chronically irritating generator of intrahuman hostility."

Dr. Lindner views the homosexual as a rebel, which is, in his opinion, goodbut a negative, destructive, unprogressive rebel, not one of the creative kind. He does qualify his judgment to this extent: "This is not to say that the individual homosexual may not, in and of himself, be a valuable, contributing person whose life and work give impetus to evolution: it is merely to face the fact that as a 'way' it fails to satisfy the requirements."

In the second section of his essay Dr. Lindner seeks for the reasons why so numerically strong an element in the population has for so long failed to join forces to give expression to its grievances and aspirations and to work for change. "One obvious reason is that the inverts do not comprise a well-defined minority. The homosexual is found on all levels of society..."

Dr. Lindner admits that in recent times the status of the homosexual seems to have changed for the better, attributing this seeming change to a specific defensive device adopted by homosexuals for their own protection and to similar defensive devices permitting society to mask its anti-sexualism as "progressive rationality."

As for the seeming improvement in social attitude, Lindner says: "A young man (or woman) . . . although apparently deluged with sex-information and surrounded by all kinds of agencies presumably dedicated to his enlightenment. and the hygiene of his mind, may live almost indefinitely in a vacuum of ignorance and solitude, fearful of exposure, condemned to tormenting and rejecting. himself. This is because, on the whole, the really influential institutions of our

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