How To End Hostility Toward Homosexuals

By SAL MAKIS

Yes, I know that title contains a very ambitious promise. Perhaps some of you have suffered so much from public and private hostility that you have almost begun to accept it as an unchangeable condition of life-yet you are allowing your hope to rise anew as you consider that title and begin to read. I recognize my responsibility toward you. I have promised you a method that you can put to practical use immediately, and I shall humbly do my best to fulfill that promise.

Will you, for your part, do this: read on only if you earnestly desire to become aware of such a method. If it would be of little difference to you. I suggest that you read elsewhere for your diversion. for the words that follow will only be pleasant to one who is ready to hear them. Agreed?

Now, if I have thinned down my audience to an attentive few, I'll reward your attention with some definite declarations aimed directly at the heart of the problem. First, I shall state the method; then I'll show why it is the method; and next I'll explain to those who believe it would be difficult how they can do it easily.

Here is the method: The way to end hostility toward homosexuals from heterosexuals is to end the hostile attitude toward heterosexuals from homosexuals FIRST.

This, you will recognize, is a specific adaptation of the Golden Rule. It is worthy to be called a true law, for it never fails. Lesser rules and customs are always displaced by higher ones, but it is futile to try force or warfare among ideas at the same level. Existing regulations are correctly overcome in only one way: by enforcing codes that are higher and more comprehensive in the scale of mutual consideration.

It has been the tendency for many homosexuals to complain, crusade, and cause constant commotion in the mistaken hope that somehow they could effect a complete change in heterosexual attitudes, thereby leaving a world of sweet brotherly love in which the homosexual would be free to disport himself according to his own preferences without ridicule. Yes, we shall have a world of brotherly love, all right-that is a universal goal which cannot be held back permanently by any amount of misdirected efforts-but whose responsibility is it to be brotherly and loving first? I say that the homosexual must take this step first; that the other way around would be out of order and impossible. If you wish to wait for the heterosexual to strew your path with roses, go right ahead; but make yourself comfortable, dear, for you'll have a long, long wait! Better do a little rose strewing yourself instead.