committed in scores of different ways. These commitments, their demands on time, and the responsibilities which they incur make for increasing difficulty in relating personal attachments of any sort, sexual or otherwise, to the many other demands of modern living. We tend to blame the deterioration of modern sexual mores on these factors, and not without reason, as the strained pace of contemporary civilization is far from conducive to deep, harmonious. and lasting personal relationships. The homosexual. more than others, having no established social ideals to follow except those borrowed (in some respects rather incongruously from the romantic heterosexual tradition, is often at sea, and prone to desert even the most elementary standards of prudent behavior in his search for emotional and sexual satisfaction.

In the heterosexual world there are externally-derived reasons and a logic to sexual mores to which the heterosexual, however dubiously or unwillingly, usually gives his assent, for the sake of home and family on the one hand, or for the sake of presenting an outward show of decency on the other. For the homosexual, who is generally presumed to be indecent by his very character, and for whom no open standards of social decency have yet been objectively established, any reasonableness and logic to sexual morality appears to be non-existent. There is a tendency to take the elements of mutual consent, privacy, and age (quite satisfactory merely as a basis for public legislation) as if these were the be-all and end-all of the personal ethics involved-and this in the teeth of the fact that heterosexual ethics and mores could not possibly rest upon such a slender foundation. The difficulty (and also the supremely challenging opportunity) for the homosexual lies in the fact that there are no external, social conditions from which to derive a logic and an ethic for his relationships. Whatever logic and ethic there is to be derived must somehow be forged and brought out from inner conditions of well-being and character which have only an indirect (even though highly significant) social outcome.

The term "ethics" refers to a standard of behavior, and this, with further reference to a defined set of conditions and circumstances. The nature of this context of conditions and circumstances describes the sphere of life in which ethics is to be studied and understood. We speak, for example, of professional ethics, political ethics, business ethics, etc., and because we habitually do this we often suppose that these fields of ethical values are without any central relationships. However, a little examination is sufficient to show that these seemingly different kinds of ethics are merely different applications of the same basic ethical principles which are universal for human nature and its capacities for thought and action.

Sexual instincts. as we have before observed. are so interrelated with our varied abilities for thought, sensation. and emotion that an ethic for sexual behavior may be sought in many different contexts of experience. Naturally, the wider the context, the more likely it will be that our ethical conclusions will prove adequate to any and all circumstances. "Sexual Ethics." in its most limited sense, could refer merely to mutual consideration between parties in a sexual act. In a wider context, it could refer also to the conditions of courtship-the motives from which courtship was paid and accepted, and, in addition. a considerable sequence of personal relationships and experience-values which are quite independent of sexual values. These would include economic relationships, and the intimate personal relationships of family, home, and parenthood. if this were involved. In the still larger context of spiritual and cultural values. "sexual ethics" loses a great deal of its sexual importance. as sexuality itself becomes a

29