EDITORIAL

Frequently a community becomes inflamed by a particularly brutal sex murder of the psychopathic variety. Police, press and the general public tend to panic and make wildly irrational attempts to root out all sex deviates from the community on the preposterous assumption (encouraged by unethical scare headlines) that every sexually unorthodox person is a potential sex murderer, that homosexuality is synonymous with sex psychopathy.

The recent sordid Nash case in California is an example. Likewise the 1955 slaying of three Chicago boys, which has led to continued police harassment of homosexuals (as alleged suspects) throughout the Midwest, with flagrant publicity attending the arrests on what are actually routine "morals. charges."

Stephen Nash, a Skid Row character, admitted strangling a young boy under a pier at Santa Monica beach, and bragged that he had killed many men some, apparent homosexuals who had befriended him, and others chosen casually a terrible personal vendetta. This case lent fuel to Santa Monica's anti-homosexual witch-hunt, with police "round-ups" continuing after Nash's arrest, and with the threatened demolition of "Muscle Beach" and several buildings housing alleged " pervert hangouts."

Perhaps the murder of the Chicago boys was homosexually motivated — Chicago authorities tend to discount this. In the Nash case some of the victims seem to have been homosexual. And two-bit psychologizers have conjectured in the press that Nash himself was driven by explosively repressed homosexual desires. But this is to blame the irrational and unhealthy repression not the homosexuality.

Homosexuals generally have no more in common with Stephen Nash than the average heterosexual has in common with men who dissect their wives with axes. There is no sense to persecuting a large minority group for one harried man's meaningless violence unless society wishes to increase the burden of frustration which might possibly drive more homosexuals to that sort of vindictive insanity.

This is not to say that Nash is homosexual, any more than one could reasonably describe any alcoholic or paranoid as homosexual merely because some psychiatrists theorize that their troubles stem from the repression of the homosexual side of their naturés. Stephen Nash was driven by fantastic hatred for his fellow men. Homosexuality is love of man for man. There may be some psychic connection between love and hate, but it is dangerously foolish to blame love for the works of hate. The problems relating to the normal homosexual must not be confused with the problems of rapists, molesters, sex murderers and sadists.

ONE, in calling for fairness and freedom for the normal homosexual, is not winking at those sex crimes that really are crimes. Each matter is serious, calling for honesty, bold new thinking, and real scientific research. But the two must not be confused.

L. P.