YOU & the LAW

by J. B. Tietz

The following article reproduces in full a paper delivered at ONE's Annual Midwinter Institute, during the morning session, January 26, 1957. The author, a heterosexual Los Angeles attorney, has for the past ten years been treasurer of the Southern California Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.

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he original version of this paper was read to an open staff meeting of the Cedars of Lebanon Psychiatric Clinic. I shared the platform with a psychiatrist and, since I believe you will be interested in the two opening paragraphs of his paper, and because I have plans for an expanded revision of my own paper, I am prefacing my discussion by his opening comments.

Homosexuality is as ancient as man. It has been noted among earliest primitive cultures. The Tahitians, the Negroes of Zanzibar, the Indians from the Eskimos of Alaska to the coastal regions of Brazil, the Papuans of New Guinea, and the primitive Australians have had homosexual customs that were frequently related to their religious practices. Many ancient cultures accepted homosexual practices for methods of birth control, during military activity, and religious rites. The Egyptians, Greeks, Carthaginians, Scythians, Normans, Celts, and Tartars openly practiced homosexuality. The Hindu and Judaic-Christian cultures, however, have always looked with abhorrence on these methods of sexual expression and have forged severe taboos and severer penalties against it. But in spite of edicts, exorcism, excommunication and over-zealous punishment, homosexuality has survived. And it has remained, as it has always been, ubiquitous, involving about two percent of the population of the world, hurdling over geographical, racial, social, legal, economic, intellectual, national and occupational barriers, and remaining an immutable constant.

While society made pious attempts to stamp our homosexuality with fire, sword, imprisonment, intimidation and social opprobrium, a small group of philosophers, artists, writers and scientists speculated concerning its nature. These incredible Greeks again evolved a conception that is the basis of our modern scientific theory. The sculpture, literature, mythology, philosophy and ethics of the Greeks revealed man's nature as organically bisexual. Over 2,000 years later, the theory of organic bisexuality was revived by the philosophers Hossl, Ulrichs, and Schopenhauer. Darwin and other evolutionists were able to postulate latent bisexuality and gave a firm scientific base for the previous speculations. KrafftEbing, Moll, Westphall, and Hirschfeld, working in the field of clinical psychiatry, were able to collect clinical evidence for this hypothesis. Finally embryologists, physiologists, and biologists confirmed the organic bisexuality of man and were able to demonstrate experimentally that this may account for man's homosexuality.

The term homosexuality was originated by a medical writer in 1869.(1) Although it is presently a commonly accepted and precisely defined term

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