DO HOMOSEXUALS HIDE BEHIND GREAT MEN?

In a quaintly reasoned article in the Jan. 7th NEW LEADER (a rightwing socialist weekly that usually concentrates its fire on the Communists) TIME associate-editor Gilbert Cant opened a chit-chat on the Bergler thing (HOMOSEXUALITY: DISEASE OR WAY OF LIFE, by Dr. Edmund Bergler) with the following smashing tidbit of logic:

"Beethoven had syphilis. Robert Louis Stevenson had tuberculosis. Dozens of other great figures in the pageant of arts and letters have suffered from chronic and sometimes vile diseases. Yet none of them, so far as I can recall, has ever rated his disease as a badge of pride, or sought deliberately to spread it among those who, happily, were uninfected . . .'

After spying a few of the more obvious lapses in Bergler's logic, Mister Cant proceeded to accept Bergler's chief conclusions, warning the public against too-easy sympathy with these victims of McCarthyism. The rest was rather slanderous railing at Donald Webster Cory (author of THE HOMOSEXUAL IN AMERICA) "and his ilk who are now coming out of the woodwork with increasing insolence . . ." launching "a drive not only to be accepted as the equals of normal men, but honored as a special breed, the repository of most of the world's artistic talent, and entitled to cut moral corners right and left."

Aside from the feeling of personal assurance it can give to homosexuals

one

Lyn Pedersen

(not, "I must be pretty bright because so many geniuses were homosexual," but rather, "Homosexuality could hardly be so terrible if so many of history's best and greatest men were homosexual;") why else do we try to study the homosexual in history?

Why indeed? If these men and women are idealized by society, we need to look closer at them to understand the true nature of society's ideals. We may find more ambivalence in society's attitude toward homosexuality than appears on the surface. As for the great men themselves, we do not feel that a little overdue frankness will dim their repute. Rather it slanders their memory to continue to hide their true natures. As for history itself, to the degree that there is any value in studying it, there is value in studying it without blushing ferreting out the

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It is not my purpose here to tilt with Mister Cant about whether it is to demand the right to "cut moral corners" that homophile spokesmen are coming from the woodwork out. Kinsey's studies and Dr. Albert Ellis' FOLKLORE OF SEX have proven (was it in doubt?) that homosexuals have no edge on moral corner-cutting

indeed, that society is far from being willing or able to practice the "morals" it professes. Nor have I space to refute the dogma that homosexuality is a disease, (if it is, who is uninfected?) or to ponder just what sort of creatures these "normal men"