that he needs to go to great lengths to discover that homosexuality is something with which many men and women before him have wrestled, and something that many have accepted and put to great social use.

But what about Mister Cant's snide argument that many great men also had "other" vile diseases? Aside from the unproven thesis that homosexuality is per se a disease, the crux of this is whether it necessarily resembles disease, that is, whether it is inevitably a moral blot or a drawback to the individual "suffering" from it.

If it is a moral blot, how is it so many of the world's most moral men (whose lives are held up as ideals) were homosexual? How explain the Bible's eulogy of the love of David for Jonathan, Ruth for Naomi, Jesus for John, if love between persons of the same sex if filthy and immoral?

The real sharp point that Mister Cant seems to be making, is that Beethoven was great in spite of his syphilis, Stevenson in spite of his tuberculosis. Certainly we can say of some great homosexuals that they, similarly, were great in spite of their sexual directions. But for many others (Mister Cant notwithstanding) their greatness was BECAUSE of their homosexuality. As G. Wilson Knight (LORD BYRON'S MARRIAGE, 1957, 30s, Routledge & Kegan Paul) says of Byron: "We cannot write off the homosexual impulse as no more than an unfortunate blot, since his greatest accomplishments flower from it

Since his 'defects' were among the sources of his greatness,' to require of him 'the one without the other' would be unreasonable

As much can be said of Wilde or Whitman, Da Vinci or Michaelangelo, Plato or Aristotle. Their homosexuality was part and parcel of what made them great.

Bergler throws in a different argument that the homosexual artist

one

is really incapable of originality merely a clever embroiderer and imitator. Pray tell, if Plato, Sappho, Michaelangelo, Shakespeare, Milton, Whitman and such were mere imitators, embroiderers, incapable of true creativity, who indeed were those lost heterosexual geniuses whose work they copied?

Aside from the feeling of personal assurance it can give to homosexuals (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 often driving motives shamefaced historians have covered up. If we are to understand history at all, honesty is required. It may be enlightening to discover what relation homosexuality had to the cultural flowerings of classic Greece, Renascent Italy, Elizabethan England, etc. And to take the bad with the good, we might ask if homosexuality was relevant to the tragedy of modern Germany?

Finally, we look to history and to the biographies of notable homophiles to tell us a lot more about the nature of homosexuality than we hope to learn from the likes of Bergler and Cant.