EDITORIAL

Homophiles have suffered in silence the perverse, dogmatic slanders of self-delegated sexperts. They have been labelled as criminal sexual psychopaths, willful perverts, trauma-retarded cases of infantilism, injustice-collecting masochists and incipient child molesters. It is no wonder many homophiles tire of the constant attempts made to analyze them and resist any further education on a subject they rightly feel is better known to them than to so-called authorities.

They know what they are. They may even like it. Like it or not, they've stopped hoping for the Never-Never Land of cure. For all the jangling and phoney claims, homophiles know the cause-and-cure cult is still batting zero.

So the average homosexual man or woman shrugs and says, "Let the doctors and preachers argue about theory. They'll still be at it when I'm six feet under. I'm going to get a little personal satisfaction out of life-if they let me alone long enough." But society doesn't let people alone. We live in society. We must somehow come to terms with it. We have to learn the ground rules as well as the loop holes. Above all we have to learn exactly what we are, and how to fit ourselves into the social scheme.

Once abandon the narrow and fruitless fixation on cause and cure, we discover that learning about ourselves and our relation to the world is neither dull, useless nor frustrating. We become swept up in a panorama of exciting historical, literary and scientific materials about homosexuality. We begin to see homosexual love as an important biological and historical current rather than as an isolated and freakish phenomonon. We glimpse a broader picture than psychologists, theologians or jurists had dreamed of.

But does the homophile who has "been around" and read a couple books really know himself? Perhaps he knows more than the authors of many of those books, but the practical education picked up in streets and bars is superficial and not very practical. The homophile desperately needs to know his identity and his status. Those who don't acquire this self-knowledge or some compensation for it, remain misfits, neurotics, outcasts or worse. Those who find this knowledge have a chance to find their place in the world.

ONE's program of homophile study, as carried out in our researches, our Institute classes and in our new Quarterly, is not a matter of trying to be pedantic for pedantry's sake. Nor is it to demonstrate that homophiles can be scholarly-that has been proven already by many of the world's leading scholars. Homophile education is a practical and urgent matter, for teen-agers who are moving inexorably in this direction as well as for those long set in their ways. "Know thyself. . . the proper study of mankind is man." For the homophile, condemned otherwise by modern society as a lost soul, this has exceptional urgency.

Lyn Pedersen, Associate Editor

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