conformist society is too timid to permit. That is why so many actors are homophile. But acting a part in a play

not enough, indeed it is often frustrating. Dr. Moreno's psychodrama points the way. But this therapy must be practised by the subject himself and regularly, as men who keep fit don't go to a doctor every time they wish to exercise. Such exercises, such systematic gymnastics are not "affected." They are necessary expansions and dilations whereby the increasing number of variations of the Appollodian ("Dianephoebe", "Mercurivene", etc.) gain necessary periodic relief from the otherwise intolerable restriction imposed by a society controlled by paralysed conformists. Our intense increase in insanity shows. that, if we will not permit harmless. expressions, then either the repression. will drive the victim to mental suicide (schizophrenic withdrawal) or to defiance (provocative exposure) or to an attack on his oppressors (paranoia or simple criminality). And here the first step lies with the disguised homosexual. Because he has to keep under cover, he at least can abstain from denouncing those who. out of courage or sheer necessity, must preserve a modicum of frankness, a personal witness to and signal of integrity which if they wore the complete mask would drive them mad. They must fly some flag however small to show the discriminating they are not sailing under wholly false colors.

The very number of the Mattachine Review which carried the article which sentenced the "affected" to be tagged "offensive" (an unhappy choice of condemnatory specification considering that the affected are certainly defensive not offensive) had in the next article a well written charge against censorship in a report on the latest British official discussion on that problem. The reporter showed that

the commission carefully questioned all the officials, bureaucrats, lawyers and police and nearly all those nongovernment pressure group busybodies who are always urging stricter laws, harsher punishments and more Comstock surveillance of the written word, the spoken line, the drawing, print and photo. The ordinary reader and listener was never consulted. Here, the reporter rightly pointed out, was a government and selfappointed interferers deciding what the public might see and hear. This is of course completely undemocratic. "The duty of the state," said a liberal Prime Minister fighting to keep the coercive power from being used to impose moral or religious prejudices, "is to keep the peace and to sustain contracts." Any further extension of the state is the beginning of tyranny and the destruction of the community.

The writer of the report in the Mattachine Review went on to say what a relief it would have been if in this atmosphere of official hocus-pocus where such hopelessly vague terms as "lewd" (which means lay not clerical) and "apt to corrupt thought" were being bandied about, at least one ordinary person, one common man could have remarked that he liked sexual display. Then it would have been possible to ask Why shouldn't he? What harm does it actually do? What are the sick-costs of repression? The Puritan despotism is dying. Its record is a horrible one of cruelty and insanity. Everyone who believes in mental health should support the right to non-violent liberty of expression. The higher the form of life the more elaborate and variegated are its aspects, the more manifold and original its patterns and decor. The homophile that sneers at his fellow homophiles' idiosyncrasies is doing almost the worst service to his own cause and the cause of liberty and the cause of life.

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