intolerant sneering makes you suspect that they are using it to satisfy some ends of their own. And they are. It is a grand excuse for doing what they are constructed to dohate themselves. These unhappy people are, in Dr. Bergler's word, diseased. But the point is that their disease is separate from their homosexuality: their disturbance goes back to a conception of themselves inflicted on on them as children, and which society's opinion of their sexual habits only serves to buttress.

If their homosexuality were the cause, rather than an adjunct, of their illness, wouldn't every homosexual have the same low opinion of his instincts? But we all know this is not the case.

And from this helpless group are drawn the cases that hit the courts, the analysts' couches or the obituary columns. Their self-hatred breeds behavior which can only get them into trouble with themselves or-in extreme cases-with the authorities, and it seems they are trapped in a cycle which only God or the atomic bomb can cure.

It is a dismal fact that the combination of homosexuality-with-neurosis is as common as rain on Sunday. A ratio of five hounded homosexuals to one serene one doesn't seem too much. And it is these, under the double whammy of sexual and personal disruption, that need the most help.

It seems that the family situation in the early years of life which is a breeding-ground for homosexuality is often a breeding-ground for neurosis too. Certain kinds of parental treatment can easily produce both results. Where a child receives from his parent, by some lucky insight or love, a profound sense of his own worth, he will be able to weather his

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sexual storms with relative ease. But when the child without a profound sense of his own value grows up and has to wring some meaning out of his homosexual life, he has a typhoon to face the magnitude of which would make some of Conrad's stony sea captains jump overboard.

As a beginning, he has to realize that his homosexuality can take him either way toward sickness or health. That his sexual urges are a tabula rasa a clean slate on which he can write any kind of life he wants. Of course, his neurosis will disagree with this violently. His neurosis will tell him to get rid of the homosexuality, that here is the trouble, here is the misery, here is the link with the lockerroom jokes. If you were like the rest of the world, whispers the undernourished ego, you would be happy. But a look around will show that neurotic people are always unhappy, whether they are homosexual or not.

Wouldn't it be wiser to get rid of the neurosis, the joker in the pack, the sting in the homosexuality? Wouldn't this lead to new self-respect and help a man or woman live a moral life no matter who his bedpartner may be?

There is evidence around us that this is the wiser course. The people who "dropped" their homosexuality and fled into marriages have left a trail behind them of lapses-fromgrace, divorce, discontent and sense of being trapped as powerful as they had before. You can see them in their old haunts in park and street-only this time they are pushing baby carriages. The net gain has been negligible. Granted, there are some marriages that work, but it can be assumed there are many more that do not.

On the other hand, the people who continued page 21

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