good conduct. This infamous red line makes it very difficult to obtain civilian employment. As for officers, they are, after sixty days detention, placed on inactive duty, and great pressure is brought to bear upon them to submit their resignations (legally, if they have the stamina to do so, they can resist this pressure and refuse to resign) to which is added the dishonor and scandal which the case may arouse. In

very distressing and brilliantly written account which will, we hope, soon be published1 a young officer on active duty in Indio-China, entrapped by a fellow officer, an agentprovocateur, describes the behindthe-scenes machinations, both political and religious, and the pitiless persecution of which he was a victim. The general officer who pronounced his expulsion from the navy said to him: "I owe it to myself to punish you out of respect to the very God in whom I believe." But what is even more shocking, the author reveals that the pursuit of the homosexual in which the naval Security Forces are now engaged has become particularly relentless in the last few years as the result of precise instructions from the Department of Military Personnel which has acted in turn upon the "peremptory advice" of the United States to their NATO allies "to purge their services of all personnel who have any 'vulnerabilities'." To the detectives of our naval forces, trained in the school of the would-be-heterosexual McCarthy, any man who is interested in his own sex is automatically a potential "spy."

But to return to civil legislation, let us consider whether the law should or should not be relaxed, at least in the cases where the partner is willing and is scientifically responsible for his acts.

A reader wrote to France Observa-

1. Des Pavois et des Fers, chroniue, 1954-1955. (Translators note: A considerable portion of this chronical was published by Juventus, issues 6, 7, 8).

one

teur, following the appearance of my article on Kinsey, replying in the negative. He does not hesitate to group the homosexuals with murderers. "To maintain," he writes, "that the existence of homosexuals is proof that they are natural is sheer fantasy. The fact that murderers exist throughout the world does not give moral sanction to murder." And this reader, while "willing to rise above the lack of understanding which our society has of homosexuals," contradicts himself immediately by refusing to "claim for them any legal rights whatsoever."

I have, now, thanks to this reader. stated the question clearly: "Is homosexuality injurious to society in the same way as, for example, murder or theft?"

On this point Kinsey is categorical. He denies that homosexuality represents a social danger, and deduces therefrom that it should not be punished by law. The Wolfenden report is of the same opinion. It is certainly a complex question, and I cannot attempt to treat it within the framework of the present study. It is barely possible that the interests of society as a whole, or if you prefer, of the heterosexual majority, are not always those of the homosexual minority. But it should not be impossible in a democratic society to reconcile occasional variant interests without destroying any of the fundamental rights of man. As Kant wrote: "No one can force me to be happy in the way he thinks I should be happy; everyone should seek his own happiness in the way that seems best to him, provided that he does not in so doing destroy the freedom of others to do the same, a freedom which can co-exist with that of everyone else, in accordance with a universally possible law."

Another of my readers was inspired with a greater tolerance than was the one cited above. He believes that each being is free and the master of his own life, and that men should not exert any