emotionally or physically to another man. Such behavior or "camp" is only acting out the way the words "belle" and "queen" and all the others suggest that one ought to act. Unfortunately, many of us are unable to confine such behavior to our living-room stages and begin to think it smart to do a little rehearsing at the office or on the street. The second depressing aspect of all this is really, I believe, the cause of the first. We just don't have a word that conveys the idea that a man may be a homosexual but is a man for all that. Almost the first thing that any homosexual does, when called upon to offer any serious defense of homosexuality, is to draw upon the glorious example of the manly Greek warriors and athletes who apparently practiced homosexual love openly and without shame. This may be well and good, but I don't think the example means much except for the fact that we don't think of those Greek heros as "belles" or "queens." Or do we?

It is not that I have any immediate solution to propose. Words of the kind we need are not created by fiat nor by committees but by poets, or they spring unbidden from the mouths of those who use them. Yet one thing is certain: words, no matter what "tyranny" they may come to excercise over those who use them, are created by men and men do create the words they need. If we will but begin by rejecting the fallacious absolutism of the male-female principle and just stop using exclusively those words which pay idolatrous lip service to that principle, the words we want will come.

There is no aspect of homosexual life in which the poverty of our vocabulary is so apparent as it is in that which we refer to by the term "homosexual marriage," a term which I even mention only with great reluc-

tance. Not only do I object to the necessity of qualifying the word "marriage" by preceding it with the word "homosexual," but I regret the need to use the word "marriage" at all.

One may argue that the word "mariage" has no basic sexual significance and that it merely indicates a union or a joining together. Indeed, figuratively and poetically, the word is often used in this way. It can be argued, therefore, that homosexuals have just as much right to this word as do heterosexuals. We can argue this point but we can't win. The fact of the matter is that "marriage" means to everyone in his right mind the union of a man and a woman in matrimony, and Webster's Unabridged Dictionary forthrightly defines it as such. Furthermore, the word has legal status, religious significance and social acceptance only as it applies to a man and woman united in wedlock to become a husband and a wife. Legally, socially, and in the view of the church it confers right and imposes obligations upon both the man and the woman, and only upon a man and a woman. To none of these can two homosexuals in our society and immediate time, no matter how sincere their intentions, how poetically beautiful their devotion, nor how permanent their union, aspire. Their relationship, if it is to be acknowledged at all, must then be recognized by an entirely different word. But we have no other word and so we continue to use the word "marriage" which we must then qualify with the word "homosexual." Even among ourselves this is necessary for homosexuals do make heterosexual marriages. Do we not invariably have to ask, when told that someone we know or think to be gay is married, whether the speaker means to a man or to a woman?

Not only, however, is it inappro-

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