DONALD WEBSTER CORY

4.2.

toward a rational approach to homosexuality

from an address given at ONE's 1962 Midwinter Institute

I would like to speak today on a particular problem that interests me, namely, how we can move toward a rational approach to homosexuality. When I first mentioned this title I realized I was implying that the present approach toward homosexuality on the part of most people is an irrational one, as I shall shortly point out. More than that, I believe that this irrationality is so widespread that it is found not only in the attitudes of the heterosexual society toward the minority group, but in the attitudes of the homesexual toward himself, and in the attitudes of the various homophile movements toward themselves. A reasoned approach, an approach in which the ends and goals that we are seeking are always borne in mind, and in which only such actions are taken as will, reasonably, bring about and facilitate the obtaining of those goals, is essential to rational thinking and rational behavior.

We are inclined to assume that the

attitude of society in general toward homosexuality is an irrational one. I don't know exactly why we should assume that, but we do. We think that it is, or we sort of feel that it is. Now, the aims of society and its attitude toward homosexuality are mainly ones of suppression. It is a suppression that has its roots in the heterosexual attitude toward all types of sexual behavior that is not contained within the family and which is, by and large, not conducive to procreation. Nevertheless, in recent years, with the rise of a more secular attitude, with the rise of certain acute population and other social problems, attitudes toward sex of a non-reproductive nature have, in general, relaxed. In the main, society does not take the same attitude today as it did forty or fifty years ago toward the idea that is commonly called, euphemistically, planned parenthood, toward contraception, or even toward the problems of premarital and extramarital behavior. And yet, despite