Given such interpretations it is only natural that sociologists would feel that the whole question was one lying for the most part to one side of their own fields of major interest. That legal codes are rapidly changing toward the social toleration of homosexual behavior and that many generations of medical and psychological research have been unable to scientifically verify that homosexuality is indeed abnormal, save in a statistical sense, seems to have escaped the attention of most social scientists.

Point of View of This Study

The point of view of this present study is that meaningful sociological conclusions concerning homosexual behavior can only be had by viewing it in objectively behavioral terms. It is further held that the homosexually inclined population of United States constitutes a subculture, that in fact it is a minority group, albeit of a special sort.

Inasmuch as it has been a sociological assumption that particular modes of human behavior yield, under given geographical and climatic conditions, their characteristic social patterns, so it is assumed in this present study that homosexual behavior can be expected to yield its own characteristic behavior patterns and more or less clearly-defined functional aspects.

This point of view is in opposition both to those who hold that the well-adjusted homosexual man or woman differs only from the general population "by what he does in bed," and from majority sociological espousal of what might be termed "the heterosexual assumption."

This latter assumption is implicit in substantially all sociological thinking. Reduced to its simplest terms it is the hypothesis that societies arise as the outcome of the natural operations of those basic drives which are assumed to be common to all so-called normal human beings.

In this theory human life is described as moving by rather simple stages, beginning with birth and thence by a sequence of processes, somewhat loosely termed maturation, onto a procreative plateau or goal. While this procreative situation, consisting of males, females and offspring, may be structured in a variety of ways, all of them bear the generic designation as, The Family.

This institution, in turn, is seen as forming the foundation of all the more complex elements which together make up a Society, and determining, within certain limitations imposed by the physical environment, the characteristic profile of any particular society.

As a picturesque capstone for the social structure based upon "the heterosexual assumption" there is added the concept of social deviation to account for phenomena not otherwise explained.

The difficulty with this rather deterministic concept is that it appears not to have ever been submitted to very careful empirical verification. "The heterosexual assumption" did indeed have a certain usefulness as a rough generalization during those decades when the social sciences were busily assimilating the impact of Darwin upon scientific thinking.

However, so monolithic a picture of the human race can hardly be made to square with the fact that untold millions of men and women the world over do not share exactly the same basic drives, or share such only in part. They not only do not share the drive toward participation in a procreative situation but they exert vigorous efforts, often against crushing social pressures, to avoid any such way of life.

The point of view of this present study is that the concept of social deviation

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