Sex & Sensibility

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by Lewis Ferguson

Most of us who have suffered because we felt "different" from other people have found it encouraging to discover that other men share our differentness. We begin to reckon that it would be a good thing if other people would concede that our differentness is legitimate. So we talk, or at any rate we think, about the rights of the homosexual minority.

This idea has value; it also has disadvantages. Its great disadvantage may be the support it gives to neglecting the opportunity we have to develop ourselves as individuals. Groups can help the individual, but group progress depends upon the individual. Too much emphasis on rights for the homosexual minority, as for any other minority, might obscure individualism.

Normally an individual includes

potentialities far beyond those he realizes. They go way beyond his dreams. Aldous Huxley said recently in an interview that the destiny of the individual is to expand his capacity to live in all possible worlds at once. If this is sound, it holds as true for the homosexual, surely, as for anybody.

I have known homosexuals who accepted this and homosexuals who refused to consider it, just as I have known heterosexuals of both sorts. The commonest of all traits is commonness. The homosexual is fortunate if his status in a misunderstood minority drives him, more than it may drive other people, to seek some way to become uncommonly effective as an individual. But the pressure is hard on every homosexual to take refuge not to grapple with life, but hide from it.

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