In my experience, the biggest help has been discovering that I did not need to stop being a homosexual in order to become a broader kind of man. I think my predicament was the usual one. I knew for sure one thing about myself, and I dreaded to let it go. The key to my misery was also the key to my greatest attainable joy. But finally I saw that getting a wider life did not mean throwing the key away; it might mean keeping the misery locked up. I did not have to enlarge my life in any particular way; I needed to enlarge it somehow. Then I would be closer to all life.

Talk of a homosexual minority so often strikes confusion because so many homosexuals, like so many heterosexuals, resist a larger life that they cannot belong to a group. This is why the sense of community is failing free men everywhere. Only the safe individual, who feels secure because of his inward growth, can devote himself voluntarily to community action. A man gives himself to others only if he has something to give; he stays lonely out of lack.

Many homosexuals are just getting along. So is most of the rest of the population. For a vast number of people, to judge from the looks on their faces and the problems they bring to psychiatrists, ministers, and other counsellors, life is like life in a squirrel cage, minus the excitement of the turning wheel.

It is impossible to say why some people live creatively and some people just squeak by. It is evident, though, that people who live creatively are all the time making new discoveries about life. Everything interests them. Generally their lives have centerwork, obligation, talent, or purpose of some kind. But the conspicuous thing about them is that they don't wear blinders. They are disposed to learn.

One thing a learning man discovers is that there is much more to sex and sensibility than anybody told him.

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Most of us were born into circumstances that defined very narrowly the permissible width of our emotional adventure. If we overstepped, we worried. Fear made us stumble. Maybe we finally had the good fortune to find that the walls were artificial.

So often the homosexual never sees what this means. He jumps over the fence, he doesn't remove it. He puts himself in another lane as narrow and restrictive as the first one. I am not saying that a homosexual needs to become bisexual or heterosexual. I mean that he ought to have the conviction that it is natural for him to have an encounter with all life.

Nobody, as a matter of fact, needs to find this out more desperately than the bisexual. Experts argue about him, but meanwhile he is torn by a terrible dichotomy. The pressures to make him one thing or the other are terrific. They push him night and day. His only release comes, as far as I can see, when he admits to himself that sex covers a wide range and that life involves much more than sex. Nobody can live a full life with sex as his main preoccupation, but many people would lead fuller lives if they were not afraid to go where sex takes them.

Here is the bona fide challenge to those who look for a homosexual minority. What the individual needs. from other homosexuals is approval of life. The simplest word for it is love, although Walt Whitman's idea of brotherhood and companionship may be needed to define love for this purpose. If the homosexual can get something like this from other homosexuals, he may some day be able to get it from the rest of society. It is a big question whether in our time the homosexual minority can fight profitably for legal rights. It is no question at all but that homosexuals can fight self-centeredness in themselves in order to help each other to see how vast life's enterprise can be.

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