life is not morally wrong so long as no one else is made to suffer, and it may even be exciting. Yet such a life is no small drain on one's energies; and there is always the danger of discovery or worse yet, that one may really be obvious to others unknowingly and thus be playing the part of a fool, engaged in deceptions that friends see through and look upon with silent contempt. In any case, not to be right with the world is a tiresome obstacle, for most of us, to the full development of our personality.

In some of the less complicated societies there are families in which the husband is shared between the wife and the male lover in an open and evidently quite tranquil arrangement. This may be seen in some of the social minorities of our own society. These are people who are little given to philosophizing, to feeling the pressure of elaborate and contradictory social rules, or to bothering themselves with a sense of guilt; they meet their difficulties as they arise and they are often flattened by situations that they have not foreseen. As a way of life for most of us, such bisexuality is pretty much out of reach a mode of existence of this kind, appropriate perhaps to these simple and ardent folk, cannot operate among others who are exceedingly self-conscious and already strained to the utmost by a mass of codes, laws, customs, ideals, and prohibitions.

There does exist, however, a type of man who has achieved such a high degree of independent self-development that he can succeed in living a fully bisexual life at a high level of awareness and creativity; and a kind of woman, also, whose roots in love and understanding are so deep that she is immune to any form of jealousy. Two such godlike creatures, joined in a pair, living a self-created way of life that the world is forced to accept and admire, these we may imagine sustaining in their wide embrace another pair a boy and girl, perhaps — in

—

a state of enchantment and delight. Such would be ideal bisexuality.

But the rest of us, alas, are creatures of our world and times; and the forces of society, the opinions of the world, press on us heavily both from without and within. The most we can hope for is a partial victory, a little area of success, solidly won in a struggle against formidable odds a genuine union with one

beloved mate.

The process of shaping us to certain ideals and attitudes begins the moment we commence to breathe some say, even earlier than this. Long before the physical development of our brain tissue has been complete at about 7 years of age, we have had built into us a whole set of patterns of beliefs, attitudes, ways of dealing with life, fears and aversions. Being established so early and so thoroughly, these influences are of overwhelming strength; and, in the case of a great many people, they are never really altered. Dr. Kinsey gives 50% of the population as the number of people who are exclusively heterosexual, who have never wandered from the sexually approved. In other people, as we know, the process completely fails to take: these then are completely homosexual, and no matter what opposition they may encounter, they will not turn aside from this orientation. It may well be that these people are actually felt to be beyond reach by the agencies of the law, the school, and the church; and that the curses flung at the homosexual are really part of a struggle to reclaim the bisexual, the 46% who might conceivably be fenced in by threats, rewards, and fears; and that, in this belief, the homosexuals are punished and the heterosexuals are wound about with chains. If so, the campaign must be accorded its triumphs; for Dr. Kinsey comments, in another of his cautious but forthright

one

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