other grounds we disapproved. I shall speak of this further below.

Irrational fears

It is clear at once, if we consider the hostility which the mere idea of homosexuality often encounters, that many people dislike and fear homosexuals, in a way similar to the way in which people dislike or fear black men or Jews, without being able to understand why. A psychological explanation of these irrational fears, if it can be given, would be helpful, and this is a point at which scientific study can usefully contribute. Let us now however consider the actual arguments which articulate persons who regard homosexuality as undesirable may bring forward.

It is often said that such practices are 'unnatural'. This is an ambiguous term which may be offered as a description or as a moral judgment and is in need of clarification in either case. Many 'natural', in the sense of easy, instinctive human activities are immoral, and traditional morality frequently pictures the good life as the defeat of nature. So the label 'unnatural', if it is to operate as a moral condemnation, will need to be translated into other more specific judgments. If, on the other hand, the label is offered as a description meaning 'very unusual', it would seem to be a false description since homosexuality is very usual. Persons who use the term 'unnatural' often wish in fact to profit from both senses and to offer an unspecified moral condemnation of other persons whom they wish to regard as a small peculiar minority.

Before going on to consider how the charge of 'unnatural' behaviour can be translated

into more unambiguous terms, let us look at a version of the charge, often current among the more enlightened, to the effect that homosexuality is a disease which psychia-

trists should be called in to cure. It seems to me that this notion is usually a moral judgment in disguise, and that it would be difficult to produce any coherent empirical filling for the idea that we have here to do with an illness' in anything like the ordinary sense. That homosexuals can be 'cured' has yet to be proved, although of course anyone's attitude to sex, whatever it may be, could be profoundly disturbed by the kind of drastic aversion treatment' of which one sometimes reads with horror in the press. Milder attempts at 'cure' usually amount simply to attending to whatever distressed condition has brought the unfortunate homosexual in question into the hands of the 'experts'. The majority of homosexuals lead ordinary busy lives as clerks or grocers or university dons, and in generalizations about such persons it is sometimes forgotten that the wellbalanced members of this community, as of the other one, escape notice.

Unfounded assumptions

It is sometimes said, as a rider to the view of homosexuality as a disease, that there are very few 'natural' homosexuals. I am not sure what the meaning of this statement is or whether it has any meaning. Compare "there are very few natural celibates." Human beings are extremely complicated and the tissue of environment, chance and choice which involves them in what may be called their 'destiny' is hard to unravel. Some people, it is true, look as if they had been framed physically upon the model of the sex other than that to which they officially belong: but such people very frequently turn out to be heterosexual. If "there are few natural homosexuals" means that there are few physically ambiguous' persons who are actually homosexual, or if it means that few homosexuals have detectably peculiar glands, this may

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