THE

SINGLE

HOMOSEXUAL

by Frank Golovitz

"For narrow is the gate and hard the way, and few there be that find it..."

(All the names in this account are purely fictional.)

The first question about the life of a single homosexual is whether his living alone is a curse or a blessing. And that depends...

Examples of lonely, unhappy homosexuals, such as Blair Niles' sobering portrayal of the tormented and confused Mark Thornton in her novel, Strange Brother, are familiar. Less so are the live-alone-and-like-it type.

Harris Medwick was a bachelor by choice. He could have married had he chosen, and could have made it good. Someone tried to blackmail him once, and the supervisor of his research plant called him in and urged he marry for appearance sake. Harris said he'd considered it, but felt it was untrue to his own nature and unfair to any prospective wife.

A high-level physicist, he survived McCarthyism and still has security clearance, despite his homosexuality and his liberally expressed political ideas. I met him in Oakland eight years ago when he talked to some science-fiction fans about "The Morals of Tomorrow." Society, he said, was approaching the stage where birth control and scientific child-care would make the family obsolete and would release all but a few from reproduction, with sterilization allowing sex freedom to most of the population.

In later conversation he quoted Francis Bacon-"He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune, for they are an impediment to great enterprises," and applied the same to so-called homosexual "marriage." Personal, animal contentedness may be a natural and ultimate