Charles

Guzzetta

Ed.D.

Morality:

Public, Legal. Homophile

Law always represents a compromise between the ideal and the practical. In a sense, this is a reflection of the compromise by which daily life becomes tolerable even while human progress becomes possible. For the vast majority of mankind, immediate gratification of vital needs is most important; satisfaction of desires is only slightly less important; and the meeting of goals of idealism runs a poor third. No one really likes to put off satisfaction. When we do postpone our desires, we do only because we are forced to do so by some external power, usually coercive, or by some equally coercive internal power. The force of the external power usually has the sanction of law or custom and the internal power has the sanction of conscience or fear. Each represents a moral code: the internal power represents our personal sense of morality while the external power represents the general public sense of morality. Thus, laws are properly seen as the embodiment of publically accepted morality or, more properly, as the public view of accepted morality. The internal forces of conscience. represent the sum total of personal experience and reason, just as law represents the sum total of public experience.

However, it is not so simple as that. Each of these wellknown senses of morality in turn is split into at least two parts: what is considered desirable and what is considered tolerable. Each moral code is enforced on both of these levels and is complicated further by the fact that our sense of the tolerable and desireable themselves are changing. Not only do reasonable people differ with each other about morality they differ with themselves in their applications. These various levels of morality internal, public and legal constantly interact with each other and constantly change each other. What offends the public morality may be made illegal today. Tomorrow, it may no longer offend the public morality, but still may offend the legal morality. Even worse, it may no longer offend the public morality, but may remain illegal as a matter of agreed public policy for any number of reasons. Needless to say, a vast number of these areas of moral conflict have something or other to do with sex.

Public morality and nudity provides a good example. Very seldom in history has the naked body itself been considered offensive. What public morality has found objectionable was nudity under certain circumstances. Some few people have objected to nudity at almost any time, but legal morality has reflected the changing will of the majority which has been highly selective in its reservations. Swimmers in Santa Monica and Jones Beach have been arrested right up to recent times for offending the legal morality pertaining to public nudity. Equally exposed sculpture nearby has been acceptable. Naked statues were all right, but not naked live people. The charge of "indecent exposure" or "offending the public decency," is used to deal with miscreants. Circumstances in which nakedness is legal have expanded rapidly in recent years. Naked living bodies in photographs became acceptable.

In person, naked bodies became acceptable so long as they did not move. Within the last four or five years, totally naked, moving bodies in the theater have ceased to offend the legal morality. Although they continue to be immoral to a very large portion of the public, legal prevention is uninspired. No one even tried to arrest naked swimmers at Woodstock. Individuals undergo the same sort of dynamic between wish and expression, between acceptable action and accepted policy. On a lonely country road, in the middle of the night with no visible traffic anywhere, the average driver stops at a stop sign not because he wants to, ought to, or is observing rules of safety, but because he has accepted such behavior as a matter of policy. In areas involving two people, this remains apparent. One explanation of the high divorce rate in California is that people coming from other parts of the country have not been able to stand each other for years, but they have remained married, not as a matter of desire or even morality, but as a matter of policy. Oscar Levant helped explain this when he said that "a long-term marriage is the triumph of habit over reason." The new setting, cleared of powerful restraints, permits the resolution of the ambiguous. practice of marriage, no matter what. The driver on the lonely road resolves the ambiguity at the stop sign by failing to stop completely, but by breaking the law "slowly.

Examples of this dual nature of morality are endless. The morality which has become policy is the most difficult to change.

One who follows the letter of legal morality almost always. will be safe, while the person who tries to stretch the limits of legal morality will have trouble even if he ultimately. succeeds. Many fines were paid; many prison sentences were served; many public disgraces were endured in this century before the unclothed human body was accepted as natural, healthy and even beautiful.

American homophile morality has been in trouble for two reasons, at least. First, it has been out of its time and place. Throughout the long stretch of history, the attraction of man to man has been honored, at times elevated above the attraction of opposite sexes. But during the Christian era, public morality has been badly split on this question and especially during the last 100 years in the United States and England, the anti-sexual attitudes of Victorian thinking have been particularly strong in their application to homosexuality. Only in the last two or three years has society broken out of the Victorian mold and moved toward acceptance of different opinions, orientations, and personal preference in sex.

The second reason that homophile morality has been in trouble is that its position is at the cutting edge of the general view of morality. It represents the voice which tells the man to go through the remote country stop sign because obviously no possible harm can result and the only justification for the sign is to control traffic. This voice may be morally right, in a rational sense, but the act is wrong if the man later