By Luther Allen

HOMOSEXUALITY...

is it a handicap or a talent?

Mr. Allen in correspondence with Carl B. Harding was prompted to write the following article on a point of disagreement in attitudes toward their homosexuality. Mr. Harding regards the individual whose sexual response is exclusively homosexual as an emotionally crippled, handicapped person because he is deprived of life's fulfillment in heterosexual love and marriage and that no life is complete without children. He believes that besides the adverse psychological effects of society's prejudice, the complete invert is usually already more than average neurotic, being the victim of psychic deformation and subconscious scars resulting from distorted parent-child relationships and other negative personality influences in the formative years. Harding therefore advocates that parents and would-be parents be educated on ways and means for their own personal adjustment and human engineering with the family unit to PREVENT an exclusively homosexual pattern of development from taking place in the child. Mr. Harding does not regard the well adjusted bisexual who is sufficiently heterosexual to consumate a happy

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marriage as necessarily handicapped, but one who can be a more whole personality than either the exclusively heterosexual or the exclusively homosexual person because of his ability to experience sexual love for individuals, of either sex.

Mr. Allen has a differing opinion on sexual inversion.

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ONCE wrote to a homosexual the statement that inversion is a talent. I used the word talent to mean both a sort of gift or endowment, and a capability.

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Being homosexual, it would seem to me, would mean to possess an intense appreciation of the qualities of other males... I view this as a gift, just as the heterosexual male's abilities to appreciate the qualities of a woman is a gift, something he would be poorer without.

The homosexual also possesses an ability to express this appreciation of men in his relationships with them, in loving them something many a man will tell you he would be poorer without. This I consider a talent. But like any talent, it requires discipline and development. In my thinking, "talent" also implies the

mallachine REVIEW

moral obligation to make the most of it, as expressed in Christ's wellknown parable. The art critic, Bernard Berenson, once wrote that the value of art for mankind is that art

is. "life enhancing." Love of one human for another is more than art appreciation, yet I think Berenson's term can quite aptly be used to describe what sexual love does for all of us. It enhances our lives.

Perhaps in writing to the young man who caused these ideas to crystalize for me I did not explain myself clearly enough, for he took issue with me in these words:

"I can no more conceive of inversion being a talent any more than I would think of blindness, deafness, hermaphrodism or being an amputee as talents."

Long ago, during a question period following a lecture, a Marxist psychoanalyst, the late Frankwood Williams, was asked the question, "How should a homosexual regard himself? What attitude should he take towards his homosexuality?"

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Dr. Williams replied that he should not feel guilty about it, should not regard it as a moral defect, a sin, but should think of himself as being, through no fault of his own, emotionally crippled. I have heard this view expressed rather frequently since. In fact, it is now a sort of psychiatric cliche. Every time I have heard the opinion advanced, I have had two minds about it. On the one hand it sounded plausible enough and it was at least a far more tolerant view than most. On the other, it never quite rang true to me. I remember saying once, "That's just what an intelligent heterosexual WOULD think!"

It seems now that the rapport between the enlightened homosexual and the enlightened heterosexual on the sex question must be very similar to that existing between a liberal

Christian and liberal Jew. Each is quite willing to allow the other fellow to worship as he pleases; furthermore, each can see important values in the other guy's religion. Their friendship is rewarding and untroubled. They can even discuss religion together quite freely-as long as neither tries to force an admission of inferiority of his religion from the other, as long as neither insists upon the superiority of his own religion, and as long as neither attempts to proselytize.

In making this analogy (and just as analogy I think it is more apt than the "emotional cripple" attitude which is pure analogy also, of course

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because religion and sexual love are near neighbors in the psychological realm) I'd like to remark further that the Christian may be extremely well-instructed in his own faith and the Jew in his, but the Christian simply does not know the Jewish religion, either intellectually, emotionally, or as a way of life, as the Jew does; nor does the Jew know Christianity as the Christian does.

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A man's religion is something he has felt and lived from his earliest days and nobody who has not also felt it and lived it as he has done is in a position to evaluate it in comparison to another religion, and the attempt becomes downright absurd when someone deeply rooted since childhood in quite a different faith is the one who does the evaluating.

The heterosexual is not in any position to make an evaluation of homosexuality as compared to heterosexuality. It follows that the homosexual is in no position to make the comparison either. A good deal of rancor has been generated by claims of amorous superiority from both homosexuals and heterosexuals. Such controversy is quite profitless. It simply doesn't serve any useful purpose. It's definitely juvenile. Perhaps even more so when engaged in 7