ticularly during adolescence. This inclination to fix attention on a person of the same sex is the root of friendship and of many forms of team games. Conscious sexual desire in such relationship is normally wholly absent. There is merely a healthy and normal affection and loyalty for the other person.

When this homosexual phase passes into the more specific condition of definite inversion, or an existing latent inverted condition becomes apparent, we often find a history of broken or unsatisfactory parental relationship. The otherwise normal boy may have moulded his personality too much upon his mother to the detriment of his relationship with his father. The father may have been away from home (note here the responsibility which war must carry), or he may have been a drunkard, or so cruel to his wife that the son has identified himself with his mother in ber defence.

The fault, again, may have been on the mother's side. She may have been 'clinging', over-concerned with her son's welfare. Or she may have been dominating or possessive, forcing or holding her son away from natural father-son relationship. A proud or adoring mother, lavishing all her affection upon an only son, may prevent him achieving emotional maturity. Desperately wanting a daughter, a mother may make up her mind that the child she is to bear will be a girl, and finding her hopes unrealized, she may treat her son as a daughter. If she lets him know of her disappointment, she may engender a sense of guilt for which he tries to compensate by over-affection for her.

Or the cause may lie exclusively at the door neither of the father nor of the mother. The parents may have been divorced, sharing access to their son. To gain power, and possibly from motives of revenge, a mother may have attempted to undermine her son's affection and respect for his father by exploiting her emotional needs, or in the proceedings that led to a divorce the father may have gravely shocked his son, who comes to blame him for the loss of home security.

In all such cases, the resultant inversion may be the result of psychological fixation. Such fixation, as we have said, will exempt an invert from responsibility for his homosexual condition but cannot absolve him from responsibility for immoral homosexual practices. The distinction is a vital one, and that it is often forgotten is proved both by the fact that to call a person a homosexual is, in popular language, tantamount to calling him immoral, and by the common use of such a phrase as "the evil of homosexuality" instead of "the evil of homosexual acts".

PRECIPITATING FACTORS

(1) A precipitating factor leading to discovery of one's inverted condition may arise through wider social contacts outside the home. The young man, conscious of his preference for companions of his own sex, expects that he will eventually form girl friendships as easily as his other friends have done. When the opportunity comes for associating more closely with women-in college, in sport or in business-be then discovers an inability to enter into normal relations with them. The precipitatory factor here is the actual opportunity which comes his way of mixing with women.

(ii) This self-discovery of his inverted nature may come through school experiences. He may be involved in mutual masturbation with other boys.

mattachine REVIEW

If the boy is sexually normal, he is extremely unlikely to be diverted into a homosexual pattern by such experiences, and quickly outgrows them. If there is, however, already a latent tendency to inversion, experiences of this kind can precipitate a homosexual condition which, in other circumstances, might have remained latent.

Although female inversion is not the concern of the present study, it should be recognized that where a girl is involved in emotional relationships with a woman teacher, a precipitating factor may occur if the situation is handled unwisely by the older woman. A girl may offer a genuine and simple love to a teacher who takes advantage of it in order to supply an emotional need so far unsatisfied by adult love (as indeed sometimes happens between a schoolmaster and a boy pupil).

A frustrated and unsatisfied teacher who loves young people may find it difficult not to grasp at this gift from an adolescent. So an experience, which on the child's side is normally soon outgrown, becomes an emotional fixation from which there is no later development into a normal heterosexual pattern.

(iii) An adult homosexual who seeks physical sexual intimacy with a boy who has a latent condition of inversion may precipitate the boy's condition. A hitherto apparently normal boy slips over into self-conscious homosexuality, with all the moral danger of homosexual practices. There appears to be little evidence that precocious stimulation or seduction are at most more than contributory causes of inversion.

HOMO

THE LAW AND THE MALE HOMOSEXUAL

It is a duty of the State to protect young people from seduction or assault, to protect society from nuisances and to preserve public decency. This duty of the State is recognized in general on every side, by the decent homosexual no less than by the normal man and woman. Any proposal for a change in the law must be judged in terms of the likelihood there may be that such a change would endanger the welfare of young people,' for this is part of that justice which the law exists to serve whether homosexual or heterosexual attacks are concerned.

The following considerations should be studied with this recognition of the moral duty of the law-maker. At least in one respect we shall see (page 110 (c)) that there is reason to believe young people are actually put into moral danger by the law as it is today.

Until 1828 the penalty (under an Act of 1533—25 ̧Henry VIII c. 6) for the commission of homosexual acts by males was death. They were referred to as "the abominable crime not to be mentioned among Christians". The maximum punishment for certain homosexual offences today is imprisonment for life. By the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, homosexual practices between adults, whenever or wherever they took place, became criminal offences to which the consent of the other party was under no circumstances to be a defence. In most European countries today the influence of the Code Napoléon has removed such acts between consenting adults from the cognizance of the law altogether.

By the 'Offences Against the Person Act, 1861', indecent assault on a male is subject to a maximum penalty of 10 years' imprisonment. Indecent behaviour is liable to imprisonment or fine.

1 See the end of this section for a note on the "age of consent".