H: But homosexuals murder nothing except a preconception of what people are supposed to be. Certainly it's occurred to me that I'm "sick," in your handy word. Every minority person in America feels this pressure, sometimes to the screaming-point. In fact I was in therapy for almost four years, examining every angle of my socalled problem.

SG: Well?

in my life that I was only sick in relation to a majority standard

SG: But your analyst didn't agree with you. And most psychiatrists would say that homosexuality is a fixation at an infantile level and represents a sadly distorted and undeveloped personality.

H: I'd find a moral judgement in such a generalization rather than the modest impersonality supposed H: I came to the conclusion that that's to distinguish I was different, not sick. Under science. Undeveloped by what the analyst's guidance I dated standard? I once read that Carl women and even slept with sevSandburg was an "undeveloped eral. But our love-making, the Walt Whitman"-and Walt, of "techniques," ended up exactly as course, was gay. So who's infanbetween two men; I could become tile there? You use the words passionate no other way. I even "sadly distorted"—in comparison imagined they were boys during to what? A fantasy of the ideal the whole thing. Believe me, I arrow-collar man or the impertried incredibly hard to act fect flesh-and-booze mortals whom straight. But it finally just seemed we both know? I've discovered a tortured attempt to be somethat much psychiatric language thing I'm not. is based on a too-pure and debatSG: What did your psychiatrist able ideal of what people should say?

be like. If you lowered the ideal to the actual reality around us, you wouldn't be so pious about the homosexual.

ment. The standards that psychiatry uses are rationally established after scrupulous and neutral research.

H: At first he said my fantasying of men when I was with a woman was a reflection of how deep-seated my my problem was. SG: That's a defensive arguHe maintained it could be "cured" and told me he'd had success before. But when I tirelessly tried to suppress my desire for men, and it came upon me anyway, he finally conceded that I would be less miserable as a homosexual. The rest of the therapy tried to blot out the guilt that I and all gay people feel for not being permitted to express ourselves.

SG: Then he finally did say you were abnormal, or sick, but had to make the best of it-correct?

H: Yes. But I myself was beginning to realize for the first time 6

H: Bushwa! Many psychiatrists use conventional middle-class` American ideals of psychological well-being as their standard. There is nothing universal about them. They merely happen to reflect the majority attitudes at this time. In the future you'll see the equally suave acknowledgment of different standards, including the right of the homosexual to fully express himself as a "healthy" mattachine REVIEW

individual in terms of his tradition.

SG: Do you actually think society will give up its basic distinctions of right and wrong, a working separation between normality and abnormality, just to accommodate the guilt of homosexuals? H: It must: Homosexuals have submitted too weakly until now to judgements from above. We now know that what you call society actually gets down to individuals in positions of social power, who call the tune and set the standards. Many of us are no longer willing to put up with this degrading of our personalities. Merely to live, we must "assert ourselves as homosexuals who are as proud to be what we are as you are of yourself. When this movement becomes powerful enoughand gay people refuse either to hide or flaunt themselves-it will will be openly accepted.

SG: You're kidding yourself if you believe that what's always been recognized as the numberone human perversion will suddenly be completely whitewashed.

H: What is a perversion? Truly modern people find it hard to see the idea of perversion in any kind entire of sex relationship. The entire concept is beginning to die as people realize that whatever can be done with the body is ultimately just aną natųral if it gives pleasure without causing harm. Be realistic. Why is it any worse for a man to perform oral intercourse with another man instead of with a woman? Or for two women to do so, instead of woman and man? Or for masturbation to involve two men instead of woman and man? Do you think our organs themselves are prejudiced and

draw a line? You moralize, but you don't have the courage to carry your logic to the end.

SG: Listen, homosexuality is obviously a substitute for the regular thing. You never mention this ABC of reasoning. You keep trying to wipe out sexual differences and pretend there are no basic distinctions between men and women. I'm convinced you do this because it gives you an excuse to act like a woman.

'H: I doubt if there's a man alive who doesn't feel "womanly" at some time, if you mean responsive, tender, sweet, even cuddly. The old categories of a man being Mars and a woman Venus are artificial: only insensitive people or poseurs pretend to a cartoon image of masculinity vs. femininity. I'm not wiping out sexual differences. Social change itself has softened the dividing line. It was once considered mannish for women to drive a car, smoke on the street, drink at a bar, earn an independent buck. We laugh at this today. Those who come after us will laugh at the pressures once put upon men to keep up a front of endless courage, indif. ference to delicacy, superiority over women. If I prefer gentleness to harshness, I'm not being a woman. I'm being human-something you might be ashamed of, with your straightjacket notion of masculinity.

SG: You mean because I don't mince, I'm a barbarian? Because I don't simper or speak in a falsetto or try to goose a waiter, I'm behind the times? Yeah, I'm a brute, I like women, steak, baseball, poker and bourbon. Maybe I'll be arrested in this beautiful future of yours.'