EDITORIAL

Challenge to our Science

Some weeks ago a man of previously good character was convicted of having committed an indecent offence with a youth. Before sentencing him to a substantial term in prison, the judge, in the course of the customary judicial homily, said in effect "You have been found guilty of a disgusting crime, and what makes it all the more abominable is that you have ruined a young boy's life beyond redemption." Not long before this a well known surgeon, commenting in a contemporary medical journal on what were, in his opinion, the inadequate sentences imposed on convicted homosexuals, wrote of "the disturbing fact that thirteen men who in their time may have corrupted scores of boys who might otherwise have been loving husbands and happy fathers, have been deprived of liberty for no more than seven per cent. of their lives." The italics, we should add, in both cases, are ours.

We do not doubt for a moment that both of these learned men were expressing a belief which they sincerely held. But is that belief well founded? Can one, or even several, such corrupting experiences permanently deflect an otherwise normal heterosexual individual from his natural development? We do not doubt that they may inflict grave psychological trauma. But are the attractions of homosexuality so powerful? If they are, how can we reconcile the fact with the evidence that lies before our eyes? For by all accounts homosexuality has been, and is, rife among the population of our public schools. If the assumption made by these gentlemen were correct, one would expect at least twenty-five per cent. and perhaps even more of our ex-public schoolboys

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permanently to forswear matrimony and engage for life in homosexual pursuits. We have, of course, no figures for this country on which to base our opinion, and indeed no evidence beyond common experience and report, but we feel fairly certain that if anybody were publicly to assert that anything like such a state of affairs existed, his statement would be received with a chorus of derisive unbelief.

The fact is, of course, that our information on the subject of normal sexual development and individual sexual practice is astonishingly scanty, whereas what we might call the mythology on the subject is voluminous. The only serious attempt to provide such factual information would seem to have been that of Kinsey, whose work in the United States was received with incredulity, an incredulity for which there seems to have been considerable justification. Leaving this aside, there remain the researches of Kraft-Ebbing and Havelock Ellis, though these were primarily concerned with the abnormal deviations to be met with in heterosexuals. But current mythology, deriving, we believe, primarily from Gibbon, seems to postulate that, unless restrained by the strictest moral principles, given the opportunity, men and women will at once indulge in the widest profligacy, in the course of which, satiated with overindulgence in orthodoxy, they progress from heterosexuality to homosexuality. What real evidence exists for this? For if it is true we believe we may justifiably describe it as a remarkable physiological phenomenon.

The whole subject of sexual development is even now lamentably obscure. We know that it is, in the first place, determined by our genes and later governed by our hormones, and that it remains incomplete, in Europeans at any rate, for the first ten to twelve years of life. At puberty full development begins in earnest, but before it is achieved a variable period of homosexuality is very liable to intervene. In the vast majority of cases, as the individual matures, normal heterosexuality is