Homosexuality:

A Moral Dilemma?

;

GEORGE J. LEHMANN

It may not be considered good form by some to begin an essay with a question; however, it is the purpose of this essay first to answer this question and then to analyze the answer. Is homosexuality, in our society at least, a moral dilemma? The answer is a definite "yes".

The morality of the society in which the homosexual lives, works and is called upon to defend brands him or her an outcast and degenerate, while the very nature of the sexual drive in man demands that sexual satisfaction is found with the person's "love-object". The homosexual is now forced to choose between the dictates of society, or at the risk of incurring its awesome wrath, the dictates of his erotic drive. And therein lies the nature of the dilemma.

The taboos against homosexuality in Western Civilization arose first as a religious taboo (among the Jews), then as a social taboo (among the early Christians) and finally as a legal offense (in the late Roman Empire). It is interesting to note that homosexuality was not the only form of sexuality against which barriers were erected. Heterosexuality was sharply curtailed by the same taboos, and was tolerated only in a very narrow circle: between a man and his wife, and then only for the purpose of procreation. Any other form of sexual expression was looked upon as a vice, and subject to severe punishment. All the writers of the early Church maintained that celibacy

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was the preferred state. In order to prevent extinction among Christians, however, a compromise was reached with the body, where sex was begrudgingly allowed, but severely restricted and devoid of joy.

This de-humanized, version of sex has come down to the present day, in theory at least if not in practice. At times the "lid" has been off, at times on-each period of libertinism followed by a period of puritanism.

It was not until the work of Freud in Vienna, Ellis in England, and Hirsch. feld in Germany, to name but a few, that sex became a subject of interest to the scientist. Confronted with a battery of irrefutable evidence compiled by the scientists, society slowly began to alter its facade without altering its basically anti-sexual core. Sex was exploited as never before. The shapely female figure was employed to sell everything from automobiles to sacks of cow dung. The enemy had been set to work!

Supposedly the invert benefitted the most from "sexual enlightenment". The lawyer's jargon was intermingled with that of the psychiatrist; the "vicious person" becomming the "mentally ill" and Reading Gaol being replaced by the sanitorium. And in more enlightened areas, the invert, instead of being presented with society's condemnation and disgust, is presented with society's sympathy and disgust.

The phenomenon of homosexuality seems to be the direct result of the fact that man is a sexual being. According to the most reliable informa tion available (and to the author of this essay, the most rational) an individual's fixation toward homosexual stimuli occurs by the same process that determines another's fixation toward heterosexual stimuli. Thus if we wish to approach this subject from a strictly biological standpoint, anyone who is fixated into any single form of outer-directed sexual expression is a neurotic. The homosexual must then be defined as one who entertains the less popular neurosis. The drive to copulate, to enter into a sexual relation, is so strong among mammals that they will readily enter into relations with other loveobjects when the usual partners, are not available. The heterosexual male who refuses homosexual activity when no females are available (such as aboard ship, in prison, or at a remote army post) is neurotic to approximately the same degree as a homosexual male who would forego heterosexual intercourse when isolated with a group of females. It would appear that homosexual fixation is more prevalent among human beings than among infrahuman mammals due to the fact that sexual fixation as a whole is more prevalent among human beings. As far as a genetic origin of homosexuality is concerned, it might be safe to say that a tendency toward this mode of fixation could be inherited, but certainly nothing more.

Having looked at the components of this moral dilemma, we must now try and answer the fateful question: How does the homosexual resolve it? How

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