casual contacts. At the same time, in dealing with adolescents, one should remember that their involvements, whether they have physical expression or not, can be far from casual: "A boy's first love is a love apart, and never again may he hope to recapture the glory and the anguish of it. It is heavy with portent and fearful with beauty, terrible as an army with banners; yet withal so tender and selfless a thing as to touch the very hem of the garment of God. Only once in a life comes such loving as this..." (Adam's Breed, by Radcliffe Hall, page 134). That first love will often be for another boy. The shock and bitterness of a boy who is denounced for having such feelings may well make it harder for him to reach a satisfactory sexual adjustment later. And the denunciation will not remove the feelings.

A factor of this adolescent homosexuality is that it may be and commonly is extremely promiscuous, even in the most respectable boarding schools. These very physical "affairs" usually seem to leave little behind them; often a mere sharing of physical experience, they may have little connection with any real homosexuality. It is not uncommon to observe that a boy who has been the terror of the Lower Fourth becomes a respectable married man with a large family; whereas a class-mate who may have lived chastely, horrified by so-called indecent activities, and conscious not even of the faintest interest in joining them, later turns out to be the seemingly permanent homosexual. "The lack of psychological contact with woman-kind may well be a more important contributing factor than the experience of sexual play in dormitories". (Donald West, page 127). While we may say that in general the adolescent phase of homosexuality is usual and does no harm, we must not forget that it may be associated with activities causing acute suffering to sensitive boys. Mutual masturbation can become a gang activity at puberty, or even before, with severe cruelty shown on occasions towards the reluctant boy who through fear or distaste tries to stand out. Something like initiation rites may be established-again a source of terror to a sensitive boy. We cannot say that practices of this kind do no harm, however harmless the homosexuality itself may be; and it is clear that a continuing responsibility rests upon parents and teachers to be on the alert for all forms of bullying.

Seduction is probably a small or insignificant factor in forming homosexual inclination and early promiscuity (which is what shocks society most-especially with a much older person) probably affects the boy concerned less than experiences at say 20 or 30, let alone 60. A man of 60 does not commonly have a new sexual relationship without a considerable involvement and crisis. A boy of 13 may hardly even remember it, especially if there was no emotional involvement. Society has inverted the significance of these matters: worse, the discovery by a parent of homosexual behaviour in the son is still often attended by a major uproar in the home and even attempts, involving a great deal of publicity, to prosecute the partner. What would have been forgotten then becomes a vivid experience, aggravated by the fact that it is frequently the mother who is most vorried. Since in relation to homosexuality people tend either to know everything or to know nothing (and it must be assumed that most readers

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of this chapter fall in the latter category) it is necessary to stress how common homosexual experiences are in the young. Kinsey thought that about a third of all males have some homosexual experience at some point. This may well be an underestimate. What one can say definitely is that (on the physical side) a great many boys at school are involved at some time in sexual play with others; sometimes frequently, sometimes not; sometimes with only one boy, sometimes with many-or even with several at one time. Males are very phalliccentred and particularly in early adolescence the experiment and relief offered by homosexual interchanges are pursued without harm or emotional upset.

These affairs will most often be with boys of the same age, and mainly physical; less often but still commonly there may be an age gap of a few years, as between a 17-year-old boy and a 14-year-old boy; these latter may be far more emotionally charged, and physical satisfaction less routine; and because in general more tense and deeper, more lasting. A genuine protectiveness and caring may be felt by the older boy, a real admiration by the younger; these emotions are not readily damped-down or forgotten. The romantic homosexual school literature-even the occasional poems which seek entry in the columns of the school magazine-relates to this latter type of affair.

But both these sorts of homosexuality, that which is mainly physical and shared with contemporaries, and that (marked by passion more than lust) linking those of different ages, flow naturally into heterosexuality and even marriage. The process may not be rapid: there are many affairs among young men of university age, and a really intense homosexual involvement may not occur until the early twenties; but all this may still be and often is but a natural precursor of the heterosexual life that is to come. One reader of The Spectator wrote in to say that at school he had written sonnets to a younger boy; later he wrote them to his girl friend; the former was good practice for the latter. Even the mainly physical affairs explore, for the boys involved, their personalities and power, and make them sexually unafraid of later, heterosexual experiments.

Passing on now to the early twenties, we may find that a tenth to a twentieth of the young men of our acquaintance are still mainly homosexual in outlook. Some may still be working out the entanglements of adolescence: their path through earlier sexual experience was perhaps not smooth or uninterrupted. They will have affairs with other young men, usually not boys, though there may well be an age difference. (A "young looking" 19or 20-year old may be the object of a great deal of affection and notice: but it is helpful to remember that a young looking girl of a given age usually attracts more attention than a more evidently ageing contemporary.) These affairs may still be very promiscuous-"one night stands"-or mainly emotional. But they are becoming more self-conscious: in the society of today those involved may be thinking of themselves as "homosexual"; and it is this age which knows real despair and may assume nothing else is ever to come. This is wrong; there is in society a small "hard core", but this is by no means necessarily the same group that had homosexual experiences at school or later. Many or

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