Following is the first of a series of five sex talks prepared and delivered expressly for the annual Leadership Training Conference of The Prosperos, held at Hotel Miramar in Santa Barbara, California, July 13-29. The Pros peros is a religio-educational organization which conducts formal classes in various localities in many states of the United States. Its basic purpose is to sponsor research, study and education in the new frontiers of the heart, the mind and the spirit. The Prosperos aims to bring the spiritual heritage of the ages into a practical working hypothesis with the science of the atomic-space age. Lectures, closed classes, group dynamics, "counseling and youth guidance in the area of straight thinking in the abstract constitute its major program. Thus the sex lecture series, as training for Prospero counselors, was designed to cast off age-old myths and taboos so that varied aspects of human sex behavior could be viewed in the light of truth and reality. It is planned that the entire series will be issued in permanent book form as one in the series of "Mattachine Lectures in Contemporary Thought" within the next few months.

The Hypocrisy Sexual Morality

HAROLD L. CALL, President,. Mattachine Society, Inc.

DURING THE PAST TEN YEARS in the Mattachine Society, I have probably talked to more people about their intimate sex problems than many therapists ever reach. Wives who have discovered. homosexual husbands have come to us. A Superior Court Judge in a Northern California county came to us and revealed that he was a man who wanted to dress in women's clothes; a woman who was a rape victim and turned frigid came to us. She admitted she was frightened at the thought of marrying a man, and in desperation she tried to turn lesbian and that didn't work either, because she just was not cut out to be a lesbian. Male hustlers, female prostitutes, and a whole spectrum of sexual beings have beaten a path to our door. Last week an 18-year-old youth came to us, wanted help in finding a job so he could leave home because he was a homosexual and feared his folks would put him away if they found out about him. We urged him to return home,.continue his education, and to maintain the best possible relationship with his parents, and at least get the advice of some professional counselors, and be certain of having a satisfactory job before he made any plunges. On the same day an 18-year-old,girl, beautiful and stylishly dressed came to our office and wanted to know how she could learn to operate a lithograph printing press because she was going to have to get out of mattachine REVIEW

her home. She was getting out on account of her "old man" (actually her step father) was making passes at her, and her "old lady" was drunk all the time, she said. We have had calls from jails, and from people who declared they were about to commit suicide. We have sent couples to marriage counselors to attempt to ward off divorce because of sexual incompatibility. We have helped put people into mental hospitals, and we have helped get them out.

In short, we have been called upon for help by thousands of adult men and women who suffer from one kind of sexual conflict or another. Some of them are paying a very high penalty for it-they received an undesirable discharge from the armed forces, they were arrested by a policeman in a toilet who was lingering at a urinal and slowly stroking his penis to entice a suspected homosexual into making a proposition, or they lost a job when the boss was told the employee, was a sex deviate.

I submit at the outset that many of these evils and injustices surrounding our "sexual problems" which so often result in a fantastic waste of manpower and skill and talent constitute a luxury which modern society cannot afford. The perpetuated myth of current moral standards makes for hypocrisy and corruption which will, if not checked, literally mean the possible destruction of freedoms we regard as dear to our way of life.

In these talks we may resort to some of the four-letter words. I have not seen the controversial Dictionary of American Slang which has so incensed some of our educators and legislators, but I trust that the few four-letter words we shall use will not shock nor will they be vague in meaning. Recently Bishop James Pike of San Francisco talked to a group of friends of the San Francisco Fublic Library on the subject of censorship and he brought up the subject of the four-letter Anglo-Saxon words which describe sex and certain bodily functions.

"It is really too bad we cannot use these punchy little four-letter words," he said. "Instead we have to resort to polysyllabic Greek and Latin derivatives to say the same thing, while the four-letter words are infinitely more expressive and everyone knows exactly what they mean."

Four-letter words or not, let me emphasize that it is not the intention in this series to be scatological, prurient, or meretricious. Nor do we present any material which will fali into the category of the obscene.

This is a report without judgment on facts and realities of sex behavior and an attempt to outline an acceptable code or attitude which is believed to be in line with the best thinking of experts in the behavioral sciences, law, religion and education. I respectfully ask that students give serious consideration to ideas presented, compare and weigh them against present knowledge on the subject, and then discard that which is found wanting.