Please do not be resistant to change, because change is going on whether we like it or not. Therefore I call upon you to accept the challenge of change, just as Thomas Jefferson did some 160 years ago. His acceptance of the challenge is engraved in the wall of the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C.: "I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions. But laws and constitutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear the coat which fitted him as a boy as civilized society to remain under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors."

In facing the reality of sex, we aren't even wearing children's coatswe're still wearing diapers!

Dr. Rene Guyon, the eminent French jurist from the faculty of the University of Paris and now an advisor for the government of Thailand, wrote in 1932 on the topic of the legitimacy of sexual acts and the principles of sexual freedom that one of the great social needs was a reform of the disastrous and chaotic system in the sexual sphere which is so pernicious for mankind, especially in the Western World.

He called conventional sexual morality a "hideous bondage." He urged us in his books, The Ethics of Sexual Acts and A Case for Sexual Freedom, to seek liberation from this bondage in order to achieve a better life and a life more in harmony with healthy nature.

Opinions on sexual ethics in twentieth century society, Dr. Guyon continued, are changing with lightening speed. At the time he made this statement 35 years ago, the World League for Sexual Reform,. founded in Germany by Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, had not yet fallen victim to Hitler, and there was indeed some real progress in the spreading of knowledge about the reality of human sexual behavior. Information derived on a scientific basis was coming forward, and in most of Central Europe a considerable sexual freedom was achieved which matched that of the Latin countries of the south and Scandinavia in the north. England, of course, held out. So did the entire English-speaking world.

The break marking an accelerated smashing of the conspiracy of silence on sexual matters in our own country came in 1948 when Dr. Alfred Kinsey and his associates published the volume on the sexual behavior of the human male. Some of us were shocked. Most of us were surprised-not so much that we learned that there was a lot of sex going on, but more secretly because we found out that so many of our fellow citizens were doing so many of the things we were doing and thought no one else did, or even knew about. There is nothing new sexually. What people are doing today

mattachine REVIEW

in bed has been going on almost since the beginning of time!

At a lecture in San Francisco in 1955, Dr. Kinsey told the audience of about a thousand persons-mostly middle-aged womenthis little story as an introduction:

"Ladies and Gentlemen, if the sex laws of the state of California were rigidly enforced, ninety-five percent of you wouldn't be here tonight. You would be in jail." At this most people in the audience looked sideways at their neighbor seated by them-I presume to see who would be in jail-and considerable embarrassment was manifest when so many persons looking at each other faced a silent moment of truth.

What was actually happening in those embarrassed glances was this: Many persons for the first time were looking at sexual hypocrites, and were realizing that they themselves were also sexual hypocrites. Most of us, or almost every one of us who has had much sexual experience has committed one or more sexual acts which are at least misdemeanors if not felonies in California. As will be pointed out later in the series, of many our innocent and mutually consenting private sex acts are actually crimes. which could draw up to 14 years.in prison in this state, or even greater sentences in states such as Nevada or Georgia. Yet marriage counselors,

in advising couples to use varied types of foreplay, are guilty of advocating these crimes!

Very few of us can look deeply into our experience and not find something we have done in sex which, if it wouldn't land us in jail, at least tie a terrible stigma upon us. Then why are we so prone to stigmatize publicly-often with lasting damage to the personality-those few people who are caught and called upon to pay a savage penalty for what the multitude is doing?

This stigma finds its greatest expression in the discharging of persons from the armed services as "undesirables" after intensive investigations into their private lives.

If one needs an example of how sexual stigma can work, look across the Atlantic today to England. The Profumo case doesn't have to be repeated here-our newspapers have covered every crotchy detail of it for us already. It is current proof that sexual indulgence and stigma of it can topple a government-since we are told this is going to happen. A few months ago another British Foreign Office case involved a homosexual. A couple of years ago an American career diplomat in Warsaw returned to Washington, D.C., for trial in disgrace, after being blackmailed by a woman. Literally thousands of such cases take place every year, involving little known persons and there is no headline about it. Yet the terrible stigma is there just the same.