across, and it is terribly difficult to get them to be in the least balanced or sensible about anything of this kind."

Sex, of course, is just one aspect of life. It is a very important aspect-indeed, a fundamental appetite, like sleeping or eating or thinking—and one cannot ignore it. By trying to ignore it or suppress it, one merely succeeds in making it into an overwhelmingly important thing which gets out of all proportion in life, and lots of people nowadays make far too much fuss about it, usually in quite the wrong ways. Three main categories of these spring to mind. First of all, there are the puritans-the people who think the whole thing is dirty and ought to be suppressed. These are the people who provide the censors and the punishers, and unfortunately they still dominate our law-making and law-giving. Secondly, there are the people who set out to exploit sex in a commercial way; not just the people who live on prostitution and make big profits out of that, but the sexual titillators, among whom I would include not merely the pornographers, but also the sensational Press, who do it under the guise of preaching good behaviour and saying "How shocking all this is", while all the time they are really creating more relish for it. And then there are the unfortunate people who as a result of all this titillation and repression become utterly obsessed by sex, so that it gets out of all proportion in their lives and their whole thought and life-drive is dominated by the unsuccessful search for satisfactory sex.

I think that all these English attitudes are particularly unbalanced and immature; in fact, we are quite rightly regarded as the laughing stock of the Continentals in this respect (although I sometimes wonder whether they are all that much better than we are). You may have read Mr. Malcolm Muggeridge in this week's New Statesman, commenting on the Quaker report. He says: "Sex, to the French, remains pleasurable or humorous. They cannot grasp it as a duty. The wrongs of homosexuals condemned to seek their pleasures in public lavatories, which so harrowed the Quakers, leave them cold." So those who seek a healthier and more matterof-fact approach are themselves sensationalised in this sort of way. The Quaker report has been commented upon in the Press in ways which are simply a grotesque garbling of what they did in fact say I am sure Mr. Wedmore will agree with that.

MR. WEDMORE: Emphatically.

MR. GREY: The more one tries to do social work to help people who have sexual problems, the more one realises that workers in all the fields of family difficulties and sex matters come up against a mountain not merely of prejudice, but of wilful ignorance. People don't want to know about sex; they not merely don't know about it, they actively don't want to know. This is especially true of homosexuality, because homosexuality is a subject about which one either knows a good deal or else one knows nothing at all;

mattmchine REVIEW

and those who don't want to know will not be told. I have been told of an eighteen-year-old boy who was troubled with homosexual feelings, and who, having hesitated for months, finally screwed up his courage to the sticking-point, came down to breakfast one day, and said to his parents: "Mummy and Daddy, I've got something very important to tell you: I'm homosexual". His mother, who was pouring out the coffee, did not even bother to look up. She said, in reproving tones, "Don't be silly, dear, that's not a funny joke at all". In other words, "This couldn't possibly happen to my child-it's always those nasty people down the road". I have also had the extraordinary experience of discussing this subject with one of the Members of Parliament who had expressed himself most violently against the Wolfenden Report in a House of Commons debate, and who, after a certain amount of quite friendly and reasonable conversation with me, suddenly looked very puzzled and asked: "Is it really true that these homosexuals actually find the idea of going to bed with a woman distasteful?"

This is the basic problem which we at the Albany Trust are up against. Almost in spite of ourselves, we are becoming a social service agency for quite a lot of our time, and in the process; we are learning quite a lot about all sorts of people. The ignorance which exists about this problem of homosexuality is quite appalling. I have heard of a couple of cases only this week of parents who have been so shocked and upset by finding that their children had homosexual tendencies that they either turned them out of the house or assaulted them. And the children, the people who come to us for advice, will often say: "Well, I have lived with my parents for ten, fifteen, or twenty years, and I don't know what to do, and life is very difficult." Usually I ask them whether their parents have any idea about their homosexuality, and they reply: "Oh, no-I couldn't possibly tell them. I would not know how to start”. This is a very difficult problem, which everybody has got to solve for themselves, but which far too few people are making any attempt to solve at all.

These attitudes are of course largely due to the law, which is why we want to change the law; but it is not the only factor. I believe that quite apart from any question of the law, there is a genuine fear among the population at large of the unknown, and a dislike of the different. However silly it may be, there are many people who feel that homosexuals are a threat to their security-to their emotional security, if not their physical security-and that is why it is not sufficient for us to speak of "persecution", and to present homosexuals as a minority which has a legitimate grievance, in order to get the law changed. This is, of course, true; but we have got to take a more positive approach, and somehow to make society surer than it is at present that the homosexuals in its midst are not a danger to it.

How are we to move towards a more sexually sane society?