4

of these women a sordid path of promiscuity coupled with excessive drinking is definitely shown to be the result of having repressed Lesbian tendencies. Dr. Karpman then goes on to show that, had these women admitted their feelings of attraction to their own sox in time, their lives could not possibly been so self-destructive.5 Dr. Karpman contonds that social condemnation of Lesbianism caused guilt foelings so strong in these women that they virtually destroyed their own live 3.6

This kind of personal negation (denial of Lesbianism) is apparent in fictional Lesbian charactorization as woll. In The Illusionist by Francoise Mallet, the Lesbian woman protagonist has in her past loved only one person, another woman. After losing her, she spends the rest of her life in promiscuity with both men and women. In the end, as she feels herself aging, she marries a man she does not love. She consistently denies her true path in life oven to herself and ends by sacrificing the last of her personal integrity by marrying for economic security.

It would be morally wrong for a heterosexual woman to be forced to lead a homosexual life: It is equally wrong and fairly ridiculous for our ourront mores to force a Losbian woman into heterosexuality. Certainly, if all women with Lesbian tendencies wore to miraculously lose all their guilt feelings, it would not end prostitution or alcoholicm in women; but it would undoubtedly lower the statistics on both counts.

It is a popular Lesbian vanity to consider ourselves all intellectual, all artistic, otc. This simply is not true. One of the reasons that a great many active or overt Lesbians are intellectual is that they discorned their personal inclinetions and all of the implications far more readily than their less intelligent sistors. Certainly it would be preferable for a miserably unhappy married woman, or a prostitute, or an alcoholic woman, or any combination of these who are fighting Lesbian tendencies, or just failing to acknowledge them, to turn to guidance centers, psychiatrists, etc., than to go on destroying themselves. In many cases a disturbed repressed individual can be helped to the point where an easy and satisfactory adjustment to overt Lesbianism is made. With this sort of help, many socially non-productive, and oven morally des-

19