DONALD WEBSTER CORY

An address delivered to the International Committee for Sex Equality at the University of Frankfort, September, 1952. See "News" for details on this congress. Mr. Cory is, of course, the author of the best-seller, "The Homosexual in America."

The United States of America today occupies a position unique in Western culture. As a result of the decline of the British Empire, the rise in influence of the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe and in Asia, and the resultant division of the world into two great and perhaps mutually antagonistic forces, the United States, with its vast reservoirs of raw materials, its industrial efficiency and wealth, has emerged in international affairs in a position of influence and affluence such as has been centered in no single nation since the decline of the Holy Roman Empire. In every field of human endeavor, the peoples of the free world are watching America, hopeful that out of this land will come new vistas of progress, yet skeptical of the meaning of American democracy and culture in terms of human values. Thus, despite the very slow and halting steps forward that emerge from this land, such progress is watched with greater interest outside the borders of the forty-eight states than are similar developments in other countries. The changes now taking place in American attitudes toward sex, as in other fields, therefore have significance far greater than would be apparent if such changes weer to be found in another land, be it France or India or England or the Dominican Republic. Yet the new outlook, simultaneously revolutionary and evolutionary as it paradoxically must be, is formulated in an atmosphere so devoid of the free interchange of thought (the very essence of that highly publicized American democracy) that, outside of a professional few, people are for the most part unaware of what is occurring.

More than any other power, the United States was founded on traditions of puritanism. The concept of sex as a necessary evil, an ugly pursuit enjoyed by man because of the devil incarnate in the flesh, was taught by the early cultural leaders of this country. The varying and diverse elements that made up the American melting pot vied with one another to appear before the masses as pure and good, one group not to be outdone by another in the antisexual repudiation of physical desire. Thus the struggle of the Protestant puritans to maintain a rigid and self-avowedly virtuous ban on all things sexual was strengthened by the several minorities that found conformance the road to acceptance and

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