Is Homosexuality a "Vice"?

By SERGE TALBOT Transliteration: DAVID

"To sustain our strict morality, we profit from the coarseness of our knowledge" -Jean Rostand

"Gentlemen, educators, and wise jurists, psychologists and pathologists, judge me. All that I have done, I have done from love; each of my acts has been required by love; it was not I nor witches, gentlemen, but God who placed this love in my heart. If He has created me thusly and not otherwise, am I the cause of it, or is it not better to say these are the inscrutable ways of Destiny?"-written in 1889, in prison, by the famous homosexual, Countess Charlotte V, who carried the mannerisms of a man and had married, under the name of Sandor, one of her own sex. (Cited by Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, 550-556).

This simple question has yet to be answered simply. The severity of those who censure is a function of their ignorance. To make it easy to condemn, they bunch homosexual traits with those which are vastly separate, calling all one.

Homosexuals dress as persons of their

true sex:

Trahit sua quemque voluptas: each to his own leaning. (Virgil, Eclogue 11.65).

Homosexuals are nc social "Abnormals": In their social occupations they are not ordinarily singled out from the others. Their lovelife sees as much morality and immorality as the lovelife of heterosexuals. It is a human bent to seek out happiness, and this is a right equal among all humans so long as the rights

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of others are not invaded. "Your body is your own," said Victor Margueritte.

There is no connection between homosexuality and child-molestation. These persons are a class to themselves. The practice is equally frequent among women as among men, and the sex of the victim is incidental to them; molesters are as interested in girl-children as in boy-children. It is empty air to contend that the homosexual instinct produces any more molesters of children than does the heterosexual instinct.

Homosexuality is not related to the sort of pathologic case which produces the Necrophile or the chronic nymphomaniac-tendencies present only in severly disoriented persons. Nor is it socially dangerous, like Sadism. It does not descend, like Masochism, to acts which are outrageous. It is not concerned with animals and animal-contact, as the zoophile is, nor does it involve fetishes with wildly unrelated objects-mats, petticoats, footwear, nightcaps, and so forth, and so on. It does not offend esthetic feeling as does Coprolangia, the psychopathic penchant for things repulsive.

Undoubtedly the sexuality of others will always appear a bit strange, somewhat repugnant. Is this reason to condemn it? "Preoccupied with my own ways, I have come to look with a good deal of distaste upon what are called normal sexual relations, but I do not expect that I shall set out to ban them," writes a homosexual in L'Unique, Dec. '53-Jan. '54.

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