said, is a private affair. A homophile marriage is a very private affair.

In the first place, usually we've got more to lose a house, two good jobs (often in the professions), and a happy personal relationship that has been tempered by the years. To find a married couple so endowed that would take their chances on, for instance, appearing as such in a TV show would be tremendously difficult. Not only jobs and material things are at stake but also personal relations with one's relatives and in-laws. Instead of just one set of heterosexual parents and relatives, in a homophile marriage there are two sets. I have only siblings, all of whom accept my circumstances. But my lover has three aunts, very religious, who raised him through sacrifices, and he would not dream of causing them embarrassment and grief. It would be a very rare homophile marriage that did not have on one side or the other some good reason for shunning publicity.

Also, we married couples simply aren't as "good copy." It is not, I know, the fault of the editors of ONE that more is not printed on us. It is far more difficult to write well and interestingly on a situation that has less conflict.

This lack of publicity regarding homophile marriages runs back all through history. I have no doubt but that they have quietly existed in all periods, but references to them are scarce as hens' teeth.

One might think (and some homophiles naively do) that in that fantastically homosexual period, the Golden Age of Greece, there would be some such references. But in all their literature there is none. The Greeks had the concept of the transient homosexual relationship between two young warriors of about the same ages, and they also had the concept of the transient homosexual relationship between an older man and a youth. But if they recognized (let alone permit-

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ted!) two homosexuals living together with the obvious intent of a lifelong relationship, they certainly never extolled it. Theirs was the practice of bisexuality. The person who was completely homosexual held absolutely no status of honor with them. That fact is totally foreign to our modern homophile movement.

This lack of historical material regarding the idea of homophile marriage works to the detriment of that point of view, of course. Homophile writers have many past ideals, myths, and famed love affairs to make reference to and elaborate on-but not a one pertains to homophile marriage. Gide and Cory, for instance, (both bisexual and married to women), can evoke their Greek forerunners and draw from that fabulous mine of literature. We have nothing comparable.

The concept of homophile marriage is new, a modern concept, a product of our great current homophile movement that commenced in Germany in the 1800's. I suspect that if anyone could be tagged as the first to intellectually push homophile marriage (though cautiously and embryonically), it would be the Englishman, Edward Carpenter. There are indications that he was homosexually married, and his writings are remarkably free from being circled around the Greek idea of the transient homosexual love affair.

Homophile marriage would always have been, and would be today, much more prevalent were it not for that major problem that has, very rightly, been the subject of serious discussions at classes at ONE INSTITUTE-the problem of how to meet.

Nowhere is discrimination against us more telling than on this point. Heterosexual society screams against the sexual promiscuity of homosexuals, but by their laws and anathema regarding homosexuals they drive us underground and force us to live 95% of our lives "passing" as heteros

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