nocent and harmless affection, mutually displayed and mutually responded to, may lead to sex play and sexual relations which were neither anticipated nor desired in the beginning. In my opinion this is more apt to develop in the case of a boy whose home lacks an emotional display of love or who may come from a broken home, and who finds a measure of understanding or affection in an older boy or man. Even the slightest kindness can foster love in the heart of a boy who finds little or none at home.
Children are far cleverer and more conniving than we like to give them credit for being, and a boy may quickly learn a great many tricks designed to elicit display of the affection he craves. One of these tricks may be to develop the feminine characteristics which exist, as they do in even the most masculine men, within him. His purpose, as a lovestarved and consequently lonely and unhappy individual, is to obtain an increasing amount of affection from the one who might previously have accorded his affection only to a limited degree. If such a relationship continues for any period of time, innocent though it may be in the beginning, it is quite apt at some stage to excite the sexual feelings of one or the other or both to the point where they cannot be denied. To judge from my own experience, and from my discussions with others, it is quite likely to be the younger of the two, rather than the older, who is the more aggressive and who becomes the actual seducer.
I shall come back to this, the first of the two premises stated at the beginning of this article, after a few remarks upon the second.
In the matter of finding and keeping employment the average homosexual would find his life much easier if he would only realize that most other people care very little about
his personal life so long as his life does not infringe on theirs. Most people are like the traditional ostrich -quite willing not to see what they are not forced to see. Many people care little what their fellow man does and may only smile indulgently at what they term their fellow's "queer" behavior provided this behavior is not forced upon their attention in such a way that it cannot be overlooked, or provided they are not forced to explain to others their own indulgence or forebearance. The average employer is no different. So long as the employee's sexual proclivities do not become so obvious as to be annoying or do not produce too much talk, do not interfere with job performance or do not result in the molestation of other employees, customers or clients, many employers are happy to pretend that they know nothing at all about the matter. Assuming that a homosexual can control his desires at least to the same extent that the average heterosexual with good taste is expected to control his, and assuming that he has real ability, he may compete with everyone on an equal footing. To me, my own life demonstrates that even when homosexuality is aggravated by other matters one may still succeed if one has ability and acts with some measure of decorum.
When I was a child both my mother and father worked in order to support a family of four children of whom I was the eldest. Consequently, I was to a large extent left on my own. As we were of a minority group in a rather strongly and religiously prejudiced neighborhood we had few friends or associates. As a matter of fact, from the time I was eight years old I had only one real friend, and my younger brother and I spent almost all our time at his home. My friend's father had died when he was an infant and his mother, like mine, worked. Conse-
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