The Church of England some years ago found herself immersed in a storm of controversy over the Deceased Wife’s Sister Act. To most men her attitude seemed pedantic and unworthy of serious attention. The English Church is unfortunate: her apparently narrow ecclesiasticism was really the result of a liberal policy at the time of the Reformation. During the Middle Ages the Church had extended her prohibited degrees to such an extent that it must have been difficult to know whom one could marry without a dispensation.[15] Only a person more than four degrees removed from the other party was an eligible partner without dispensation, the degrees so being reckoned as to include even second cousins. The English Church swept away these anomalies and concentrated on an irreducible minimum of prohibition up to three degrees (reckoned in direct ascending and descending generation from the common ancestor)—thus sacrificing all regulation against marriage between first cousins, who are four degrees removed.
The real opposition to the ecclesiastical attitude was, however, that any affinity, as distinguished from consanguinity, should be a bar to marriage. The unhappy deceased wife’s sister was merely a convenient representative. But this is a controversy which is not sufficiently imminent to engage us in these pages.
Chapter 8: The Homosexual Temperament
We must now pass from the normal or hetero-sexual to the second-class of sex-temperament. This is the homosexual—that in which the individual’s sex attraction is directed towards the same sex. And here it will be necessary to utter a note of warning. The sex instinct lies so deep in human nature that many men are incapable of regarding sex characteristics save through their own temperamental colour. Normal men are frequently found, for instance, of such underdeveloped mental faculties that they start out with an immense sex prejudice against the homosexual. Without being able to consider the question impartially they abhor this variety as an unspeakable evil. It is essential that we should place such critics outside the area of practical investigation. The homosexual tendency may be as evil as they imagine it to be, but we must only arrive at that conclusion as a result of impartial and incontestable reason. And any man who cannot undertake that inquiry is as valueless for our purpose as are his prejudicial opinions; he must simply go back to the nursery.
Let us therefore, as far as is individually possible, attempt to treat this question with an open mind. And accordingly we shall find it most convenient first to consider the various attitudes which have been taken up with regard to this difficult problem.
The legal or State attitude we have already to some extent anticipated. The State looks with suspicious eyes on any influence which tends to sterilize the birth-rate. Accordingly, in England, homosexuality is branded as a crime for which a heavy sentence can be pronounced. It is true that legally this sentence, under the Criminal Amendment Act, can only be inflicted for the physical sex-act itself; but this includes any assault or any behaviour which may be construed as an attempt to lead up to the commission of the act. And, accordingly, any man is legally under suspicion if he is thought to be homosexual, even though no perpetration of the physical offence can be alleged against him. The hideous system of blackmail is thus encouraged by the law. Once a man is understood to be subject to these proclivities, it is assumed that sooner or later he will commit the offence, and he is watched, if not by the over-busy police, by those idle persons who trade upon the legal attitude toward this problem. Any conversation or literature on the subject is suppressed, so far as is possible, by the State, because the physical expression being a crime, all that may become an incentive to the crime is itself criminal.
We have already mentioned the basic fallacy of the legal attitude. It does not follow that because a line of conduct may decrease the birth-rate, it is therefore wrong. Celibacy, as we have seen, may be an actual virtue. But in this particular instance there is a still more serious error. The English law, by branding homosexuality as a crime, assumes that it is a deliberate perversion; for it would be obviously ridiculous to punish a man for doing what he could not help doing. Even the law is not so illogical as to sentence a madman to penal servitude because he insists on being mad. No, the State regards the homosexual as one who has of his own choice assumed this form of sex temperament, in the same way as a man decides to rob or forge a signature. The legal attitude must rest on this supposition, for otherwise its policy would be flagrantly unjust. And accordingly we find the law classifying this family of behaviour as “unnatural.”
Now, if there is one fact which is clear from an investigation of the problem, it is that this supposition is as false as it is possible for any supposition to be. Let it be granted that a certain number of homosexual offences are committed by persons who are sexually normal in temperament. There remains the whole body of homosexuals, of those, that is to say, in whom the homogenic attraction is as integral a part of their nature as the appreciation of music or the love of colour. Abundant proof of this contention is to hand. There have been thousands of individuals in every age, including the present, who have never heard of homosexuality,[16] have never met other homosexuals, or come into contact with anything approaching homosexual practice; and yet they have been homosexual all their lives. I have known persons who believed that no one else in the world shared their aspirations, and also have suffered tortures because of their supposed isolated abnormality.