Social Lepers or Sick Men?
Homosexuality is probably a great deal commoner than most people in this country recognise. It is a subject usually treated with great reserve. But in a number of recent cases well- known men have been involved and the subject has for once been placed fair and square before the public, together with the implication that male homosexuality is, on the increase. " It is spreading," wrote a Daily Mail leader-writer, " like a foul growth in our midst." But where is the evidence for any such statement ? And where is the • evidence for the Daily Mail's further charge that most homosexuals " must be men who choose perversion " ? This note is one in a disagree- ably hysterical campaign initiated by Mr. John Gordon, of the Sunday Express in an article in which he said that " homo- sexuality now infects politics, literature, the stage, the Church and the youth movements," to say nothing of " the exotic world of international politics." Mr. Gordon calls not only for " sharp and severe punishment " for these " pests " or " human dregs," but demands that they should be made " social lepers." Certainly homosexuals who make a nuisance of themselves in public or corrupt youth merit no more sympathy than other nuisances or corrupters, but they merit no less. As for punishment, a report issued in 1949 by the Joint Committee on Psychiatry and the Law appointed by the British Medical Association and the Magistrates Association (published by the B.M.A. under the title of " The Criminal Law and Sexual Offenders "), took a very different view from that of Mr. Gordon. Moral tub-thumping may be good for circulation; it is not a substitute for knowledge of the subject—or, indeed, for common humanity.
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