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Homosexual Law Reform [2]
Sir: Your correspondent Varian J. Wilson has made some extraordinary comments in his reply to J.W. Goodwin on the subject of homosexual law reform. No doubt the heat of controversy is to some extent responsible. But, if only to introduce a saner note, I wish to take him up on some of his points.
| (a) | To speak of another correspondent’s ‘brief for the pervert’ is in itself an extraordinary statement. The term ‘pervert’ is often applied negatively to homosexuals; but such name-calling makes intelligent controversy impossible from the start. A pervert is a person who chooses to act in a manner contrary to ordinary moral and psychological behaviour. A fair example might be a person deliberately deriving sexual satisfaction from the torture of animals. One cannot fairly apply the term to those sexual deviations which can be reasonably well contained within the ordinary social framework – the masturbation of adolescents, for example, or the homosexual behaviour of those who already have a homosexual disposition. Even those psychologists and moralists who regard homosexuality negatively are generally ready to regard homosexual traits as an inevitable ‘half-way house’ on the road to a heterosexual maturity. And to speak of a ‘brief’ is to impute a bias and a false emphasis. |
| (b) | In my own experience I encountered a number of homosexuals who are ‘languishing in a New Zealand prison for offences solely against adults’. I do not know how Mr Wilson arrives at his opposite conclusion. I also know a number of homosexuals, peaceable people, who live in terror that the police will arrest them for some compulsive and mildly homosexual gesture made when they are intoxicated or have otherwise relaxed their controls. An ordinary heterosexual person would, I imagine, react to such a gesture with page 362 charity and some humour – ‘You’ve made a mistake, brother; I don’t belong to your tribe.’ But those who make the laws are apparently so hag-ridden by negative Puritanism that they have felt they must legislate against every nuance of their homosexual neighbour’s conduct. |
| (c) | Mr Wilson speaks strangely of ‘the rarity of the particular type of hypothetical homosexual which the reformers are sobbing about’ – I take it that he is trying to say that homosexuality among adults is a rarity, and that pederasts are the norm. In fact the reverse is true. |
| (d) | Mr Wilson’s most extraordinary statement, however, is his blanket charge against homosexuals, namely that – ‘They are averse to honest toil, and live by non-violent dishonesty such as cashing valueless cheques, often with unhappy female confederates’. How can one answer a statement so wholly unjust and illogical? Are the ‘female confederates’ unhappy because their chosen mates are homosexual, or because they are too imbecilic to part company with them? Is one supposed to think that the homosexual ten per cent of the population (who may include business men, artists, clergymen, teachers, dress designers, wharf workers, perhaps even MPs) is also more prone to crime than we heterosexuals are? His statement is a prize piece of heterosexual arrogance. If there is a statistically significant variation in the crime rate among homosexuals (which I much doubt) could it not be accounted for anyway by the socially induced conflicts prevalent among a group who live in fear of the ignorant obloquy of their neighbours? And would the answer not lie in the abolition of barbarous laws and private efforts towards understanding? |
| (e) | Why does Mr Wilson think it futile ‘to point to a parallel with the age of consent for heterosexual acts’? Such parallels rest on the notion of adult consent which the law already recognises. One does not condone sexual faults, heterosexual or homosexual, by allowing one’s neighbours the adult freedom to make choices that may not be in accord with one’s own moral views. Coercion in matters of sexual morality is not only an excessive limitation of freedom; it is also unworkable. |
I leave Mr Wilson to his Puritan paradise. I hope he is happy there.
1967 (444)