Natural v. Normal

Sir: Re Homosexuality in America [Oct. 31]: As a clinical psychologist, I have begun to see how the pressures to conform force young humans to squeeze individual self into a mold created by a popular myth of what "other people" think, believe and feel. It is the myth of the normal person. Squeezing self into the mold painfully denies some of the natural individual self, and one is left vaguely resentful and unhappy.

The loss of natural in pursuit of normal can be seen in a man's discomfort about physical expression of affection for another man. The urge is for affectional interchange that goes beyond the anesthetized handshake or the slap on the back. But there is fear that if affectional urges are freed, one may be seen by others and/or by himself as "queer."

Viewing homosexuality as a "condition" uncovers our implicit belief that a natural part of self for many (perhaps most) men is bad because it does not fit our myth of the "normal" man. We live in a world where a man may kill another man but he may not kiss another man on the television screen viewed by our children. Natural urges thus emerge in ugly, distorted form.

In the name of sane humanity, let us stop our obsessive concern about homosexuality as a condition. Let us stop nervously watching our children until they start dating. Let us encourage the search for natural self. Let us encourage expression of all varieties of affection before our denied and twisted desires murder us all in an acceptable war.

DONALD H. CLARK Ardsley, N.Y.

Sir: As founder and organizer of the first Mattachine Society (Los Angeles, 1949-53), I call upon its many inheritors to abandon the culs-de-sac of sectarianism and special pleadings and make common cause with the many fronts of the Free Generation confronting the real enemy--male chauvinism!

Other than homosexuals and all womankind, not the least of its victims in our antagonistic society are the heterosexual males, themselves caught up in a chimera of superiority deriving from a culturally unconscious past. Chauvinism, in all its sexual as well as racial aspects, is the real enemy of all men and women who seek the one security that is viable--community--and the one freedom that is transcendant--individuation.

HENRY HAY Los Angeles

Sir: God created woman for man, and for the perpetuation of the human race, otherwise, He would have created man alone. It is as simple as that. Homosexuals are hopelessly antiwoman, and to encourage their wantonness is to demean all women.

Perhaps society should adjure to the ancient law of putting to death all deviates.

VERONICA MARSLAND Queens Village, N.Y.

Sir: Talk about sick! Look around once quick. What did you see? The sickness, boy, is in you and me! His thing doesn't kill, maim or addict. His thing is love and that's not sick.

C. MOORE Media, Pa.

Sir: Last September, after three months in the U.S. Navy, I walked into a doctor's office on base. In a tear-filled outburst, I told him I am, had been, and will always be gay. The Navy is now processing my discharge under the heading of Fraudulent Enlistment.

A search for patriotism, fatherly favor, and stability prompted me to hide in the epitome of all-maleness, the military vacuum. Anguished realization that I was denying myself a firm part of my whole being forced me to tell the truth. I am grateful for your article, which has given me insight as to the kind of public reception I will receive when I no longer boast, "I am an American sailor," but cry out more proudly, "I am an American homosexual."

SEAMAN ANTHONY G. LUNDE U.S.N. Bainbridge, Md.

Sir: As a lesbian, I felt that the article was for the most part informative and objective. However, I was vastly amused by one line: our "new militancy is making the heterosexual citizens edgy."

For centuries we have written your music and your literary masterpieces, painted your beautiful pictures, designed your clothing and home furnishings, danced and acted in your plays, styled your hair, and in general given you your highly prized American culture; if the truth be known, 95% of American culture is the homosexuals' culture.

Perhaps it is finally time we realize that we contribute to a society that despises us. We want our rights now, not 100 years from now. Try to visualize 12 million homosexual men and women marching on Washington.

Yes, edgy indeed.

S. M. GIBSON Williamsport, Pa.

Sir: On behalf of the vast legions of heterosexual classical musicians, may I reassure you that "talented homosexuals" don't dominate the field or turn the music world into a closed circle. There are enough old-fashioned happy marriages among leading musicians, from Rubinstein and Serkin to Oistrakh and Stern, to fill a whole issue of TIME. In fact, I believe a Gallup poll would reveal a higher percentage of conventional sexuality among musicians than among businessmen.

HENRI TEMIANKA Founder and Director California Chamber Symphony Los Angeles

Sir: I make no judgment about the homosexual. Perhaps those who do judge them should keep in mind Poet Rod McKuen's words: "It is not how we love or who we love but that we love."

JANE AFTON BARRY Weston, Mass.

Sir: Since no one basiclly cares about whether or not the other fellow likes his steak rare or well done, or how many times he visits the bathroom, why all the fuss about how the other guy likes his sex? Is it anybody's business, really?"

NICOLE LIEBERMAN Forest Hills, NY.

Constitutional Question

Sir: Coming on the heels of an important Supreme Court decision, the most recent instance (at Vassar, no less!) [Nov. 7] of not entirely peaceful demands for all-black college dormitories raises an interesting question: Is a separate-but-equal facility or segregated housing also unconstitutional if the blacks want it, or only if the whites want it?

DOUGLAS CAMPBELL Cos Cob, Conn.

Point to Consider

Sir: In your important article "What Would Withdrawal Really Mean?" [Oct. 24], you rightly say, "But it is certainly not in the interest of America's European allies to see the U.S. humiliated and seriously weakened."

I have recently returned from the North Atlantic Assembly in Brussels where the point was made publicly and privately that moratoriums, like peace, are indivisible. If America can abandon a brown ally in midbattle, then she can abandon a white ally as well.

If there is a major loss of confidence in American resolution, there will certainly be an irresistible demand that European countries should produce their own nuclear defenses. An American scuttle will not only lead to the fall of the Saigon government, it will also lead to the collapse of nonproliferation.

PHILIP GOODHART, M.P. House of Commons London

Sir: When I hear someone say, "We must get out of Viet Nam, but only when we can leave with honor," I think of an old streetwalker saying that she will retire when she can do so as a virgin.

PETER VANADIA Manhattan

Sir: I've cried with them at their funerals, laughed with them at their weddings, drunk with them during their celebrations. I've seen pride in a yellow-and-red flag on the faces of peasants who not many years ago had no flag. I've seen rice fields that have lain bare for years spring to life with rice again. I've seen canals reopened that had been previously closed for years by the Viet Cong. I've seen the people clear the years of undergrowth from their ancestral tombs, rebuild and begin to live again. I've seen 13-year-old children start to school for the first time. I've seen a young mother saved at childbirth because of a newly opened dispensary. I've seen communities spring to life again as they are given security to travel and trade goods in adjacent villages. And I've slogged with these same people through mud toward tree lines that burst into hostility; toward an enemy that assassinates their elected officials by night, intimidates them in their fields by day, shells their communities and claims to be their liberator.

My America, you may declare a moratorium on what is happening here, but I've seen it and lived it--if I joined you, I would have to declare a moratorium on my soul.

RICHARD T. CHILDRESS Captain, U.S.A. A.P.O. San Francisco

Sir: Knowing that it is about as popular--and as safe--to defend Spiro Agnew in these columns as it was to defend the chief rabbi of Berlin in Der Stuermer in the '30s, I nonetheless feel compelled to name Spiro Agnew the winner in his battle of wits with Senator William Fulbright, as reported in TIME [Oct. 31]. Agnew, TIME reported, said of "M-day": "A spirit of national masochism prevails."

What other words could more accurately describe an intellectual Establishment that quivers in ecstasy, and whimpers for more, when it is called "racists," "bigots" and "brutes" by any rapist, wrecker or riot leader who is given a long enough prison sentence to write a book?

Agnew went on, in TIME's report, to describe the M-day demonstrators as "an effete corps of impudent snobs."

Could Jonathan Swift, or even Allard Lowenstein himself, have said it better? Certainly Sam Brown, the twentyish Harvard hysteric who organized M-day, was pretty impudent (and a bit of a snob, too) to insist that the President needed his urging, and that of a half million other pubescents, to seek the peace that his public life depends on, that the life of the nation that chose him to govern depends on.

He needed it about as much as a brain surgeon, in the midst of a delicate operation, needs his elbow shoved and to be screeched at, "Get it over with faster!" There are those of us who might have preferred the phrase "Arrogant Punks," but then, we're not Vice Presidents, restrained by the majesty of that office.

"Perhaps the best put-down (to Agnew)," said TIME, "was the calm one that came from Senator William Fulbright. He said, 'I just considered the source.' "

Now that may be a blazing new bon mot to TIME's reporter, but anyone familiar with early American ethnic humor has found that phrase in Jerome Weidman's early novels of low-life in The Bronx, in Arthur Kober's old "Having Wonderful Time" stories in The New Yorker, and even earlier, in the comedies of Montague Glass.

It was a phrase used by queenly shopgirls to express their disdain for anyone brighter than they were.

Speaking only in my private role as an American institution, I prefer the normal nausea expressed by Spiro Agnew to the menopausal querulousness of Senator Fulbright.

AL CAPP Portland, Ore.

Sir: Written on the wall of a dormitory John at the University of Michigan: "Mickey Mouse wears a Spiro T. Agnew watch."

LISA JOHNSTON Bowling Green, Ohio

Indomitable Spirit

Sir: Can we Beatle Freaks ever relax [Oct. 31]? My friends and I have found 75 irrefutable examples proving that Paul McCartney is indeed dead, John Lennon is dying of incurable throat cancer, Ringo Starr has no arms, and George Harrison is in his 70s. Despite all these setbacks, the Beatles continue to play. Incredible the indomitable spirit of the British.

BILL WEINSTEIN Pasadena, Calif.

Shape of the '60s

Sir: May I comment on two paragraphs dealing with Arthur Burns's selection as next chairman of the Federal Reserve Board [Oct. 24].

First, my reference to him as "ponderous and a little pontifical." If Arthur is at times ponderous, it is a mark of deliberateness, and we need this in central bankers. He is also capable of moving fast on crucial policy matters.

The second matter concerns economic events in 1959-60, which are described in a way that is commonly believed, I fear, but is nonetheless incorrect. What readers would have to conclude from your paragraph is that 1) credit conditions were not eased in advance of the 1960-61 recession, 2) federal spending was not increased, and 3) as a result there was recession.

The facts are different. That there was recession is correct. But it is not correct that there was no response from policy. Credit easing started in mid-1959, with net free reserves swinging from minus $500 million to a zero position by mid-1960 and to plus $500 million by November of that year. It is hard for me to visualize a faster move. There was a response also from federal expenditure policy. Federal purchases of goods and services were flat in 1959 but rose in the first quarter of 1960 and climbed thereafter at a pace that continued substantially unchanged through the Kennedy years.

Moreover, the record shows that when the '60s began, prices were stable, labor cost increases were in line with productivity improvement, we had weathered a gold crisis, and the trade balance was back to a hefty plus. How splendid it would be if only we were entering the '70s in similar shape!

RAYMOND J. SAULNIER Chairman, President Eisenhower's Council of Economic Advisers, 1956-61 Barnard College Columbia University Manhattan

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