Men Only

Though often too polite to mention it, many an American returns from Britain convinced that in some of London's best circles homosexuals are as common as sin and nearly as popular. Even the British have lately gotten around to discussing homosexuality in such matters as the Burgess and MacLean case. Recently, Parliament itself asked the British Medical Association to appoint an eleven-man committee of doctors and psychiatrists to advise on how the laws concerning homosexuality might be changed. Last week the British Medical Journal printed a summary of the committee's report. It was a shocker.

Cases of homosexual offenses recorded by the police, said the report, have increased more than eight times since 1930. "If undetected acts are increasing in the same proportion as the detected ones," "Said the committee, "the position is most disquieting." The board's coldly stated estimate: active homosexuals in Britain constitute between two and three per cent of the adult male population--or roughly about 500,000 men.

If Parliament wants to ease the law to permit homosexual relations between consenting adult males (as the intellectual weeklies have been urging), the committee raised no objection, as long as these affairs are conducted in privacy. Generally, the committee found that homosexuals should be regulated legally only 1) to protect the young from seduction, 2) when they disturbed the public order, as by soliciting and importuning, or made a public spectacle of themselves, as "the behavior and appearance of homosexuals congregating blatantly in public houses and restaurants are an outrage to public decency."

But a social problem of a different order, the committee pointed out, is the homosexuals' "alleged tendency to place " their loyalty to one another above their loyalty to the institution or government they serve, and on the part of homosexuals in positions of authority to give preferential treatment to homosexuals, or to require homosexual subjection as expedient for promotion." In this connection, it added bluntly, "the existence of practicing homosexuals in the Church, Parliament, the Civil Service, the Armed Forces . . . constitutes a special problem."

This remark thudded into an appalled silence all over Britain. The committee found some wan notes of consolation: 1) "The incidence of homosexual practices is probably not sufficiently high to have a really appreciable effect on the marriage and birth rate"; 2) the Kinsey report estimated that 10% of the U.S. adult male population were "exclusively homosexual for at least three years of their adult life. It is believed by the committee that if a similar study were made here, the incidence would be found to be much below the U.S. figure."

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