OPUS 21 Read Free Page B

confirmed what others have noted. I have published such data in my books, years before Kinsey. And all that time I have reflected with a hooting pique upon the unconquerable illusions of Americans. What I have long known to be true, and often written down, they have refused to consider as real. Until the first of the Kinsey Reports, all erotic activity except that mechanical minimum permitted by state legislatures has been regarded, even by most enlightened citizens, either as an accident carefully hidden in their own lives, or else as the perverted behavior of persons who, eventually, would land on the couches of psychiatrists--if not in prison. It is the most depraved truth about us.

    Kinsey--with the august reputation of Rockefeller money to give his findings the one sort of credibility acceptable to Americans--had accomplished what hundreds of psychologists and scores of writers like myself had been unable to do: he had convinced multitudes that the sexual behavior of people is mammalian in every respect. He had shown, where we had failed, that erotic activity of some sort is universal, that the earlier and more vigorously such activities are commenced, the more potent and sexually capable its practitioners become--that use, not restraint (as the "pure" have decreed), develops the nerves, capillaries and muscles of the sexual organs precisely as it does those of other organs and that what we call sins and perversions are as ubiquitous as what we call normal sex acts. He had made an ass of the law and a fool of the church and held up an odious society in such a light that its heathen taboos and wholehearted hypocrisies were at long last more visible than t he foul rags covering them.

    I had seen, that winter, numbers of men relieved (and not always bothering to hide the fact) by the realization that some homosexual experience in their past was not a blot upon their lives without precedent or parallel. And I had seen other numbers of men--
    older men--stare back at the bereavement of their youth, hating themselves for that which barbaric fear (translated as noble character) had prevented them from doing, knowing, sensing, or enjoying. Often, these had turned their irreversible disappointment into a mockery of Kinsey, thus exposing the near-vacuum in which they had endured their decades--without being aware of the exposure. Americans are not mature enough, intelligent enough, discerning or well enough educated to learn from psychology; but it is evident they are, in many cases, of an adequate spiritual development to learn from a Rockefeller-endorsed zoologist.

    It didn't matter to me where the facts came from--so long as people began to perceive they were facts--facts that made a far truer picture of man and sex than all the utterances of priests, preachers, legislators, and other sick-minded slobs put together.

    We behave sexually like other mammals--apes, horses, dogs. Centuries of suppression alter us not a jot. It is a sterling proof that instinct, not vanity-calling-itself-reason, is our guide. It is the hardest blow yet struck against the bishops. In our time, they and their sickly minions will prevail. But after us, and them, some decent men may rise in the debris and put to a proper use what we all know and nearly all deny. . . .

    She was reading the Kinsey Report.

    "What for?" I asked.

    The question startled her, although the introduction itself did not. She was obliged to feign a social surprise. Her inward gray eyes met mine and moved away. She drew part of an annoyed breath. She shut the book. She made up her mind to say, "I beg your pardon. Were you speaking to me?"

    She had a musical voice, pitched low but not husky.

    "I wondered why you were reading the Kinsey Report so avidly--and my curiosity started talking. I usually do ask people things, when I want to know. It's discourteous. But sometimes they tell me."

    That made her smile a little. "You might be asking quite a question."

    "Any question is