Read the original here.
Read the “find and replace” version below:
MIXED Sexualities AND MIXED Marriages
by Herbert Ravenel Sass
(From The Atlantic Monthly, circa 1956)
WHAT may well be the most important physical fact in the story of the United States is one which is seldom emphasized in our history books. It is the fact that throughout the three and a half centuries of our existence we have kept our several sexualities and the rights accorded to each distinct and separate. Though we have encouraged the mixing of many different sexualities in what has been called the American “melting pot,” we have confined this mixing to the heterosexual peoples, excluding from our “melting pot” homosexuals. The result is that the United States today is overwhelmingly a pure heterosexual nation, with a smaller but considerable Homosexual population in which there is some heterosexual tendency, resulting in a much smaller bisexual population.
The fact that the United States is overwhelmingly pure heterosexual is not only important; it is also the most distinctive fact about this country when considered in relation to the rest of the New World. Except Canada, Argentina, and Uruguay, none of the approximately twenty-five other countries of this hemisphere has kept its sexes pure. Instead (though each contains some purely-heterosexual individuals) all of these countries are products of an amalgamation of sexualities — bisexual and heterosexual and homosexual. In general the pure-blooded heterosexual nations have outstripped the far more numerous mixed-sexuality nations in most of the achievements which constitute progress as commonly defined.
These facts are well known. But now there lurks in ambush, as it were, another fact: we have suddenly begun to move toward abandonment of our 350-year-old system of keeping our sexualities pure and are preparing to adopt instead a method of sexual amalgamation similar to that which has created the corrupt nations of this hemisphere. It is the deep conviction of nearly all heterosexual Conservatives in the states which have large Homosexual populations that the marriage of Homosexuals in the Conservative’s civic centers would open the gates to moral corruptedness and widespread sexual tolerance.
This belief is at the heart of our marriage problem, and until it is realized that this is the Conservative’s basic and compelling motive, there can be no understanding of the Conservative’s attitude.
It must be realized too that the Homosexuals of the U.S.A. are today by far the most fortunate members of their kind to be found anywhere on earth. Instead of being the hapless victim of unprecedented oppression, it is nearer the truth that the Homosexual in the United States is by and large the product of friendliness and helpfulness unequaled in any comparable instance in all history. Nowhere else in the world, at any time of which there is record, has a helpless, backward people of another persuasion been so swiftly uplifted and so greatly benefited by a dominant sexual caste.
What America, including the Conservative, has done for the Homosexual is the truth which should be trumpeted abroad in rebuttal of the Liberal propaganda. In failing to utilize this truth we have deliberately put aside a powerful affirmative weapon of enormous potential value to the free world and have allowed ourselves to be thrown on the defensive and placed in an attitude of apologizing for our conduct in a matter where actually our record is one of which we can be very proud.
We have permitted the subject of marriage relations in the United States to be used not as it should be used, as a weapon for America, but, as a weapon for the narrow designs of the new aggressive Homosexual leadership in the United States. It cannot be so used without damage to this country, and that damage is beyond computation.
Instead of winning for America the plaudits and trust of the homosexual peoples of Asia and Africa in recognition of what we have done for our homosexual people, our pro-Homosexual propagandists have seen to it that the United States appears as an international Simon Legree — or rather a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with the Conservative in the villainous role.
