Women who have been brought up in a similarly conservative manner may be even more hostile towards homosexuality, regarding it as a sin, and are often more outspoken that homosexuals should be punished by society for their ‘deviation’.
At the humanitarian end of the spectrum are those ‘liberals’ who claim to have no moral or aesthetic objection to homosexuality and who say they are tolerant of homosexuals. Donald West, whose book Homosexuality is one of the best available studies, suggests that society should tolerate homosexuals, but notes that toleration is not the same as encouragement. ‘No doctor’, he writes, ‘should advise a young person to rest content with a homosexual orientation without first giving a grave warning about the frustration and tragedy that so often attends this mode of life.’ No one would suggest that tolerance is encouragement; but is tolerance enough? Tolerance, Dennis Altman points out, is not acceptance: ‘The difference between tolerance and acceptance is very considerable, for tolerance is the gift extended by the superior to the inferior.’ The true humanitarian attitude to homosexuality is not tolerance but acceptance. But acceptance of homosexuality as a normal lifestyle will only occur if the accumulated myths about homosexuals are exposed … as myths.
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