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To ascertain which current techniques of counseling and prevention are most effective, to develop new ones and delve into the still uncertain patterns and multiple causes of homosexuality, the task force recommends establishment of a major U.S. center for the study of sexuality—from sex patterns in animals to all kinds of normal and abnormal human sexual behavior. Too often in the past, it says, competent researchers have been discouraged from entering the field by the taboos that surround it—and by the difficulties of obtaining research funds. Other key points: teachers and youth-group counselors should be better informed about homosexuality so that they can help rather than hector the young; law officers should be given facts to set against their irrational feelings. "Disgust and anxiety interfere with an objective understanding of the problem, and could be prevented or alleviated if valid information about homosexuality were disseminated," the report says. Among the homosexuals, "it is important to counteract the prevalent sense of hopelessness and inevitability."
Puritanical Proscriptions. Distinctions between types of homosexuals should be at the heart of the nation's legal policies, the report argues. Penalties should remain stringent for homosexuals who commit forcible rape, seduce children or commit sex acts in public. But "discreet homosexuality is the private business of the individual rather than a subject for public regulation"; prohibition of "the crime against nature," as many statute books coyly phrase it, merely raises the homosexual's vulnerability to blackmail and "exacerbates" his mental-health problems. The commission recommends that the U.S. follow the example of England, which two years ago legalized homosexual acts between consenting adults in private —as recommended by the celebrated Wolfenden report—and has suffered no discernible ill effects. The U.S., along with the Soviet Union, is one of the few countries in the world that have such strict proscriptions against homosexual practices. Since 1952, the sobersided American Law Institute has recommended that the individual states repeal such statutes. So far, only two have enacted a Wolfenden-type law—Illinois in 1961 and Connecticut last summer, to take effect in 1971.
The Hooker report's sobering implication that society has been grossly unfair to the homosexual is sure to stir controversy, and its recommendations are bound to be adopted only slowly. Still, the research makes clear that Americans can now recognize the diversity of homosexual life and understand that an undesirable handicap does not necessarily make everyone afflicted with it undesirable.