uperior nobility
of friendship over love,[E] and even to claim a superior humanity for
people who are more attracted by members of their own sex.

[Footnote E: I am using the terms "friendship" and "love" in their
ordinarily accepted and narrow sense, as meaning respectively the love of
friends and the love of lovers. This is arbitrary, but I cannot find other
words except by using long phrases.]

There is not in this any question of the bestial depravity which
deliberately debauches the young and innocent: it is a question of the
kind of friendship glorified by Plato. And those who uphold the Platonic
view are not always debauchees but sometimes men and women who, however
incomprehensibly, still sincerely believe that they and not we who oppose
them are the true idealists. This is why it is worth while to state our
reasons for our profound disagreement, and to do so as intelligently and
fairly as possible. It is also worth while because no one has suffered more
cruelly or more hopelessly than those whose temperament or abnormality has
been treated by most of us as though it were _in itself_, and without
actual wrong-doing, a crime worthy of denunciation and scorn.

First, then, let it be remembered that the highest types humanity has
evolved have been men and women who are really "human," that is to say
who have not only those qualities which are generally regarded as
characteristic of their sex, but have had some share of the other sex's
qualities also. A man who is (if such a thing could be) wholly and
exclusively male in all his qualities would be repulsive; so would a woman
wholly and exclusively female. One has only to look at history to realize
it. Compared with the exquisite tenderness and joy of a St. Francis
of Assisi, the courage and determination of a St. Joan of Arc, the
intellectual power of a St. Catherine of Siena or St. Theresa of Spain,
the "brute male" who is wholly male, the "eternal feminine" with her
suffocating sexuality seem on the one hand inhuman, on the other subhuman.
It is not the absence of the masculine qualities in a man, or of the
feminine qualities in a woman which raises them above the mass; it is the
presence in power of both; and no man is truly human who has not something
of the woman in him--no woman who has not something of the man. Here is a
certain truth. And its supreme example is Christ Himself--Christ in Whom
power and tenderness, strength and insight, courage and compassion