Thank you Gerry for the courage to speak the truth.

You cannot class gays with pedophiles because heteros are sometimes pedophiles;

The important thing in any intimacy is genuine love of the other in an "I-Thou" relationship as Martin Buber puts it, where the other person is not merely an object for the satifaction of ones desires of whatever ilk they may be. Even in a hertero- relationship the "I-It" relationship is a perversion, a low mean disgusting selfish perversion which happens all too often, I suspect.

It has been my experience that those who have had a life-changing experience are slow to condemn. They are more likely to be hard on themselves and easy on others. They are likely to stand up and defend those who are being condemned, even at risk of their own reputation. To them, people, individuals, are more important than any other consideration.

You cannot class gays with pedophiles because heteros are sometimes pedophiles; it is a perversion of logic to do so. There is also the matter of the 'age of consent' ignored by pedophiles.

Karl-Maria Kertbeny or Károly Mária Kertbeny (born Karl-Maria Benkert) (1824 – 1882) was born in Vienna, the son of a writer and a painter. He was an Austrian-born Hungarian journalist, memoirist and human rights campaigner who coined the word homosexual.

As a young man, while working as a bookseller's apprentice, Benkert had a close friend who was homosexual. This young man killed himself after being blackmailed by an extortionist. Benkert later recalled that it was this tragic episode which led him to take a close interest in the subject of homosexuality, following what he called his "instinctive drive to take issue with every injustice."

After a stint in the Hungarian army, Benkert made a living as a journalist and travel writer, and wrote at least twenty-five books on various subjects, none of them of any lasting value. In 1847, he legally changed his name from Benkert to Karl-Maria Kertbeny (or Károly Mária Kertbeny), a Hungarian name with aristocratic associations. He settled in Berlin in 1868, still unmarried at 44. He claimed in his writings to be "normally sexed," and there is no direct evidence to contradict this, despite the scepticism of subsequent writers.

Nevertheless, from this time he began to write extensively on the issue of homosexuality, motivated, he said, by an "anthropological interest" combined with a sense of justice and a concern for the "rights of man." In 1869, he anonymously published a pamphlet entitled Paragraph 143 of the Prussian Penal Code of 14 April 1851 and Its Reaffirmation as Paragraph 152 in the Proposed Penal Code for the Nordeutscher Bund. An Open and Professional Correspondence to His Excellency Dr. Leonhardt, Royal Prussian Minister of Justice.

A second pamphlet on the same subject soon followed. In his pamphlets, Kertbeny argued that the Prussian sodomy law, Paragraph 143 (which later became Paragraph 175 of the legal code of the German Empire), violated the "rights of man." He advanced the classic libertarian argument that private consensual sexual acts should not be subject of the criminal law. Recalling his young friend, he argued strongly that the Prussian law allowed blackmailers to extort money from homosexuals and often drove them to suicide.

Kertbeny also put forward the view that homosexuality was inborn and unchangeable, an argument which would later be called the "medical model" of homosexuality. This contradicted the dominant view up until that time, that men committed "sodomy" out of mere wickedness. Homosexual men, he said, were not by nature effeminate, and he pointed out that many of the great heroes of history were homosexual. He was the first writer to put these now-familiar arguments before the public.

During 1869, in the course of these writings, Kertbeny coined the word "homosexual" as part of his system for the classification of sexual types, as a replacement for the pejorative term 'pederast' that was used in the German and French speaking world of his time. He called men who are attracted to women, heterosexual, he called masturbators monosexualists, and called devotees of anal intercourse, pygists.

Once self-identified homosexual men, such as Karl-Heinrich Ulrichs, began to campaign for homosexual rights, Kertbeny faded from the scene. If he was homosexual, he was never prepared to say so. In 1880, he contributed a chapter on homosexuality to Gustav Jäger's book Discovery of the Soul, but Jäger's publisher decided it was too controversial and omitted it. Nevertheless, Jäger used Kertbeny's terminology elsewhere in the book.

The German sex researcher Richard von Krafft-Ebing, in his Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) borrowed the terms homosexual and heterosexual from Jäger's book. Krafft-Ebing's work was so influential that these became the standard terms for differences in sexual orientation, superseding Ulrichs' word Urning.

Kertbeny did not live to see this wide acceptance of his ideas. He died in Budapest in 1882 at age 58.

Sexual orientation refers to the direction of an individual's sexuality, usually conceived of as classifiable according to the sex or gender of the persons that the individual finds sexually attractive.

It is my experience, that those who have never had a life changing experience, can not fathom anyone else having one...

It is my experience, that those who have never had a life changing experience, can not fathom anyone else having one...