Percy-L: Literary, Religious, Scientific, and Philosophical Discussion of Walker Percy

[Nikkibar AT aol.com]

When I wrote (a message or two back) that Walker never got past the notion that homosexuals were disturbed, I think I did not make it clear that I never heard him use expressions like "gravely immoral." He did at one time thorw a guest out of his house for implying that William Alexander Percy (Uncle Will who raised Walker and his two brothers) was gay. So matters of gaiety and its morality were never discussed at least in my presence, although I did have occasion to chat with Walker over the issue of whether homosexiuality should continue to qualify as a mental disturbance in psychiatric or scientific context. He held that it did and I held that it didn't; we agreed to disagree, as we often did. I would suggest that perhaps one reason why he never voiced himself over the issue of the morality of the issue may have had something to do with the Uncle Will isue, a matter to which I was not sensitive at the time of any of our conversations. In short, I think he would have been unlikely to go that far, but chose to keep his opinions on the matter in the psychiatric context for reasons of his own which are nobody else's business. It would not be proper to impute to Walker an ex post facto endorsement of "grave immorality" on the basis of the intellectual fossil record. 

Nikki Barranger