By JOE GOLD and
ELAINE NATHANSON
Star Staff Writers
(Last of a Three-Part Series)

Although it is not the vogue to practice discrimination in America these days, one group—known homosexuals—are not admitted to legal or medical practice, cannot teach, join the armed forces or the police or get a passport to leave the country.

Definition of homosexuality is elusive. Is a "queer" someone who has any sexual contact with his own gender, or who engages in frequent sex contact with both men and women? Or must a gay be someone with little or no contact with the opposite sex?

The most widely accepted definition is that a homosexual is someone who will respond, both emotionally and physically, to another person of the same sex, regardless of the frequency of his contacts with men or women.

Discrimination based on sexual preference is often not based on laws, but on matters of administrative policies. One example, denial of government security clearances to known homosexuals, is being challenged in Congress and the courts.

Laws, on the other hand, are not nearly as specific.

 Arizona has no law specifically banning homosexual activity. Instead, the state relies on Arizona-Revised Statutes 13-651 banning "the infamous crime against nature," sodomy, an activity of male homosexuals and ARS 13-652 against "lewd and lascivious behavior arousing lust."

The city's anti-loitering ordinance passed Jan. 25 has a clause aimed at homosexuals. Section 11-13 of the city code states: "A person is guilty of loitering when he loiters or remains in a public place for the purpose of engaging or soliciting another person to engage In deviate sexual intercourse or other sexual behavior of a deviate nature."

Maj. Clarence Dupnik of the Police Department says there have not been any arrests on this charge to his knowledge, and that the infrequent arrests that do occur come under the state statute on lewd acts.

Most homosexuals have few problems with the police, particularly in Tucson, so the threat of arrest is more potential than real.

Nonetheless, one of the top priorities proclaimed by gay activists is to change the laws before authorities being mass arrests or embark on a "witch hunt" of gays.

Tucson police make no active attempt to arrest homosexuals unless they engage in sexual activity in some public place — "the same standard that is applied to everyone," according to Chief William J. Gilkinson.

But attorney W. Edward Morgan, who has defended local gays, says the department has engaged in entrapment in city parks by sending plainclothesmen to be picked up.

Morgan calls the entrapment policy the "police way of keeping the parks clear and keeping down a reputation for the city as a place where homosexuals can meet — a kind of preventive maintenance."

"The general police attitude," Gilkinson says, is that "we are a little more progressive in realizing that people have their own personal hang-ups."

More than a dozen Tucson homosexuals concur that there is little police harassment of gays and that the few arrests made are for loitering in public parks after midnight.

Prohibition of homosexual behavior goes back to the Old Testament: "If a man lie with mankind as with womankind, both of them have committed an abomination They shall be put to death." It is only in the past five years that changes in the laws have been made.

Democratic politicians have made the first recommendations on a national level. Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota, an announced presidential candidate, says the rights and freedoms of the individual should apply to homosexuals. Indiana Sen. Birch Bayh, who recently dropped out of the presidential race, says the 1972 Democratic Platform should deal with the rights of the homosexual.

Homosexual contact between consenting adults is permitted under the British Sexual Offences Act of 1969, and Canada passed a similar law that same year.

The American Law Institute's model penal code recommends similar legislation in the United States, but Illinois was the only state to adopt it until Connecticut's consenting adults law went into effect Oct. 1.

New York state assembleymen plan to introduce a bill dropping sanctions against homosexuals by the end of the year. Arizona's gay liberation movement wants similar reforms in the state.

But the largest effort is on the federal level. A Washington gay who admitted to his emotional bent was denied a security clearance, which is the normal procedure. But this time the issue was taken to U.S. District Court where judge John H. Pratt ruled in mid-September that the government cannot ask probing questions about the sex lives of applicants, not could a security clearance be denied on the basis of homosexuality.

The case may be appealed, but Congress already has bills before it that would eliminate dismissal from civil service employment or denial of a security clearance for homosexuals.

The government may argue that homosexuals are more open to extortion as a reason to preserve the current rules on security clearances. The fear of exposure is still a tremendous pressure as long as society considers gays to be outcasts.

Series nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Journalism