The existence of a culture implies, of course, that there are individuals who participate in it. In the case of the homosexual culture this does, indeed, rule out Mr. Winter's "big quarterbacks," "brawniest laborer," and "rugged athletes" who have wives and children, the truck drivers who have an occasional homosexual experience and even prisoners who turn to homosexual relations for sexual outlet and continue them for many years even though they are basically heterosexual and will again be so in fact upon their return to society. The homosexual culture does not even represent all the individuals whose sole sexual outlet is and always has been found with members of their own sex.

As Mr. Winters correctly points out, "This leaves the exclusively homosexual who is not only abnormal but in a distinctly small minority." For the manifestations of homosexual culture we look to this small minority numbering possibly a million and a half in the United States. Mr. Winter's lamentations notwithstanding, if ONE succeeds in reaching all the members of this minority it will have one of the large periodical circulations in the country, and his fear that this minority could not support a publication is not well taken. The homosexual minority will support a publication in its interest but not one in disguise. It is not the size of a cultural group which determines its influence. The Jewish minority, for example,has always been small but highly influential throughout the world.

Obviously a culture exists only so long as people participate in it. Some participate to a great extent; others only occasionally. The percentage of Negroes participating in the Negro-American culture is relatively large; the percentage of Jews participating in the Jewish culture relatively small. It is, however, the participants in a culture which keep it alive and influential.

Consider the homosexual culture (and I mean here the pure, 100% homosexual culture which is somewhat hypothetical) in which perhaps only a few of the 1,500,000 "absolute" American homosexuals participate. Who are these participants? What do they do? They are the homosexuals who visit the homosexual bars, who walk or talk or gesticulate in the universally-recognized, homosexual manner. They are the homosexuals who admit (at least to themselves) they are, indeed, homosexual and that their lives, plans, hopes and prospects must, accordingly, be different. A small minority of this small minority recognizes the existence of an emergent, homosexual culture-a way of life, a striving and a hope for a world in which they will not be hounded, degraded, ostracized. And some of them look toward the development of a homosexual ethic.

The author of "Homosexuals Are Not People" seems to regard the words "homosexual ethic" as almost unclean if not idiotic. The problems of the homosexual ethic are too broad to be discussed at length here and should be the subject of a separate essay, but I should like to say merely that the words refer to the establishment, through conscious understanding of homosexuality by homo-

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