STOP THE MUSIC: THERE'S NO AUDIENCE! Trying to pin down your policy is like sighting a gun on a butterfly. In just six issues, ONE has flitted amiably from stuffy research to vulgar flippancy with the apparent wish to please everybody. It will come as news to the editors that this can't be done. It's no secret that scientific people actually believe they can be "objective" about everything and that they think all expression should be cool, calm and collected even as their enemies burn their text books, and lynch from lab to lab. Aim at these cool characters and you'll have a medical journal that will make a day at the mortuary seem a welcome change. Nickels and pennies will be welcome change, too. Then turn to the popular "gay" market and you'll find yourself printing slop. The average homosexual wants in his/her magazine (a) sobstories detailing how hard their lot is, (b) pornographic poetry written in the modern manner without verbs so that the slavering reader need only scan the mystic lines for familiar naughty words, (c) romantic clap-trap differing from MGM and the Ladies Home Journal only in that the two lovers are of the same sex, and (d) "mad" and daring lay-out and illustration of the most "liberated and modern" type. All this would naturally put your scientific people to flight with a speed making jets blush. Nor would the general public have any of that stuff either-in the ridiculous event that you'd thought of interesting them in a magazine on deviation. They'd be justly horrified at the Witches' Sabbath which the gay ones would make of ONE and, if your scientists took over, the public would only read it in the event of insomnia. What's more, the average person has little interest in the subject except when it bursts into headlines and reporters hint at vices so exquisitely ghastly that he explodes in outrage-not so much at the criminals as at the unspecific reporters. This magazine has no real audience, no discernable policy and a future more uncertain than a snowball in hell. Pleasing everyone, you please none. ONE's aim isn't really bad: it simply doesn't exist. It's not a shot: it's an explosion.

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JUST WHO ARE THE EDITORS AND WRITERS ANYWAY? Of course, this mootest of questions can't be answered. Anyone willing to print his real name in a magazine on homosexuality in 1953 should have his head or heads examined. But the fact remains that the reader of ONE often pauses to snarl, "Who says so?" and, in glancing at the obvious pen-names, is left with a feeling not unlike the inability to burp when it's most needed. You should know that almost everyone reads by the author these days. You look to see who wrote it and proceed to read what he has to say with your mind fully made up to agreement or disagreement beforehand. That's why unknowns are so unpopular; the average

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