How many memorable stories of heterosexual love can you think of which exclude all elements but love itself? Take the most famous of all love stories, "Romeo and Juliet." A.X. must be horrified because Shakespeare dragged in the totally irrelevant matter of the feud between two families. We know it is irrelevant to the subject because the overwhelming majority of lovers never come up against any such problem. Yet it makes the play. If Shakespeare had left it out and confined himself to a description of the feelings of the lovers, the whole thing would have been insipid. My point is that homosexual stories must be written the same way accounts of normal love are: they must include nonhomosexual topics.

A.X. calls your subject matter "crushingly limited." Actually, there are few subjects available to fiction with the immense variety of homosexuality. There are more gradations to it than to normal love. There are people who are gay but won't admit it, those who want to be but don't dare, those who hate themselves for it, others who derive strength from it. Some effeminate men turn out to be normal, while other men are thoroughly masculine in all respects but one. There are homosexual introverts and extroverts, homosexual heroes and cowards, geniuses and buffoons, homosexual cowboys, bootblacks, evangelists and senators. There are people in every walk of life with a dash of homosexuality which comes out at moments of crisis in unexpected ways. There are bisexuals so

evenly balanced that they veer first one way and then the other. Stories could be written from all these angles and a thousand more. The possible variety staggers the mind!

I go along with A.X. in one respect. If all you print is the kind of stuff he thinks you must, I agree that One's days are numbered. It would be fatal if your stories turn out to be ex-parte arguments in favor of deviation. And if they are merely descriptions of homosexual feelings, you will be purveying nothing more than a watered down form of pornography. After the novelty wears off, this type of thing will please no one. It is too pale to be satisfying as erotica and too dull to get by as straight fiction.

The public loved, and the critics praised, Ring Lardner's stories of ball players because he wrote of them primarily as human beings, only incidentally as athletes. Other writers treat them as automatons who do nothing but play games. As a result, their fiction is lifeless. Mediocre writers fall into this error whenever they depict any specialized group of people. Homosexuals are primarily just people; 90% of their personality is identical with that of heterosexuals. Their stories are the same as those of normal people except that homosexuality is one of the many factors which shape their lives. If One's stories are simply case histories of homosexuals as such, they will be bad psychiatry and rotten entertainment.

Many fine stories dealing with sex deviation have been published, all the

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