The article that fused this firework appeared way back in September '53: "Formula" by M. F. The writer proposed that each homosexual and person interested in his own civil rights send in fifty cents a month to form a fund for lobbying. His conviction that it takes financial influence to change laws was accompanied by a second conviction that the first year would net us something up in the millions. By the following year we'd be free of persecution. It was a splendidly driving, gutty exhortation. The same can be said of this refutation. The editors, of course, believe that the "D. Pythias" who writes below is a case of arrested or bailed-out development. Maybe even silly.

Take It From Me!

Truisims From the Glassy Eye

I am one of those guys who took those advertisements on the covers of ONE seriously. A major part of this article is in answer to your September issue wherein I found an unusually large number of appeals for organizing; especially, I wish to make reply to the clarion call of M. F.

Dear M. F., you get A for Arithmetic today! Take a number-any number-and voila! we have marching legions, eminent scientists on the barricades, and Fearless Fosdicks recruited for counter-espionage. I, too, have seen the Vision on the Mount. But "now the fancy passes by". What remains is a flea-bitten veteran with the taste of ashes in his mouth, and the smouldering conviction of a drudge who is determined to keep slugging even after the time when the gallery has packed up and gone home. Take it from me, there is more to this business of organizing homosexuals than meets the glassy eye.

Dare I disturb the incensed air by uttering truisms? Let us be sober for a moment, get our heads together, and see what happens when those numbers of yours become cruel fact.

Voting is Vulgar

TRUISM NO. 1: To start a mass movement, you need to stir up the innards of the plebs. But the plebs in this country are, by and large, a pretty contented lot. Talk to any organizer for mass movements-churchmen, blood bankers, paci-

fists, Red Crossers, union men, et. al. Mass movements are aroused by the blood and fury of fanatics, saints, and martyrs. Few of such ilk are to be found within the theoretical grouping of the population we shall call the American homosexual. The vast majority of such people firmly consider The Problem to be an individual, private matter. Homosexuality then is similar to the status of Christianity in this country today. The day of the Crusades is over. We no longer think in terms of, say, One Great Mother Church united to battle the infidel in the here-below. We have in this country come to consider a man's faith as more or less a personal, private matter-thanks to the Protestant Reformation and Thomas Jefferson.

The Unexplained Quaker

TRUISM NO. 2: To keep even the tiniest revolution active, we will have need of full-time professional revolutionaries. The Russian Revolution had Bakunin and Lenin. The Crusades had Peter the Hermit and Pope Urban. Our Revolution had Franklin and Thomas Paine. But consider again the stonecold facts. How many of our number are willing to risk the perils of professional status in a homosexual movement, particularly when (as Cory points out again and again in his article) the majority of us are involved in elaborate measures to escape detection? Try it yourself sometime. Go to the editor of your hometown newspaper or to the minister of the

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