RESEARCH

COUNCIL

PROGRESS

REPORT

Its Articles of Incorporation authorize ONE "to stimulate, sponsor, aid, supervise and conduct research of every kind and description pertaining to socio-sexual behavior." Numerous items of literary and historical research have appeared in the magazine during its first two years. From time to time, and as more material becomes available, abstracts and monographs will be issued covering important aspects of literature and history that many of the so-called "standard" critics, biographers and historians have either glossed over, ignored, or suppressed entirely.

In the first issue of the magazine there was a scholarly analysis, prepared by an attorney, of the legal term "Entrapment." Items of authoritative legal research have regularly appeared since that date. It is hoped that ONE's files may become a valuable source of information for attorneys and others interested in laws affecting homosexuals.

In the social and biological sciences, as well as in the field of medicine, serious research workers are painfully aware of the extremely tentative and conjectural nature of the larger part of past "scientific" study of socio-sexual behavior. Warring schools of psychology, psychoanalysis, endocrinology, and others have fired salvos of theories, hypotheses, "analyses,” and badly digested, or inaccurate laboratory experimentation back and forth with a reckless abandon which might be sardonically amusing to those concerned, were it not that sinister and tragic action and attacks have sometimes found justification in "science."

ONE's readers need no reminders as to the fevered legislative hearings held in many states; of the inhumane and unjust laws adopted, perpetuated or extended; of "legalized" castrations; of the indefinite institutional commitments of unfortunate victims on "shotgun" scientific dicta; of the suicides or ruined lives resulting from ignorance of socio-sexual realities.

ONE's Research Council cooperates with individuals, institutions and organizations studying socio-sexual problems. It also conducts independent research projects of its own.

The first cooperative project, with Don Slater representing ONE, was started in the spring of 1953, by a team of three psychologists who had become interested in making a study of the well-adjusted homosexual woman. Studies of Lesbians in prisons, hospitals, or those seeking psychiatric and medical help had previously been made, but the literature concerning the average, employed, socially-adjusted female homosexual has been noticeably limited. Some social scientists even seemed to have assumed that such individuals were non-existent.