I can answer that right now, because I said no such thing. To EMPHASIZE the positive aspects of something is quite different from INVENTING them. The point is simply that negative aspects have been emphasized long enough-so long, in fact, that were society's judgment of homosexuality based upon the literature (which happily it is not) it would have considerable justification.

We homosexual writers must portray our lives as they are really livednot jumping off cliffs on the French Riviera or committing suicide with jeweled sabres in the Taj Mahal or nurturing delicate neuroses at elegant cocktail parties on Park Avenue. We must show homosexuals as human beings, as very like their neighbors-working at dull jobs with inadequate wages, struggling to meet the payments on furniture from Sears for the sixtyor seventy-a-month apartment on unromantically-named streets like Sixth or Central or Main. Most of us, after all, are not sons or daughters of foreign diplomats, professionals or distinguished scholars who just happened to be wintering in Capri when their offspring were born. Most of us come from places like Rockford, Illinois or Minot, North Dakota, and were born to working-class or white-collar-class parents. These simple facts, these well-known settings, do not make our lives or loves any the less exciting, tender or tragic. If anything, portrayal of the ordinary life offers a challenge any writer should welcome; it is always more difficult to describe the familiar excitingly and convincingly than it is the distant or unknown.

Psychology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis, while they have doubtless aided some individuals in solving their problems, have so far done little or nothing for the homosexual MINORITY. It is, further, by no means established that homosexuals generally are cases for treatment at the hands of these practitioners regardless of their professional interest or personal sincerity. I certainly do not advocate that we, as writers, ignore the advances of contemporary psychostudies, but to cast our creative writings in the mould they have fashioned for us would be the reverse of what we must do if we are to produce a true HOMOSEXUAL literature.

Homosexual love affairs (or marriages, if you will) are by no means always tragic-some go on until death brings about a separation. If an affair ends in dissolution there are usually constructive reasons for it or reasons which can be used constructively by a skillful writer. Many marriages end because of social pressures, parental disapproval, physical separation (going away to school, the Army, etc.) Some loves cease because one of the partners outgrows the other a rich source for narrative investigation. Most probably end because neither partner to the alliance feels it is worth while going on in the face of the difficulties (whatever they may be) in view of the relative ease of separation.

What about a story, for example, of a homosexual marriage that DID work? What made it work, and what can society and other homosexuals learn from it? Why not a novel about a homosexual who didn't BECOME (a confusing commonplace in many homosexual stories) but always WAS homosexual and who had no guilt feelings about it, because he was a sane person who believed in love and kindness and honesty and never violated his beliefs despite his social oppression?

The material is there; the ability is available or can be developed. If we believe in ourselves we can produce a healthy, new homosexual literature in the interest of our minority and all of society.

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