interchange of ideas undertaken? Yet such has been the unbelievably fantastic situation concerning study of the lives, welfare and the very being of countless millions of homosexual men and women, all because of taboos so hysterical that few except scientists dared even treat the subject, and then usually in ponderous and obscurantist latinisms.

ONE, as a Corporate structure, had always contemplated entering the field of education some day, and was slowly developing its plans in that direction. However, when the urgency of the need and its harmful effects on the Corporation's most valuable asset, ONE Magazine, became so vividly apparent, no time was lost in opening ONE Institute of Homophile Studies, the first of its kind in the world.

What is this Institute? First of all, it is for adults, and adults presupposed to already have a considerable educational background. No hard and fast rules in this respect exist so far, but no encouragement is given to the lazy, the idly curious, or the semi-literate. Much reading is required. Independent thought and research are expected, at the general level maintained in any university graduate school,

Yet, awkwardly enough, no one could be found who had taken undergraduate work in the field! Nor were there any textbooks available. No traditional subject-matter classifications existed. Great classic authorities were scarcely to be found. One thinks of those medieval days in Paris, or at Salamanca, as students thirsty for knowledge clustered in the infant universities to discover what it was they wished to learn.

In short, ONE Institute faced a new field, filled with quagmires and quicksand traps for the unwary yet promising fabulous yields to the patient husbandmen. The Institute found itself entering veritably upon "the proper study of men," of whole classes of men and women who even to day remain virtually unstudied, a micro-universe that has cut athwart races, regions and ages from the beginnings of history and down to today. What questions to be asked! What answers to be sought!

Is homosexuality a disease, as claimed by many doctors and psychologists? If so, what is the nature of this disease? Can it be cured, and, if so, how? Is it a biological anomaly, some curious mixup of physical and mental characteristics? Is it unnatural, abnormal, a perversion? Is it a sin against both God and man, as many theologians claim? Is it "the abominable crime against nature" described in so many statute books, on which basis arrests, disgrace, suicide, blackmail, often follow in tragic sequence, as tens of thousands of American families can testify?

Or, is homosexuality a way of life, quite as valid and rewarding as any other? If so, what is the nature of this way of life and how should it best be lived? Did great cultures of the past rise to glory because they tolerated love which had other motivations than human reproduction, or did nations fall into decadence because of such? Is it accidental and irrelevant that the Golden Age in Greece and the High Renaissance in both Italy and England were shot through and through with homosexuality?

Does homosexuality have an important and necessary social function, or is it a sickening scourge, destroying civilization's finest values? If poetry rose to new heights with Sappho, and her homosexual love poetry, drama with Sophocles and his pederastic themes, while law gained a new standard of calm justice through Solon, the great homosexual, what then of Ernst Roehm and the strange horde over whose backs Hitler climbed to power?

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