have been viciously slandered, the issues in such a prosecution ought to have been more clearly drawn...

MATTACHINE

The 4th Annual Mattachine Convention at Frisco's swank Palace Hotel over Labor Day opened with some sharp advice from Atty. Kenneth Zwerin for those who place a too-naive faith in fine pamphlets about citizens' rights-in-case-ofarrest. Most police have more respect for their billy clubs than for citizens' rights. Dr. Harry Benjamin, leading off a panel on whether the individual homosexual must be rejected in our time, said current laws. must stand indicted by science and common decency-but public opinion has to change before the law. can. He emphasized multiple causation of homosexuality. Psychologist Leo Zeff suggested the subject would better be discussed by a panel of homosexuals. He felt general acceptance would come slow, warned that most homosexuals court rejection. Social workers Julia Coleman and William Baker pointed out the terrible price society pays for rejecting homosexuals, and noted the talents homosexuals offer. Dr. Alfred Auerback of the Calif. Committee on Mental Health, mentioned public anxiety about manliness as a cause of anti-homosexuality, and said people will change if not pushed too hard or forced to think about things they don't understand. Most of the panel agreed that "swishes" cause much of the prejudice and that "swishes" will disappear if legal discrimination stops-yet, in ancient Greece, where homosexuality was respected and almost universal, "swishes" were as common as today and twice as obvious.

Dr. Benjamin also described the

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homophile education and research done in the early 1900's by Dr. Magnus Hirshfield's famed Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin, with its professional staff, library, museum, lecture halls, living quarters and therapy rooms. At the awards banquet, Chief Psychiatrist David Schmidt of San Quentin told how most inmates were at first contemptuous of homosexauls till gradually some young prisoner would come to look like "the girl they left outside. Finally and almost invariably they would become fully homosexuals-for the duration at least. He also described in unnerving detail the thousands of experiments carried out on prisoners. (prostatotomy, castration, insulin and electric shock, hormonal treatment and on to psychoanalysis and group therapy-one prisoner, after a castration "by consent, howled, "I thought they were just going to take my tonsils out") in a vain attempt to cure sex deviation. The next day, representatives of the Daughters of Bilitis (over 40 members in Frisco), ONE, Inc., Mattachine Society and Pan-Graphic Press compared their various programs. ... Average attendance was about 45, including delegates from Los Angeles, Denver and the amazingly active group in New York. Newsletters from the various areas were bound together into a fat Convention-issue of the MATTACHINE REVIEW.

ODDMENTS

Lee Mortimer reports a Gay Street in Greenwich Village. Just one? . . . London scandal sheet, The PEOPLE, revealed that German high-jumper Dora Ratjen, who set woman's world record 19 years ago, was not a real woman. "For the glory and honor of Nazi Ger-

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