a gay and merry merry Christmas to you ALL!

D.F.

by Valentine Richardson

Christmas is a happy season. Most of the year people scurry around, absorbed in personal affairs and duties, but Yuletide seems to bring out of hibernation a special glow of fellowship and jollity.

At Christmas family and friends are knit closely together, for however brief a period, however wide the divergence of their paths at other seasons. By whatever peculiar alchemy, everyone suddenly remembers that no man is an island to himself. Old friends telephone cress-country, cards and letters jam the post-boxes, and quarrels are hopefully patched up, while cash-registers. in department store and supermarket clang merrily, toesins that should alarm, but don't. A golden haze whose gentle warmth few resist hangs round about.

The homosexual home, no exception to this influence, is especially happy at Christmas-time. Let us visit a few such homes to savor that unique and special flavor some call Gay, but better termed, perhaps, just—Life. Chris, busy executive in a large New York exporting firm, had a shock of wavy hair, once iron-gray, now almost white. His handsome, mobile face flashed frequent smiles as he moved about to greet the guests. The apartment had a smartly modern décor, yet with an odd difference, which was only to be explained by the part Joe had taken in its planning. Joe, with the liquid, dark eyes and soft black hair. Chris' housemate for many years, was half Hawaiian.

Jack was an old friend of the two of them, so merited an affectionate buss from each of them as we came in. I. the newcomer, had to settle for handshakes. It was hard not to notice, as we sipped our Old-Fashioneds, that the simple gift we had brought looked indeed modest alongside the imaginatively decorated packages piled around the cleverly asymmetric little Christmas "tree," looking like a mobile come down to earth. which Joe had constructed on a table in the

corner.

Most of the guests appeared to be men in managerial and professional positions, well-dressed, easy, relaxed. A few couples were dancing on a well-waxed square where the diningroom rug had been turned back. Most of the men were just chatting here an arm thrown comfortably over someone's shoulder, there a pair quietly and unaffectedly holding hands.

Theresa and Gretchen, the only women I saw, came in just after we arrived. Old friends of Chris and Joe, they had lived for years in an apartment just across Central Park. Said they preferred visiting guys to gals. Less chance of stepping

one

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