homosexual relationship. In separating sex and friendship he rejected the real thing, and admitted it. He told me about the wonderful Christmasses he'd known at home. His family life seemed to have been near ideal before the break. I think he still felt maybe he should have surrendered to his father's demand to get cured. "How can I go on like this? How long can this go on?"

Lester Timmins, from Mifflin, Pa., was of subnormal intelligence. I picked him up hitchhiking on the Hollywood Freeway last Christmas. Vain, but not good looking, fantastically childlike, unable to care for himself, but charming except when in a group, where he grew loud and unbearable, he started telling me right away about Christmas at home and his mother's cooking (when there was food enough for the large family), how he loved and admired brother Joe who died in the Navy in Korea, how his mother prayed and cried for him to come to Lord Jesus at a Prayer Meeting the year before, how his drunken father had beaten his mother that Christmas and left with no support, how he's stayed six months with an elerly plumber in Denver and how a man bought his pie and coffee in Van Nuys that morning. All this and more he told in about ten minutes. I was on the way to Christmas dinner with some jam friends I couldn't conceivable. have taken him along. So I dropped Lester off, along with ten dollars I couldn't afford, and my address, which I shouldn't really have given him. He got a cheeseburger, three bottles of soda pop and four slices of different kinds of pie for his Christmas dinner, went to an expensive movie and blew the rest in a penny arcade. Broke by ten in the evening and lost his fancy leather studded motorcycle jacket along the way. Spent a cool night trying for another ride and was at my house the next morning...

Lora Barla and Anne Gentry were perky, boyishly cute gals who'd lived together in a blissful uproar of Greenwich Village life for over twelve years when I knew them. That godawful, halfpainted apartment (paint cans still sitting around) with makeshift furniture. They kept aloof from other Lesbians, except Tandy Torrasin, a slinky little mouse on the make for Anne. They entertained frequently, almost continuously, mostly gay boys and the broke artists. Every Christmas, Lora and Anne went all out. Presents galore. An overlarge, overdecorated tree. Greeting cards thumbtacked from floor to ceiling on at least two walls, and a round of warm parties. Always a crowd for Christmas eve-friends and relatives, for Carol-Rounds, which went on for hours til Lora exploded, which she did every year the same way.

"I want a baby," she would suddenly howl. And the party hushed. "Why can't I have a baby like anyone else?" A long, loud outpouring of crying and abuse, first at the injustice that denied children to a Lesbian marriage, then at Anne for cheating her of her rights to be a mother. The party faded away. Maybe a couple boys stayed to help patch things up. Lora usually quieted down a half hour after the crowd left. Christmas day, if there were visitors, she would be distant. maybe snappish. A few spats with Anne-but never serious. Once when Joe and I stayed for dinner. Lora exploded. "Why are we sitting here? Why in God's name? Why are we trying to act so happy and normal? Christmas isn't for queers. It's for normal, married people, respectable, wholesome people."

Anne generally just sat thru Lora's holiday outbursts-she knew it never happened any other time of the year. The next day it was over. Lora apologized and tried hard to analyze her outbursts: "I suppose no other season gets so insidiously under your skin with the image of ideal family life. Everything you've

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