ever heard along that line, even when you know it's all impossibly wrong for you, just bursts out like a nasty boil sometimes-a poison in the soul that has to come out."

Anne humphed, "Glad only one of us suffers from boils."

I suppose the ones hardest hit are those for whom the religious question isn't emotionally solved. For many homosexuals, a rejection of religion seemed to be a necessary condition of self-acceptance. But the religion is still festering inside them. They want to believe what they believed when they were young, but they can't seem to manage it without rejecting their homosexuality. So, faced with a national orgy of religious sentiment at Christmas, they tear themselves apart.

It has never been very bad for me. I can take the sentimentality or leave it. I can watch the pageantry, react to the fine old story just as I would to a movie, and feel no more torn up afterward. Sometimes I wish I were more deeply involved. But I'm not.

Very few, I suppose, really throw a drunk, a bitch or a fit of Christmas, but I would guess that for at least half of the homosexuals in our society, Christmas is the loneliest time of the year. For the homosexual who is still too rigidly straightjacketed by the encrustations of a morality which doesn't fit his own condition, and for the homosexual who has lost a lover, or who hasn't found one, the seasonal gaiety all around can be a ruthless torment.

I do envy those homosexuals and there are many of them who can enter wholeheartedly into the Christmas spirit, with no qualms, no recriminations, no self doubts.

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