or at least their aura is there; there are cheery lights, service, the changing scene, and the ever-present array of pretty bottles.

Among homosexuals the feeling of isolation is exceptionally prevalent and often cruel. Empathy, the feeling of spontaneous rapport and understanding with other fellow human beings, is often smothered under personal doubts and misgivings, under mistrust of others, and under insecurity in most personal relations. "What would they think if they knew?" Thus the Gay Bar is exceptionally important to many homosexuals, as the one institution where they can be sure of finding some measure of kinship with others. That this could be true at all seems to me a sad reflection on the state of the social conscience.

By the antihomosexual, the Gay Bar is often represented as the epitome of evil, a place given over to wantonness and unending assignations. It has not been my experience that sex is any more or less sought after, any more or less available in the gay bar than in the straight bar. If unalloyed sex is all one is after. then brothels, streetcorners and other public facilities offer much more certain rewards. The unattached homosexual. like the unattached heterosexual visits a bar because he or she hopes, after some drinks, to break down a barrier of personal isolation, to establish with someone else the kind of warm, personal intimacy that seems to be denied him under usual circumstances. Romance and sex may be involved, but I maintain that this is not the principal issue at a bar, any more than is the procurement of an alcoholic beverage.

What is the prognosis of friendship or romance begun at a bar? This is a question of considerable importance to many homosexuals. In general, the prognosis seems extremely poor. Since the basic motive for being there is un-

stable, a motive of escape, of drifting, this impairs both one's judgment of others and the solidity of one's own intentions, and what one escapes to in this manner is almost invariably something that one will want to escape from later on.

From the foregoing the reader can assume that I, for one, take a dim view of both the personal and social phenomena of drinking. I cannot say I have found that time and money spent in this direction have ever brought me pure and unalloyed blessings. Yet the Gay Bar has brought me some blessings, which, though far from unmixed, suggests a certain positive moral value for the Gay Bar in our present society. I do not now refer to the covert and furtive fraternization among homosexuals that one sometimes finds in small communities, where perhaps one bar out of the three available accommodates the "village fruit" surrounded by a small and restless coterie who would not dare to verbalize, even to themselves, their precise reasons for seeking out such company. I refer to the bona-fide Gay Bar, decades old and well-established, such as one finds many of in the larger, cosmopolitan cities.

This Gay Bar is a licensed business institution, known exactly for what it is both by bar-hoppers and by the authorities. One is not surprised or dismayed when police swagger in, usually in pairs, glower menacingly at everybody, hurry back to the men's room to see if anything is going on, glower once more at everybody on their return trip, and swagger out again. "Vice," quite likely, in a sharp turtle-neck sweater, is ogling you from your very elbow. This Gay Bar can have a strengthening effect on the confused or uncertain. They can sit there and think, "Well, I'm here, and I am what I am, and I'm here because I want to be. I'm no worse, and prob-

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