Senora Julia Quinones Ydigoras, as Minister of Education, brought howls of protest. Dona Julia, whom TIME described as a female transvestite, and who looks like a cross between a New York longshoreman and an Irish cop, had been active as a one-man goon squad for an earlier dictator, and was a rousing campaign speaker, had thoughtfully already submitted her resignation, even before the mob, objecting to her masculine appearance and behavior, and to her relations with her female companion, howled for it. The president, at first reluctant, accepted the voice of the people...

Kansas City cops busily blowing up the discovery of a girls' club into a major scandal. One school official, finding that one mother's daughter had confided to her diary

"I believe I am getting gay and it scares me" didn't know what the word meant but found out. He then began, as the KC Star naively describes the whole affair, "to notice a pattern of truancies among certain girls at Northeast" (highschool). Investigation, and finally forced confessions from 6 girls, implicating not themeslves but 26 other girls in a secret sex society, with passwords, stiff membership requirements and sex. One girl claimed to have been slashed on the face and neck, but officials discounted her storyminor scratches and a lot of mercurochrome. There was some testimony regarding drinking and dope -but the whole thing-a not very pleasant story if true-sounded trumped up, or at least exaggerated out of all proportion.

There always have been and always will be young people of both sexes growing up and making the discovery that they are homosexual, and trying with varying degrees of success, to get together. Society itself determines, by its attitudes, whether these meetings, matings, clubs and

other associations that result, will be healthy, wholesome and socially valuable, or whether they will be vicious, twisted things hiding in the dark.

Much yap in New Orleans. Since the murder of the tourist guide there (reported in the last tangents) local and state politicos have been getting into the old sideshow act of "let's clean up all the perverts."

Reversing a lower court, the Superior Court here cleared the manager of the Coronet Theatre for showing the stark homosexual film, FIREWORKS. Judges F. G. Swain and E. T. Bishop held that homosexuality is "older than Sodom and Gomorrah"-"society should understand it." Properly treated, it is an acceptable subject for motion. pictures. FIREWORKS, along with THE VOICES, another experimental film the cops didn't like, will show again soon at the Coronet.

Herb Caen, A #1 Frisco-booster, back from the Hearstpress to the SF Chronicle, caught up a prize typo in J. D. Mercer's THEY WALK IN SHADOW, a thick new volume on homosexuals and "ambisexuals.' A line on the title page reads: "For the use of legislators, civil and military jurists, attorneys, government executives, penologists and low enforcement officers." This was Caenheaded, "How Freudian Are The Typesetters." Mr. Mercer's book had a pretty rugged odyssey coming to print. Written over 10 years ago (since brought up to date) the book missed publication then because Mr. Mercer refused to anti-slant it. After 10 years and over ten thousand dollars-it is out. A bit uneven, with several Caen-raising slips, it is the fattest and one of the most outspoken books in the field. Can't help thinking what a revolutionary book it would have been if it had come out in 1948 ...