TOWARD UNDERSTANDING

The purpose of this column is to create a better understanding of homosexual problems through the psychiatric viewpoint.

Dear Dr. Baker:

This subscriber received his first copy of ONE Magazine a few weeks ago. I hope that you will have this letter published if for no other reason than to let B. C., whose letter has been published in the June 1959 issue of ONE Magazine, know that his letter has been a great help to someone, namely myself, and also to let you know, Dr. Baker, that your answer to the letter B. C. wrote to you was a big help also.

This correspondent (like B. C.) has known the anguish of loneliness and can sympathise with anyone who has undergone the torture of it. At least B. C. is still a young man with his life ahead of him during which time he may have the opportunity to form the friendship with a member of his own type. This correspondent has not been so fortunate. He is now in his middle fifties without the knowledge of how to go about meeting gay fellows like himself. Working as he has done for many years in a sensitive government agency, he did not dare risk associating with his own kind. Now he feels desperate, high and dry, without the knowledge of how to go about meeting his own kind. He does know where the gay bars are now a days in nearby Washington, D. C. but even visiting those places he finds that as a comparative stranger to such places he is met with open suspicion and has been given a hasty, very cool, brush off whenever he has attempted to get into conversation with those whom he felt certain, or reasonably so at least, were gay fellows and giris.

You were quite right when you said that heterosexuals can also enjoy, if one may so express it, quite as much loneliness as the homosexual, or the

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BLANCHE M. BAKER, M.D., Ph.D.

bisexual. This correspondent has been classified by psychiatrists as heterosexual in past years he had four nervous breakdowns within the past twelve years as belonging in the latter category. He himself feels that he has always been a homosexual no matter what the medical authorities may have stated to the contrary. This correspondent has known that fact since his early teens. He unfortunately married early as advised by his family doctor as a means of getting over the difficulty of leading a homosexual life on the inactive side. He could not possibly have done anything worse. He had known loneliness before that marriage but it was nothing compared to the terrible loneliness of what it was during the past thirty years of married life. No doubt the suppression that went into trying

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