liked what they saw. Just because limp wrists weren't visible from the press seats . . . Syd Harris' syndicated column was better than most: ". . . many spectators were surprised at the virility of the male

dancers . . . ruggedly masculine,

and no nonsense about it. American and English dancers, on the contrary, are notoriously lacking in the masculine virtues; with very few exceptions, they are frustrated ballerinas."

(Is that something you can see from the audience, Mr. Harris, or smutty gossip? Or are some of your best friends frustrated ballerinas, perhaps?)

"I bring this up," he continues, "not to indict them or to jeer at anyone's problems, but simply to point out that the cultural patterns of a nation determine which activities are taken up by what sort of people. In Russia, for long before the Revolution, dancing was regarded as a vigorous art form, with nothing at all 'sissyfied' about it . . . did not attract merely the 'sensitive' and willowy young men, as it has in America. Because the Russian public did not consider dancing to be effeminate-as the Anglo-Saxons still uneasily feel it to be the Russian dance-scene was filled with full-fledged members of both sexes .

"We get the kind of arts we invite. In America, the fields of music and the stage and (to some degree) literature are crowded with men of dubious gender, because as a nation we make a false separation between every-day living and the

arts.

"If, in a society, virile young men are shamed out of their early interest in dancing or music or acting, then the vacuum left by their absence will inevitably be filled by the deviates-some of them with talent, but more of them merely

seeking to create a closed and comfy society of their own.

"My objections to this are not moral, but esthetic. It is not healthful when the arts are dominated by a particular group, no matter what that group may be. A monopoly-whether financial, political, or sexual always ends by suffocating the thing it embraces."

By that reasoning, most fields of art should have fairly well been suffocated several centuries ago. Aside from the ridiculous implications that homosexuality is absent among Russian dancers, and that homosevuals are necessarily effeminate, there are strong grounds for challenging this contention that deviates enter the arts in exceptional numbers merely because they are shunted out of other pursuits. With this logic, we would end up with the argument that there is an initial friendliness for the arts associated with homosexuality, and an antagonism for it in the real heterosexual. We would also arrive at the conclusion that Russians as a whole are more virile than Americans-since Americans are always afraid someone will think them effeminate. And if Mr. Harris thinks virility can be judged from a distance, he should investigate the sexual proclivities of some of the wrestlers, actors, marines, marlboro men and football players who set the pace for this masculinity jazz. It would be no exaggeration to say that the whole cult of masculinity is a defensive homosexual invention . . .

According to Herb Caen of SF Chronicle: (immediately following a campy-snide mention of the Daughters of Bilitis convention) "On the other hand, John Hamilton has finally decided on a name for his newish Sausalito bar: 'The Satyr's Head.' To underscore, he says in deep, manly tones, that it's