Letters

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PLAYING POSTOFFICE THE NEW WAY

Dear sirs:

It has been brought home to me very vividly the way in which the Post Office is working these days. They apparently confiscated a mailing list somewhere which contained my name. I was accosted today by a postal inspector who forced me to sign, and swear to, a statement that I would not receive through the mails anything which any postal inspector might judge to be obscene. I say I was forced to sign the statementthe alternative was lost time from work for a series of hearings.

As I pinned the inspector down, in discussion, to indicate what he meant by "obscene" he insisted that several serious literary works were in that category. Will we ever see justice in our lifetime?

Dear sirs:

Mr. W. Chicago, Illinois

The Postmaster General is having a field day. Should models be posed today as for Michelangelo's "David" and photographed there would promptly be an obscenity charge. Some of the cases in the current Post Office reports are quite interesting. For example, nothing is said as to whether the pictures seized were obscene or not.

I have seen pictures from some of the firms being prosecuted and by no stretch of the imagination could they be called obscene. Any large art museum has more revealing pictures and statues and positions-witness the many faun and satyr groups, or the famous "Rape of the Sabines" in the Vatican Museum. If anyone posed for that today or sold photos of it, into the hoosegow they would go.

Two of the few gay bars here have been closed down and I hear that more of the few left may shortly fall under the ax. I have been informed that nothing objectionable went on in either place. Perhaps they

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failed to pay off adequately. One hears of similar closings in New York and also Cincinnati.

Dear editors:

Mr. B. Washington, D. C.

Dal McIntire's "Tangents'' (November, 1960) pointed up a practice that is not only annoying and irritating, but which is a direct infringement upon the rights of the individual-the arbitrary and insulting Post Office practice of censorship," the somewhat euphemistic term for a practice that reeks heavily of the brain-washed husks of human beings in Orwell's 1984.

It seems that we, in truth, are not allowed to read what we please-so long as Big Brother decides what we are intelligent enough not to be "perverted" by. I can judge, without the dogmatic censorship of Postal authorities, what I consider to be good, and what bad.

Our rights to judgment, intelligence and freedom are being encroached upon. How contradictory and self-defeating is the process of censorship of both art and literature, whether it occurs in United States or in any other country, for something great and good and worthwhile in man is thereby undermined.

Dear Bill:

Mr. B. Topeka, Kansas

Twelve months ago, for no reason and without explanation my copies of ONE stopped coming. I made inquiries but could not find a satisfactory answer from the Postal authorities. Then yesterday, as suddenly as they had stopped, I received a full year's supply.

Dear friends:

Mr. R. Melbourne, Australia

How about a personal call on the new

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