ingly not true.

True or false, the dissenters and counter-dissenters were unabashed. Sparks flew in all directions and smoke curled out from the doorway of each Drafting Committee-room. Continuous pressures were exerted to change the program, to revise its title and generally to alter the proceedings.

While readily conceding the values in healthy controversy and that dissenters too have "rights" (although this was the word that

so obnoxious to many, there

some present who felt this continued behavior to be in extremely bad taste. They asked themselves what the reaction might have been had guests at the Daughters of Bilitis Convention last May risen from the floor to demand heatedly that the program be changed more to their liking.

Thoughtful observers at the time, and since then, have tried to understand what causes might underlie the sincere opposition of most of the women attending, as expressed by President Bell's "manifesto" printed on a following page, and Editor Del Martin's "How Far Out Can We Go?" (THE LADDER, January, 1961) in which she argued that ONE's 1961 Midwinter Institute was "likely to set the homophile movement back into oblivion and would leave us wide open as a target of ridicule from those who already dislike us . . ."

Was it as some suggested, that the Daughters of Bilitis, its membership restricted exclusively to women, was so narrowly focussed an ingroup that its members could not be expected to understandingly concern themselves with the general problem of homosexuality?

Or was it that lesbians, by virtue of their own infrequent personal contact with the brutal realities of the denial of rights the male homo-

sexual so continually experiences, were but a step ahead of heterosexuals in their comprehension of what the problems are?

Was it, even, that lesbians have been so brain-washed by the circumstances of their own favored social and legal status that they would resist to the hilt their brother-homosexuals' efforts for betterment, fearing lest some disturbance of the status quo might endanger their own relatively peaceful pursuits?

That these, and many other questions were raised would seem to evidence that homosexuals, both male and female, still understand neither themselves very well nor the larger society to which they must somehow accommodate themselves; also, that a single Midwinter Institute, a single "group-participation project in homophile education" could do little more than raise some of the important questions and bring them out into plain view.

What, Then, Was Accomplished? It has been asked what results were achieved and why there were but seventy persons registered, as against one hundred and thirty the previous year. Did this reflect general opposition to the idea of "rights," as some believed? Was it, as others suggested, that homosexuals are too lazy to do their own thinking and would prefer to sit listening to panels of "experts" telling them what to think? Or, was it the Recession?

Dr. Evelyn Hooker, psychologist and one one of the Annual Banquet speakers, raised the possibility that homosexuals may be so conditioned by fear as to shy away from consideration of rights for themselves, even to doubt their own ability to deal with such a topic.

Another banquet speaker, Hal Call, Editor, The MATTACHINE REVIEW, pointed out that the Midwinter sessions had revealed, if nothing