uals. Scenes about male homosexuals with any degree of frankness will likely be amputated from the novel, no matter how much violence the amputation may do to the sense of the book.

Many novelists try to cover the subject and get away with it by punishing the homosexual characters in their stories all out of proportion to the minor sins they may commit. If the denouement isn't violent, then at least, it has to be sad.

I think it's possible today to write a good, well-balanced novel about homosexuality and its attendant problems. I don't think it is always, or often, done. However, the mere fact that it is occasionally possible speaks well for the future. A top flight novelist needn't be terrified of muddying his good name forever if he takes up the theme.

It is certainly true that some writers are still afraid, or cautious, about letting their true names be associated with a gay novel or story, but I think the number is dwindling. There are such quantities of excellent writers. who have explored the subject without any squirming embarrassment or overworked explanations of "why I did it," that anybody interested in writing in the field can take heart.

I am not chiding our writers for what they haven't done or haven't yet been able to do. When you are writing for the general public, you have to bear in mind the vast immovable normalcy you're attacking. Because that's the way the public takes it: as an attack.

I like to think that nobdy is really normal: not one hundred percent. Everyone has quirks that would be damn hard to define in his creative writing class without making himself out to be anything from cannibal to necrophiliac. Nobody has a monopoly on normality—not even the smug and comfortable family man with a wife, six kids and the weekly lawn

to mow.

The trouble is: he thinks he does. Most people who don't positively know otherwise, are convinced that they are normal. Anybody who differs too radically from their mode of life, their knowledge and experience, is abnormal. Some people believe that they are normal, merely because they are heterosexual.

Some types of abnormality lend themselves readily to sympathy. You find Gray Ladies minding paraplegics in hospitals, white people joining the NAACP, childless couples taking active interest in the PTA. But you don't see many of the straight clan publicly and openly joining hands to work in the homosexual cause. Why? Well, no Gray Lady was ever accused of having mechanical hands, a white man can safely aid the NAACP without being suspected of Negro blood. But even the most sympathetic and civic minded heterosexual will boggle if he's asked to sign up for active work with a homosexual group.

As to the novel . . . hard cover, quality fiction reviewed in the best critical media, advertised and promoted in book stores and dealing with homosexuality, is inevitably a little self-conscious. A number of people who consider themselves perfectly normal are going to read it and the novelist seems to have the heavy burden of making his people believable and sympathetic to homosexual readers and at the same time believable and unsympathetic to heterosexual readers.

This mixed audience, coupled with difficult editorial standards has resulted in many of the stereotypes in gay novels that have bothered a lot of us.

On the other hand, someone writing gay novels for a soft or paper cover house has an entirely different range of problems. First, his audience is largely gay. Unquestionably, many