idly curious matrons dashing through the supermarket will pick up such a book and read some of it and their husbands may glance at the bedroom scenes, but for the most part, the audience is either gay or wants to be, or has a strong, built-in sympathy already for the subject.

Paperbacks are universally available; they are inexpensive. They have the advantage of escaping critical scrutiny and analysis in the influential book reviews. This, of course, makes for some sloppy writing, but it also gives a much greater freedom than the hardcover novelists experience. There are towns in this country not just Boston, either-where paperbacks, just because they are paperbacks, are not kindly received, no matter how demure the damsel on the cover. But on the whole, there is more freedom in the paperback and more truth is likely to come out.

Unquestionably a lot of this writing is pure hack work. There are editors who will say to a competent professional writer, "I need a lurid little item to boost sales. Give me a hundred and eighty pages of lesbianism." So off he goes, blank as the back side of the moon, to grind out all the prurient love scenes he can cook up in the allotted time and space. The only difference between this book and his others is that instead of boy-meets-girl, it's girl-meetsgirl. It doesn't matter to him that the girls might go at things a little differently. He just writes the same old guff the way he always has, gives the characters new names and a new setting and the publisher gussies it up with sexy blurbs and a cover featuring a female in bluejeans.

I think the best of the paperback originals have avoided crass commercialism for the most part. I have made some concessions to it-minor ones having to do with dramatic temper tantrums or a chase scene, rather than sex-because it has been pictured to

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me by my editors as a vital selling point. It may startle you to know that a paperback original has to sell close to 200,000 copies in its first printing to be a best seller. A hard cover novel selling only 30,000 copies is considered a best seller. Naturally, the paperback editors count on the low price to peddle more of their books, but they count on good dependable fast action and sex, as well.

Some writers can and do work well working full-tilt to grind out up to three paperbacks a year. However, there is little time to polish the subtleties and revise the clumsy passages. So, occupying this humble position in the publishing world, we can say things that could not be whispered to Bennett Cerf or Charles Scribner's Sons. We can come closer to the realities of gay life than the more elevated hard cover novels.

To judge from the huge correspondence I get from my readers, almost all of them are gay. I doubt if the same could be said for readers of Durrell, Renault or Isherwood or dozens of others with exalted reputations, for all the best reasons. Nonetheless, it has given me a special insight into how other homosexuals live, what their interests are and how they respond to homosexuals in print. A great many of them believe that since I've solved the problems my characters were facing, I can solve theirs, too. I have so many requests for advice that I'm beginning to feel a little like the "Ann Landers" of the gay set. But I am flattered, even so, because they seem to have faith in me and the people I write about have apparently come across to readers as genuine human beings.

One thing I've learned from my readers which applies to my novels is the simple, but all important, fact that homosexuals, male and female, are as vastly diversified in temperament, interests, social and financial status, and intelligence as heterosexuals. I never

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