really believed in a homosexual stereotype. But, my experience was strictly limited to a small personal acquaintance and beyond that I didn't know any more of the gay world than it knew of me. Growing up in a conservative middle-class spine-of-society background and getting more of the same in college, it came as quite a shock to me that I could admire, even love, somebody from a totally different background and sphere of knowledge and tradition. I was oversheltered, it is true. But I've discovered, reading these many letters from my readers, that a lot of them are, too. They aren't all, or mostly, big-city sophisticates. Some of them write to ask if Greenwich Village is a real place. It is quite a responsibility to think that I am their only link with what must seem to them like an exotic Shangri-La they will never have the chance to see.

In my writing I have made an effort to describe locales accurately and to include a variety of personalities. I think a lot of heterosexuals think that homosexuals are emotionally all of a piece and one of the things I have hoped my books would do, as a sort of side effect, is make the point that the gay are as various as the straight.

Little by little real people are creeping into the gay novels and into other books where a homosexual may play only a peripheral role. While many people have similarities with many others, I have always thought that each individual's personal differentness from the rest of humanity was what made him unique and valuable . . . and that goes for everybody, whatever his sexual persuasion.

Another stereotype in the gay novel has to do with the style of writing. You don't find quite so much panting and purple prose in real life as you do in a novel, whether it's gay or straight. Most of the time the days bump by in an indistinguishable

stream; long dull stretches broken by far-spaced excitement.

The novelist has to catch and concentrate the drama of perhaps a lifetime in a few short pages. When he's writing about homosexuality, the temptation seems to be to overdo it. It is true that the real Old West, for example, never saw John Wayne firing ten shots out of his six-shooter, or Jane Russell sauntering out of a saloon in corkscrew curls and not much else. It is equally true that most gay circles never saw some of the eye-poppin' excesses described by our less circumspect writers. Most homosexuals live rather quiet lives, work hard enough and try to maintain a little discretion on the home front. But that doesn't sell books. Newspapers thrive on the stories about one girl shooting another girl's husband, or some grizzled codger dragooning a highschool boy into his car, all with dramatic and tragic results. Nobody ever reads that George and Alan celebrated their tenth wedding anniversary or that Jane Doe got a gold watch from the Daughters of Bilitis in honor of her unselfish years of

service.

So writers manufacture a little excitement. A certain amount of this is right and good. We don't want to sit around and read about somebody else sitting around and reading. The danger is that the prose will get a little too hot and the picture will become perverted beyond all connection with reality. I believe it is unjust for a novelist to distort the lives and actions of his gay characters for purely mercenary The homosexual world is not confined to North Beach, Greenwich Village, the Left Bank. The homosexual is not invariably a promiscuous screwball. He doesn't spend his days cruising and his nights boozing. He doesn't go ring-aroundthe-rosy with the pin-up boy on the Vice Squad once a week. He doesn't bed-hop from lover to lover, plot to

reasons.

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