EDITORIAL

Homosexuals are at certain disadvantages culture-wise. For example, as children we had nothing but heterosexual literature. "And they lived happily ever after" was never two women or men. A pretty fem Cinderella never had a small-but-costly crown put on her head by a handsome Queen of the Amazons with a gleam in her eye. Of all those Knights around that Round Table there was never that minority of two playing knee-sies.

This is not to push gay fairy tales for tiny tots but to illustrate a point too often unrealized or forgotten: that what we are doing-homophile journalism, creating an outlet and an atmosphere encouraging to homophile writers, or call it what you will-this is something new.

This didn't exist when homosexuals of my generation, and probably yours also, "came out." We could pity-wallow with "The Well of Loneliness" or walk through the weird wax-works of Krafft-Ebing.

Stop and consider: would ONE, and its issues from nine years to delve into, have helped with your adjustment after you "came out"? And, if you are a writer, would you not have begun earlier?

This building of a tradition or an atmosphere of homophile writing (indeed, just reaching and convincing many homophiles themselves that there can be such a thing) is a slow process. It is not accomplished in just nine years. We know that. But, as I think Gertrude Stein might have put it, somebody surely sometime has to start a thing.

So we didn't get gay fairy tales as children. So all right. At least now, for the first time in history, the rise of homophile journalism allows the adult homosexual viewpoint to express itself and become a permanent chronicle in print. And not only for our own times. And ONE intends to be around for a long, long time.

one

Alison Hunter

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