articles which deal with subjects of homosexual interest in a down-to-earth and practical fashion.
Those who have articles, stories, poems should send them along, but expect no correspondence or word of any sort for at least six months. There is not time to both evaluate material, get out Magazine issues and yet to correspond with aspiring authors. If they demand word on their material and pester the Editors with letters it is simply returned to them, unread.
Dear Editor Slater:
Your Editorial (August, 1961) is, to say the least, illuminating. However, people in high State Service and other important posts need greater protection against the blackmailer. The laws of various countries tend to encourage blackmail, by making oddities of behavior great and grave moral issues. This should not be so.
Every individual should have the right, on this planet, to a perfectly free and private life, divorced from all career and anything else. For any profession to want to control the personal and private life of anyone is a lowering of the standard of humanity. Both the heterosexual and the deviant are targets for blackmail, the one when he or she is married, the other because he or she does not marry.
A security risk is anyone who is not secure in himself. Personally I am always suspicious of anyone or anything which depends for its existence on ignorance and the suppression of personal viewpoints. The stamp and mark of the Tyrant is limitation, division and the desire to conquer, via control of the mind.
The right to know, which implies the freedom to find out, should override all forms of censorship. I am sure that the United States is bigger and much more intelligent than to allow for one instant any sinister postal jugglery. I can see from your Tangents feature that life proceeds in the States very much as it does here.
Your Case History (August, 1961) is startling. How could anyone hound someone like this, for whatever reason? A man or a woman doing a useful job, rendering useful service needs encouragement rather than insults, for people such as John are very scarce these days. Tenderness, concern for others, is dying. It needs agencies like ONE and agents like John to ensure that humanity be constantly lifted up rather than trodden down. He, like many others, has proved that the homosexual can work hard and honestly, does desire a decent, useful life-and who dares deny him, or her, this much? The late Senator McCarthy was hated this side of the Atlantic and his sudden demise was a relief, in Britain at least. We do not want his kind.
Mr. A.
Manchester, England
PLAIN TALK
Dear Editor:
Your Magazine has been coming to my home for a month or more as the result of a low practical joke. However, since your trite publication has been mailed to me I took the liberty of glancing through a few copies.
My opinions are that I did not appreciate the insinuation in one issue that Jesus Christ was a homosexual. Anyway, even if you could "prove" he was it would not justify some of the sickening actions of mentally ill individuals. Trying to justify homosexualism is like trying to justify wholesale use of the H-bomb. It is a step toward the destruction of the human race.
If you people with this problem (or should we call it a disease of the mind) would utilize your publication to plead for understanding and perhaps some type of clinical help, I would be all for you; but when you try to encourage this and ask for legal justification for your abnormal acts-well, I think you are way off base.
Stop sending this "thing" to my home, until all of you can realize and respect the reason for your being on Earth.
Dear ONE:
Mr. B.
Granada Hills, Calif.
In the December, 1961, "U.S.A. Inside Report" the sex deviate was called all kinds of names from murderer, traitor, down to recruiters, as was explained over radio station WMEX by a woman. Luckily I was listening.
Jerry Williams, of the station, allowed me to answer it for fifteen minutes. I answered the recruitment accusation by saying that this was a condition acquired from the ages of three to twelve, by from three to thirteen percent of the population, according to Kinsey and that once acquired it has never been known to change; that teenage boys and girls are thrown into the streets and naturally go to older people for their protection, but that most of them hang out with those of their own age.
I said that ministers should organize the mothers of homophiles, and went on to tell about ONE Magazine, Mattachine Review and the Daughters of Bilitis organization, and how all three were studying the problem.
As for the murderers and traitors, they are few in number and found in all classes. They are psychotic and are for the doctors. Someone else called the station and said that "Inside Report" was calling names at sixteen million people.
But the best thing of all was that Jerry Williams let me answer this magazine to two hundred thousand politically and intellectually-minded listeners.
Prescott Townsend Homophile Center
Boston, Mass.
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