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Of course, much that is written about ONE is designed merely for sensation, where adherence to the truth doesn't count. An article in the current issue of The Lowdown is of this kind. Read this article and you will believe that ONE runs a call-boy service, and that ONE publishes a "newspaper that is printed exclusively for the 'third sex. You would also learn that ONE is a "secret society." It is "all our own." No one else can get in. Well it is obvious that the author of the article knew nothing about ONE. He may have felt that the simple truth would not make exciting enough material for his magazine. The most cursory examination would have revealed that not one of his statements is correct. Yet The Lowdown offers, pledges no less, to its readers in large print on each cover "The Facts They Dare Not Tell You".

One of the "lowdown" type magazines a few years ago reported that ONE had a membership of several hundred thousand. More recently a similar magazine upped the figure to over a million. All very flattering but not very factual. In the middle 1950's, a British doctor in an otherwise excellent book on the subject completely misrepresented ONE's aims and purposes. The author said in part that ONE was an organization dealing in "apologetics." That ONE begged for "sympathetic understanding" and "deplored the condemnation of homosexuals."

It is hard to say why people write this way about homosexual organizations. Maybe it is because it sounds so good: a vast underground army of organized homosexuals intensely secret and efficient — prostituting the young, bleeding the rich, tirelessly persuing their perversions. Who would believe that homosexuals band together otherwise-to educate, to learn, to seek civil and social equality. How dull? Exactly. Jess Stearn in his book The Sixth Man avoided the problem by barely mentioning ONE at all. His reporting of The Mattachine was about the most accurate to date.

And now we have a new book appearing in late spring and its subject is the homosexual organization with the provocative title Homosexual Revolution. The book is written by R. E. L. Masters, Jr., of Springdale, Arkansas, who is a comparatively recent subscribed to ONE. We have been told that Mr. Masters "knows more about ONE than we do." Since we are the founders, we can only laugh at such presumptuousness. Furthermore, a first reading of the book reveals that its rather glib and flashy pages lean too heavily upon quotations and misquotations, to permit such a claim to be taken seriously. There is apparently no end to the quackery. The subject is ripe, and the time is ripe, but our Ozark sage seems not to have the answer.

The record is clear. It was once told in Homosexuals Today, 1956. Any accurate reporting will have to be done by one of the organizations involved. Meanwhile readers should be cautioned to "take with a grain of salt" exposes and inside reports and other intelligence about social and secret societies of homosexuals.

Don Slater, Editor