The Homosexual Aid Society in the Middle of the 21st Century

by Roger Barth

Early today, June 1, 2060, I entered the Great City for the first time. I could feel my heart pumping as I made a beeline for the Homosexual Aid Society Headquarters. The taxi driver knew where to go; no need to look in the phone book, as in the smaller cities.

Of course, I had never been anyplace before that had over 10,000 people the crucial number. The situation in the small towns had not been really bad. To be sure, according to the terms of the historic Concordat that emancipated the homosexuals, only in those cities of over 10,000 population were they completely free-free to live as they wished and with whom they wished, free to meet and love, and so forth. But the Concordat explicitly guaranteed the right of every homosexual, as a human being, to live wherever he wanted; it was only a homosexual act-defined

as sexual intercourse between two people of the same sex-that was prohibited in the smaller communities. In this way the American people felt they had achieved a sensible compromise: the basic fabric of American life had always been the small town, and it was decided that these small towns would henceforth remain

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heterosexual, and homosexuals were allowed to live there but homosexuality as an act was illegal.

In the small town where I was born everyone had been pleasant. They had all known about me. When I was about six someone asked if I liked boys or girls. I said boys, and they kept asking me from time to time. After some years it seemed conclusive, and so they would say, "Some day you will become a member of the Homosexual Aid Society and live in a large city."

The taxi left me in the middle of the 9-block area that belongs to the Society, in front of the main building with its familiar twin towers that everyone knows from the pictures, one tower representing the men, the other the women, both rising out of their common base, and it is one of the noblest examples of that gently curving but severely classical style of architecture that the homosexuals introduced at the very end of the 20th century.

The main building is surrounded by the other buildings, such as the Sports Pavilion, the Botanical and Zoological Gardens, the Cultural Museum with its Grand Auditorium for lectures and plays, and the Society's

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