EDITORIAL

Radclyffe Hall's THE UNLIT LAMP was the tragedy of a talented girl whose talents were lost to herself and society because, handcuffed by family and prejudice, she never "came out." How many such people, these Unlit Lamps, exist in our world today? How many such people living out sterile, unfulfilled and frightened lives, who are merely stumbling through their lives in what are, as Thoreau put it, "lives of quiet desperation"? We don't know how many, of course. But this we do know. We have reached some of them. The letter may be on cheap dimestore ruled paper sent from a ranch in Wyoming. Or it may be on beautiful stationery from an expensive girls' finishing school. And some come in person into our office. They have one thing in common-amazement that a homosexual organization has functioned openly in our society for ten years. That eye-opening fact alone changes their views of society-and of themselves.

There is another side of the coin from The Unlit Lamps. That's the homosexuals who "came out," all right-but long, long ago in their youth, with a vengeance and a bang. And they have never gotten beyond trying to recapture that youthful coming out, and though they, too, are in conflict with society, so obsessed are they that they cannot spare any time to help do something about it in a rational way. You see them on their unquiet, desperate, promiscuous flights from bar to bar, party to party. What else can we call them but The Overlit Lamps?

Thoreau also said that if one is marching out of step from the rest, "perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer." Well, we homosexuals certainly march through life hearing a different drummer. But our minority is diverse, from the extremes of The Unlit Lamps to The Overlit Lamps, and all gradations in between, and just putting all out-of-steppers into a separate platoon doesn't mean they'll be marching in unison. To the rest of society we may look like a ragged bunch, men and women marching every which way, a motley crew. Maybe we are. Maybe we haven't yet found the drumbeat that we can all march to. But at least now the nickel has been put in the slot.

one

Alison Hunter