or allowing someone other than himself, particularly his homosexual "confidants," Ronnie, Harvey and Tata, who, he says, are real persons (which I seriously doubt) to make the most damaging statements. Mr. Masters then demonstrates his own sense of fair play by making some such statement as "in all fairness it should be pointed out," and so forth. It is much like the technique of a court room attorney who asks a question which he knows in advance will be stricken from the record, but which cannot, by any means, be erased from the minds of the jurors or spectators.

It is, indeed, probably asking too much to expect objective reporting in this field, but we still have every right to expect accurate reporting of verifiable fact. That there is much misreporting, whether it be the result of sloppy and careless research or deliberate distortion, is the one really unforgiveable thing about this book. The basic trouble, I suspect, is to be found in the author's choice of a title. The word "revolution," itself a loaded word, is so far from being an appropriate designation for anything the homophile movement has yet accomplished or ever dreams of accomplishing that Mr. Masters has been hard put to come up with any material sufficiently sensational to justify, even remotely, the use of that word. Consequently, when he has run into something startling, or which may be made to appear startling, Mr. Masters has been careful not to probe too deeply lest the whole truth spoil an otherwise good story. Here is one example:

In one section of his book Mr. Masters discusses the possible political potential of the homosexual minority if it could or should be united into a cohesive voting bloc. In this connection he says: "Indeed, novelist

one

Norman Mailer has written that he was tentatively offered a nomination. to Congress if only he would write an article for ONE magazine." I do not know what Mr. Mailer's motives were in writing this statement, but then Mr. Mailer writes fiction, and possibly he was not quite sure what he was writing at the time. Mr. Masters is not, presumably, writing fiction. If it were true that ONE offered to secure a nomination for Mr. Mailer, if ONE could secure such a nomination, or even if ONE fancied that it could, then this state of affairs is a matter of tremendous importance and is certainly, in my opinion, worth investigating. It is obvious that the responsibility for the truth or falsity of this statement lies not with Mr. Masters, but with Mr. Mailer, this is such a bold statement, however, that I cannot conceive of any intellectually curious writer not making any attempt to determine whether there was indeed any basis for such a remark. This. Mr. Masters has not done.

It is clear that Mr. Masters has done a good deal of research in preparation for this book, but he has confined his research almost exclusively to secondary sources and apparently made little or no effort to evaluate his sources, verify his material, or to bring it up to date. Almost all of his descriptive and historical material has been taken from HOMOSEXUALS TODAY, published by ONE, Inc., back in 1956. Some of the material in this volume was out of date even when it was published, as ONE is the first to admit, and there were, no doubt, actual errors even then, yet Mr. Masters has used this same material without change. At the end of his book Mr. Masters apologizes by saying: "By the time this book reaches the reader it will be, in some of its details, outdated. There is no help for that. Events

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