will always lack purpose and direction. In 1962, it is no longer enough to just have a bull session about homosexuality-unless you think of the subject like Newsweek as a "discussion . . . of lives in the shadowy half-world of homosexual society." The most articulate of the 8 participants was a former member of the now dissolved New York Mattachine Area Council who had apparently gained valuable experience thereby. The remarkable thing about the broadcast seems to have been "a breakthrough in the conspiracy of silence" on the subject over New York's airways. It is to be hoped that we will soon see these 8 courageous homosexuals on tele-

vision.

MATTACHINE DOES IT AGAIN

The Mattachine Society's 9th Annual Conference, held August 24 and 25 in San Francisco, was one of the most successful of these occasions ever convened. A Friday evening reception in the Society's attractive headquarters set the tone of mingled seriousness and fun which marked the whole occasion.

The Saturday sessions featured short addresses by Don Lucas, Executive secretary of the Society and Harold Call, President, followed by a most serious paper on VD given by Dr. Edgar C. Cumings, Associate Director, American Social Health Association. He carefully laid out the ground-work for his listeners' evaluation of the great complexity of the problems to be solved in this "behavorial disease," as he called it, stating that despite the social nature of the whole question only three cities in America today have psychiatric case workers attached to their VD clinics. He cited many figures and unanswered questions whose contradictory implications he was frank to acknowledge.

Following a delicious luncheon (all of the food was good, for which the Jack Tar Hotel deserves a salute) Rev. Robert W. Wood, author of Christ and the Homosexual had been scheduled but, due to illness in his family, had instead to be represented by a fiftyminute tape of his talk. Listeners heard a forthright, unsparing exposition of his views concerning the areas of conflict between the churches and the homosexual and the changes both must make before much accommodation can be found between them. He spoke cuttingly of "a dialogue of the deaf," in which Christian theology must be called upon to drastically revise its attitudes toward homosexuals.

Afternoon sessions were devoted to about an hour's description by Dr. Evelyn Hooker, UCLA psychologist, of the two books on which she currently is working and for which she still is unable to announce a publication date. Her talk was one of the most frank of the many she has given for homophile organizations but was, at her request, "off the record." Marshall W. Krause, staff counsel of the Northern California ACLU, gave a deceptively quiet and unassuming presentation of the legal framework within which many homosexual problems occur and the position of the ACLU vis-a-vis the same, marking him as a most shrewd and capable young attorney, friendly, yet apparently quite convinced of the essential rightness of "the heterosexual viewpoint." Some listeners found his bland dispassion a bit chilling if it could be thought representative of the general attitudes of civil libertarians.

Richard Schlegel, announced as a doctoral student in political science at American University, Washington. D.C., gave a fiery and seem-

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