As for me

e.

I am a new subscriber. I almost said a new "member" but that would be misleading. For I have always been one of you, though I did not discover you until just lately, after a long search. So that this opportunity to speak to my own kind (if the editors see fit) is a significant thing for me. and there is much I would like to say. But I am not a writer nor a poet, and it will be best to be matter-of-fact.

Here, then, are some of the things I have been thinking about over the years. I speak mainly to other women, but as you will see some of what I say applies to men as well.

1. There must be thousands of us who are isolated. Women, I think, must inevitably have a harder time finding one another than men. (I do not say that men do not have other problems.) Think only of these facts: (a) A woman cannot roam the streets alone at night, if she is not interested in taking what goes with that; (b) women do not usually form attachments so quickly or easily as men. They need congenial, lasting contacts, and these are harder to come. by. The consequence: if they're not miraculously lucky, they could spend a lifetime alone, living among strangers, ignorant of who and where their own people are.

What is the answer to this? I think local clubs and correspondence groups. Not just in New York and Los Angeles, but everywhere. And I wonder if it is not up to those who are already "in touch" to point the way. The most determined lone individual is up against a hopeless task if he or she does not know even where to begin to look. I see the problems and the risks.

2. More bitterly than any other one thing now, I resent the moral

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mutilation that we inflict on ourselves -through the need to conceal the truth, or to deny it, or just to be quiet in the face of outrage. How many had integrity once, and prized itand no longer have it? I think the answer is this:

a group can talk where an individual may have to remain silent, or anonymous. And what is the group to say? Not just emotional protest, not just bitterness for bitterness, no matter how much relief that may bring, but facts. And that brings up my next point:

3. Much job and other discrimination, while no doubt really based on "moral" or emotional prejudice, is rationalized as being due to the "character defects" of the homosexual. I for one believe that prejudice can be fought over the long run by exposing false rationalizing, wherever it is false. I suggested above that we probably do have, perforce, some "character defects" as a group-but that does not mean the whole popular stereotype is valid. And now popular stereotypes are reinforced in the name of science, for the doctors have developed a clinical picture based on what they see in their clinics. When Dr. Edmund Bergler states that homosexuals are characterized, always and everywhere, by "general unreliability of a more or less psychopathic nature," hypernarcissism, defensive malice, flippancy, pseudo-aggression. (whatever that may be); when Dr. Frank Caprio finds them, among other things selfish, extremely jealous, unscrupulous, emotionally immature, intimately associated with crime-is it any wonder that both government and private employers will not hire those who can be detected?

The answer to this, I say, is that trained psychologists and psychiatrists must investigate the homo-

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