Armstrong is a very sick person, and very definitely untypical. The same column intimates that other missing children are similar victims. Perhaps so, but just as likely prey to other kinds of sick minds-none of which is typical to the society it moves in.

You quote Mr. Rankin, police psychiatrist, as saying that cure of the homosexual is possible. This is the greatest untruth of all. In all the annals of psychiatry you will find probably only one other psychiatrist who agrees with him-a doctor in New York who made a fortune on a book in which he says so. This man and his theory have been categorically refuted by the findings and writing of countless medical men, including doctors at the Jung Institute at Zurich and no less than the eminent psychiatrist Karl Menninger.

encom-

But what else is Mr. Rankin to say? His responsibility passes the cure of the criminal, and it would be admitting defeat for him to say otherwise.

Homosexuals are not homosexuals because they wake up in the morning and decide to go be lewed in public, as one decides to rob a bank or cash a bad check. They are as they are for very basic and deep-seated reasons that, so far, psychiatry has not been able to determine.

Your assumption that something can be done is correct, but your approach bespeaks ignorance of the unalterable fact that homosexuals have, do, and will exist and practice whether there are laws or not, and whether or not those laws are enforced with severity and dauntless persecution.

You suggest closing the bars. How ridiculous. Will homosexuality vanish from the scene? No. They'll move elsewhere onto the streets if necessary if driven there.

one

You suggest a ghetto-type arrangement. Areas specifically designated for these people. Well, let me tell you something. Areas are set aside, or selected rather, by these people, and pretty soon they become so elegant and expensive and in demand by the normal people that you can't get into the areas. Examples are Greenwich Village and Fire Island in New York; the International Settlement in San Francisco; Bourbon Street in New Orleans; Laguna Beach in California. You and I can't afford to live in these places because the normal people are clamoring at the gates, so to speak, to reap the "smartness" and beauty the homosexual makes of his home and neighborhood.

Gathered together, the reaction is far from the "martyrdom" which Inspector James Fisk fears.

You intimate that strict law enforcement and maximum penalties will deter the homosexual-make him vanish from the scene. But that is not true-history has proven that, even in Los Angeles. I had to smile at your reasoning that if the Hollywood Vice Detail had more people they could arrest four times. as many violators therefore only 25% of violators were being apprehended. I'd wager the percentage arrested is far less than one tenth of one percent of the incidents. If there were only four times as many violations as you list, there's really not much of a problem, now is there?

What has to be done is that homosexuality must be recognized, and having resolved themselves to the fact that it is here to stay, authorities must work to control the dangerous part of their activity, and deal with the lesser offense of "just being" with understanding and tolerance. In this way, much of the scourge could be eliminated.