of recent years.

The New York Times reported simply "125 persons arrested." One would automatically suppose that the paper was supporting the campaign of the police. But a closer look showed that the Times had merely reported the facts without comment. Some of the other papers did comment, and carried letters praising the action of the police. Others, myself included, sent letters of censure which were never published.

The campaign of the police to make the streets of New York safer continued. The next weekend another large bunch of "vagrants" was arrested in Times Square (traditionally one of the safest parts of New York.) Again, newspapers lauded the activities of the police. A few days later someone was murdered on Third Avenue. A few days after that another was murdered on Tenth Avenue.

Anyone could see the facts. Murders were being committed because people were sitting around outside late at night. The enforcement of a curfew would have eliminated this danger easily enough, but Mayor Wagner was against such a measure because it "resembled too much a dictatorship." In order to avoid the obvious methods of a police state, the people were subjected to a less obvious one: that of persecuting a minority group to make the public think that its evils were being mitigated.

It was obvious to anyone who cared to think about the matter that the arresting of large numbers of people in heavily travelled districts was not solving the crime problem. The murders continued while the neighborhoods in which they occurred continued to be free from any additional police surveillance until eventually the heat wave broke, people went back into their houses, and the crime rate fell back to normal.

Thus the 1959 crime wave died a natural death. It was not stopped by

the police. And who had paid the bill? The homosexuals. But the police, having once tasted of blood, continued their persecution campaign against homosexuals and other defenseless "undesirables" more particularly those poor alcoholic devils who sit on their newspapers in Central Park imagining themselves about to float away on their raft in a sea of liquor. The police, naturally, are not the least bit interested in enforcing justice. They are interested in mollifying the public and in keeping their jobs.

By the next winter the Campaign to Eliminate Homosexuality was extended to the bars in Greenwich Village. One by one they all closed. Mary's was the first to go. After fifteen or twenty years as the symbol of the Gay Life on Eighth Street, it was snuffed out of existence. Next went the Old Colony. The Main Street held out a little longer, but it too succumbed after a few months. Lenny's, Ce Soir, Mais Oui, The Grape Vine, The 415, the Annex, not to mention the Bagatelle for girls, all disappeared. New York would never be the

same.

The summer of 1960 was very different from that of 1959. It was cooler; there were not so many sitting on benches and leaning against the wall on Central Park (understandably!). Everywhere a grim, tense atmosphere of waiting for the worst seemed to hang in the very air. Plain-clothesmen stalked the fifties and sixties with the old, sordid routine:

"Come up to my place for a drink?"

"Sure."

"You're under arrest."

In gay circles the fellows warned one another not to speak to anyone they didn't know. The benches in Central Park provided perpetual bait for frequent and unexpected raids by uniformed officers.

"Are you gay?" "No."

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