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EDITORIAL

The pedant and the prude are as busy on the homosexual scene as they are on the heterosexual. They are forever obscuring our understanding of matters sexual. A chance fly-speck on the Rorschach will be twisted into deep sickness and maladjustment by the examiner of the "invert." While the busy pedant tortures the evidence out of shape the prude shields himself from the impurities building a defense against the immorality of the homosexual scene. But for the most part the fear of the prude is as groundless as the conjecture of the pedant. For the pedant to leave no jest without commentary is sorry. For the prude to see no wit in our subject without infamous suspicion is equally sorry. The homosexual scene is a very broad one. It contains many segments some good, some bad, some laughable, some sad. ONE Magazine tries to cover all of them it can.

One homophile organization protested violently our June, 1963 cover which depicted some swishes. Donald Webster Cory, in a speech at ONE's 1962 Midwinter Institute wisely counseled that it is a grave error to discriminate against any segment of our minority even the swish.

ONE violently agrees with this idea.

Another homophile organization more recently protested against a drawing in our August, 1963 issue which depicted a butch male sitting on a toilet. An officer of yet another organization has publicly derided the scholarship of the classes at ONE Institute.

Swishes, butches, classes—yes, toilets too are part of the homosexual scene. Our minority is what it is. It is not what some might like it to be. Why overwhelm it with resentful moral implications and tortured analyses? To catch a look at our minority in its sum total requires piecing it together from its different parts. Many of these parts may strike the sensibilities of some as harsh. So what? It may be that this type of sensibility is but a weird kind of prudery or ostentation. It certainly isn't facing reality.

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Don Slater, Editor

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