Returning to San Francisco after some years I am appalled by the growing number of hustlers. It is hair-splitting to say they are not necessarily homosexual because they are male whores. I sometimes wonder where all this pother about homosexuality being unnatural crept into culture.

Our

If memory serves me, fifty years ago all discusion of sex activity was not nice. I cannot recall having heard homosexuality discussed or condemned. It certainly existed, to my personal knowledge. Many of my childhood partners in bed and haymow drifted into heterosexuality and marriage, or at least bisexuality and marriage. Perhaps this would be the same today if society didn't make us so selfconscious about being criminally different.''

Personally, I am persuaded all of us are basically bisexual and that the pressures of hypocrisy force us to patterns we would not naturally follow. The absolute homosexual is created, not born. Thanks for you! comment on my "Conversation".

James Ramp

San Francisco,

California

BRICKBATS AND BOUQUETS

Dear sir:

Thank you for your sample of ONE. It is the type of thing we would like to have in our bookstore, as we feel a bookstore should be a meeting place for all types of ideas. However, we will not sell something that we ourselves do not consider worth reading. To be honest, the two stories in the August issue contained some of the most trait (sic) writing that I have ever read. The story line was poor, and the conversation so badly done that it was a job on my part to read both of them.

If at any time you feel that you have something that we can honestly sell, we would be more than happy to carry it, but until then, we cannot sell anything that we would not read ourselves.

Gentlemen:

D. H. Mead, Coffee Corner, Denver, Colorado

Please! Use a little discretion in your magazine mailing wrappers! They get thinner and more transparent as time goes on.

Please add some camouflage or color of some kind to disguise the contents at least partially. And leave off your return address. That is another dead give-away. Even a half-blind and half-wit mail handler

one

easily detect what your package is. Please help us to remain anonymous until such time as it is safe to show our hand. Mr. A.

Dear Mr. Lambert:

Memphis, Tennessee

The letter from Mr. C., of New York (July, 1963) just doesn't make sense. How can local police and postal inspectors come into possession of, open and read firstclass mail? Even if they do and try to use the information so received against either the writer or receiver they openly admit a violation of U. S. Postal laws and are subject to prosecution under them.

Just how ignorant are some of the boys? How easily intimidated? The only thing I have to confess to any minion of the law is my name and address, and I can refuse to reveal that if I choose. Won't someone enlighten thee dumb clucks on their legal rights and protection under the laws of our country?

How about a few editorials on legal rights, as well as civil rights to educate some of the lily-livered belles? It just might put a bit of starch into a few willowy spines and strengthen the entire movement, as well as themselves. Hope this gripe will produce some beneficial results.

Dear friends:

Mr. M.

Hollywood, California

"It may well be," writes John Burnside (August, 1963) "that the curses flung at the homosexual are really part of a struggle to reclaim the bisexual.' bisexual." I am reminded of what a friend said years ago about the bisexual: he denied the existence of such a creature, asserting that the bisexual is a person becoming heterosexual or homosexual.

If this is true, clinical observation suggests that many people never quite make it, or not in one lifetime. The person who is becoming something makes a poor ally, which explains why the "bi-s" give little support to the cause of justice to the homosexual. But when civilization has reached a certain stage of development, they might dare express themselves.

At this stage in our national decline we might do well to look at the ancient Spartans, who knew how how to condition their youth for military service. The male part of the population was segregated from the female in an austere homophilic way. The bisexuals must have enjoyed Spartan life, but it was rough for the heterosexuals and

30