letter, but for quite other reasons. It is ill-becoming for a publication that is spokesman for those who have suffered so severely when their identities have been revealed, to goad into revelation any one of its members, rank and filer or leader. I would characterize this as hitting below the belt. if it were not for the high opinion that I have for the particular part of the human anatomy that resides in that area.

One other personal matter, and I will sign off. Evans contends that much of the material "is merely a rehash of other people's ideas"—and who these people are, these "other people”—is never explicated. Could it be that Evans thinks it is quite all right for Evans to talk about "other people" without identification, but Cory and LeRoy must not commit this sin?

I have suffered many accusations in life, but fortunately no one has ever accused me of not incorporating other people's ideas into my work. The task of a writer, or a thinker, is to build on the foundations of seminal minds: and I would be quite remiss if I did not betray in my work the ideas of Plato and Aristotle, Darwin and Freud and Einstein, Whitman and Gide, William James and John Dewey and Bertrand Russell, Krafft-Ebing and Kinsey and the Ellises (Havelock and Albert), and many figures less renowned to the public but not the less influential in shaping Cory: namely, W. I. Thomas, Charles Cooley, George H. Mead, Florian Znaniecki, Karl Mannheim, Robert K. Merton, and Talcott Parsons. All of these people are my spiritual and mental fathers, even should they disown me as their son.

But never do I recall incorporating in this book, nor in any previous one, a train of thought swiped from another; never have I taken an idea and repeated it without acknowledging my debt. My works, both on

one

homosexuality and other subjects, have come out of the loneliness of my own inner monologue, extended with John LeRoy into a dialogue.

What amuses me about this statement is that for years I have seen many authors worthy and unworthy. in books and magazines (including writers in One), take my ideas, and only on rare occasions make acknowledgment. The concept that the homosexual constitutes a minority group was worked out in utter solitude; it is now repeated almost like a platitude. Norman Mailer acknowleged the influence my work had on him, and other writers have done the same, sometimes in private letters which I may not quote. Max Lerner wrote that the only original ideas in One (or perhaps he stated, the only worthwhile ideas, I paraphrase from memory) were in my writings. A recent British book on homosexuality liked some of my ideas so much that the author lifted them without acknowledging the source-including it so happens, a factual error that I had made in the earlier work.

Robert Lindner often quoted me. sometimes disagreed with me, and then a careful reading of his work reveals that many of my phrases and expressions and even whole parts of sentences are turning up, as if they were his own, as he must have thought they were. One of the most important works on the teenage sub-, culture in America, widely hailed by educators, develops the concept of the teenage group as a minority. When the author was approached by a mutual friend of himself and myself, who suggested that the manner of development of this theme indicated it had its origin in the reading of The Homosexual in America, the author replied that this is very possible, he had read the book and been deeply impressed, but had he known the debt, he would have acknowledged it. The same cannot be said

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