has been raped or rolled or beaten or jailed. What he doesn't realize is that every one of those beautiful men sitting on those bar stools chatting merrily feel exactly the same as he. It is a sad thing, but true. Tennessee Williams said "We're all sentenced to a solitary confinement confinement within ourselves."

I have often heard the cry, "But nobody understands." Unfortunately, this is entirely true. Dear reader, nobody absolutely nobody-understands you, and nobody ever will. You can live with another person all your life and he still won't completely understand you. You can talk to a psychiatrist for twenty years and even he will not entirely understand you. Your parents never understood you, 'your friends never understood you, and God Himself probably never fathomed your mind. In order for another person to understand you, he has to shuck off his own problems and live your life for you inside your body. This is impossible, so it is impossible for anyone else to really understand. The best thing you can do is try to understand yourself.

After you understand yourself, accept yourself for what you are and love yourself. But never, never make the horrible mistake of trying to make the heterosexual world accept you as well. It is not yet possible to ask Mrs. Bluelip down the street to accept you as a homosexual. She will accept you on a thousand other terms -if you're that nice Mr. Jones who raises gardenias and dresses so well. This is what you must work withdress well, raise gardenias, and be friends with her. After you are very good friends she might come to a realization of your sexual proclivities. But I would never recommend that you come right out and tell her. In the first place, she really won't believe it. In the second place, you will always be thenceforth-that silly man

who acts like a queer, and who admitted that he is one. In a word, you will never really be friends. If the heterosexual world knows that you're gay, you will always be a "queer" first and a raiser of gardenias second. And you will never be able to rise above this, even if you desert horticulture and become the world's greatest nuclear physicist.

But is holding the truth from our neighbors so horribly wrong? I don't really think so. A bald headed man wears a toupee. If we hate our neighbors we're usually civil toward them anyway. Most of us refrain from making unkind allusions to Mrs. Plumpbottom's moustache or Mr. Plumpbottom's buck teeth. In other words, we are constantly lying in our every day life. So it's not really so bad to lie about our sex lives, if it makes things easier. And most of us will agree that it does.

We are constantly crying about the heterosexuals who attack us. But we never really stop to consider their side of the story. We take it for granted that they are all fiends with gore-smeared fangs and let it go at that. But why do they look upon the homosexual as they do? I think it's because they're just a little bit afraid of us. It could be that we remind them of a phase of their youth which they still feel guilty about. They are afraid that they'll revert to that past phase and be Found Out. Since no one is entirely masculine, the straight men protect that masculinity which they possess with all the fiber of their being. They are always afraid that they'll lose it. And the homosexual presents the greatest challenge. They somehow fear we'll take their manhood; so they strike out in terror and destroy us. If you fear someone, you can never be his friend. Consequently, the homosexual and the heterosexual are enemies. I'm afraid that they'll remain enemies for a long. long time.

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