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The comments below clearly illustrate that not all members of society are intolerant and condemnatory. Tolerance is a two-way street for us all.

TOLERANCE by Paul Menken

There are few males today who would dare stick out their necks and come to the defense of their less fortunate brethren, that great fraternity (or is it sorority) of the homosexual. So I take it upon myself to do just this since I have known and talked with dozens of them and have come to realize that their defense, far from being a fabrication, is all too true.

They are driven by an overwhelming compulsive hunger for sex with their own kind, and this force is so powerful that it might be compared with that which causes a stranded traveller in the desert to seek water. No diatribe by the Church, no derision of acceptable society is therefore powerful enough to swerve these unfortunates from their objectives. (Verify this at your favorite psychologist).

They seek out each other in the dimly lighted cocktail lounges, in park rest rooms, in bus terminals; in fact anywhere that a prospect seems at all likely.

The normal male blindly refusing to tolerate his less acceptable brethren turns to scornful names for those thus afflicted and heaps upon them such appellations as "Queer," "Nance," "Pansy" or "Fairy." The homo for his part, not wishing to appear a freak in his own eyes, accepts for himself and his kind only the term of "Gay" since that sounds almost like a Mardi Gras tribute, suggesting the tinkling of cocktail glasses, the bright lights, the good life!

Some of the greatest names in the world of fame were similarly afflicted. When Peter Ilich Tchaikowsky composed "None But the Lonely Heart," was he trying to convey to us that one had to be (like himself) a homo to know the deep devastating loneliness inflicted by life, when those normally created turned their backs on these unfortunates?

We know too today what made Oscar Wilde. This great man of letters, accepted and lionized by Society all too soon was to sprawl alone across a table in a pub, empty save for his single glass of absinthe, because he too had consorted with flunkeys and house-boys, way beneath him in social status but satisfactory, no doubt, as partners in taboo sex performances.

Andre Gide made no pretense about his leanings. After all, the French were never a nation to be sexually squeamish.

And the noble Caesar, stabbed in the back. Were his last words an inquiry as to whether or not (like himself), Brutus was "Gay" when he chokingly gasped out, "Et tu (and you), Brutus?" Had he survived a few minutes longer, he might have added the old Army gag, "Are you 1......2?"

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Can we also believe that the exquisite purity of the "Pieta" came from the