more fun-loving atmosphere than that of the sometimes lugubrious older organizations. However, all the clubs we saw in Europe evidenced a fun-loving atmosphere. In general, what we saw of the homophile organizations amounted simply to membership bars. Those members I managed to talk to seemed unaware of any educational, reform or social service activities by these groups. I did see copies at the Arcadie club of serious booklets by Daniel Guerin and Marc Daniel on sale, and in Copenhagen, where I might have had considerable conversation with the Directors of the Forbundet, I had laryngitis.
We received our warmest welcome from the Danish Forbundet. Jacob, Eric and Einar, who spoke excellent English, met us at the plane, provided a banquet for us at the Restaurant Lilli Rosenburg, where the club meets on Fridays, and also on Sunday afternoons in winter, and a smaller house party a couple nights later. They reported that they used to have an office, and that they'd recently gotten the legal age limit, in sex cases involving money, lowered from 21 to 18-not as an approval of prostitution, but as protection against the vagaries of judges and juries.
I've long been fond of the sensuous and versatile Swiss artist, Hans Erni, (best known here for his designs for UNESCO cards and for Rand-McNally ads) and wanted to buy some of his prints. I found them, only after the shops displaying them had closed our last day in Zurich. In Copenhagen, I purchased a fine wall-sized print of Picasso's GUERNICA, and a number of Danish homophile magazines which led to real difficulties with the British customs dept. Despite the recent liberalization of American newsstands, I was unprepared for the frank, but idealized male body art and sexology on continental stands, or the bald smut (the prurient sort that's much smoke and little fire) in England.
Our six cities differed strikingly. All were more extensive than I'd imagined. Zurich, Copenhagen and Paris each appeared as beautiful and architecturally homogenous. You looked down streets along a solid, impressive facade. New architecture, daring enough, blended with the old. Munich, Amsterdam and London, generally more spectacular, seemed more mixed, offering offering sharp contrasts. Individual buildings surpassed those in the other three cities, but the whole effect was chopped up, like Los Angeles, more open, less harmonious. And the people as well seemed best looking in the first three cities, but the standouts in the other three were really something to behold! (But it was a short trip, and these judgments aren't to be taken too seriously.)
London and Copenhagen seemed to have the most extensive and most beautiful downtown parks. Howard and I found one lovely park near the fine hotel in Copenhagen that was filled with excellent copies of nearly every famous nude male statue in Europe, and another park in Amsterdam, appeared filled with the most monstrously ugly collection of very recent modern sculpture I'd ever seen, the prize being a bronze, heavy chair, raised on a high pedestal, that looked rather like the Lincoln memorial, without Lincoln.
Amsterdam had also the largest redlight district I'd ever seen, all looking rather pretty, like a stage set for Irma La Douce. The girls, pert and attractive, unlike their London counterparts, occupied every window and doorway for blocks. Generally, we saw little remaining war damage, but many Munich streets were still lined with bombed-out buildings, often as memorials. The people in Munich seemed badly dressed, though fancy-dress parades on their handsome boulevards was quite the custom. A matter of taste, not economics, as everyone seemed to be wearing someone
else's
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