POETIC JUSTICE

Toronto's JUSTICE WEEKLY for 3/5 reports that former S.F. Policeman Waldo Reesink was recently and permanently turned down for a City of San Francisco retirement pension. He is said to have quit the police force in 1960 after pleading guilty and serving nine months in county jail for taking "bribes" from the owner of a bar frequented by homosexuals. A practical cop would have saved up enough from his "bribe" money to set up his own pension trust fund. Anyway, ONE has always suspected that most such "bribes" by gay-bar owners are in reality shake-downs by cops themselves, and thus we are scarcely sympathetic to the plight of this excop (and a sergeant, too!) Any reader want to take up a collection?

As for the City of S.F.'s refusal to grant the pension, maybe the million-dollar damage suit against it by agencies and persons sympathetic to the homophile is having a sobering influence upon their attitudes toward police abuses in this area. High time the worm turned!

APPROVED PUBLIC BEHAVIOR FOR HOMOS?

Same JUSTICE WEEKLY narrates

a tawdry tale of three 35-yr.-old) men observed at 2:00 A.M. last September (by plainclothesmen) in a compromising position among some trees in Sir Winston Churchill Park. They pled guilty only to "fondling each other's exposed private parts," but the officers testified that they were all "more or less in a state of undress from the pants down," and that, while standing in line one behind the other, they were rather more in-

timately engaged. The three men were named (without specifying who was Lucky Pierre) and described as a teacher, a court reporter (both of whom should have known better) and an "immigrant." The sentence for each, $100 or 30 days. Point is, in view of our demands for sexual liberty in private, precisely what is privacy?

UNCLE WILLIE'S MISTAKE

Robin Maugham has recently written revealingly of his uncle, the late William Somerset Maugham, renowned author ("The Razor's Edge, etc. etc.), and of the latter's long-time romance with Gerald Haxton, in a clipping recently received from a correspondent in England. W.S.M. is said, once, to have disparaged homosexuals' talents as being, while undeniably ornamental, nevertheless no more than that-superficial, non-creative, and without depth or insight into life. Now it appears that he may be posthumously tarring himself with his own brush, according to his quoted confession.

Nephew Robin describes a scene with "Uncle Willie" at the latter's villa in France, a few years before his death. He tells of W.S.M. remarking, in sudden tears, I've been such a fool, and the awful thing is that if I had my life all over again I'd probably make the same mistakes." "What mistakes?" Robin asked. "My greatest was this tried to persuade myself that I was three-quarters normal, and that only a quarter of me was queer; whereas really it was the other way around." For this admission alone, ONE salutes this

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