The Twilight People Rebel

With strident battle cries of "Gay Pride" and "Gay Power," the New Homosexual is emerging on the American scene.

No longer will these erst while disinherited walk with "the wounded look"; no more will they accept a "we live in shadows" routine. According to these people who have long been forced to lead double lives, who have been considered sick or sinful or criminal, today there is a Homosexual Renaissance. Up to now the socalled twilight people have been not only one of the nation's largest minorities but also one of the most silent.

This era of silence, apparently, is over. Donn Teal's book The Gay Militants Stein and Day, $7.95) is a chronicle of this revolution which began in Greenwich Village, the world's largest "gay ghetto."

TEAL'S STUDY is firstrate research and journalism, a combination of collected articles from the gay press unified by sharp, perceptive continuity. He ranges from coast to coast examining various gay "zaps" (picketings, sit-ins, TV disruptions) against the estab-

By Abe C. Ravitz

lishment. He shows the accumulation of political power in the hands of the homosexuals, and he illustrates some of the social alliances drawn between other contemporary minority revolutemporary minority revolutions and the gay rebellion.

Teal also dramatizes some of the antagonisms erupting within some of these movements: while Huey Newton, for example, wrote that homosexuals "might be the most oppressed people in the society," Eldridge Cleaver continually treats the gay with derision and contempt, never seeking their support.

Why all the sudden commotion? It has been long overdue. Teal and the gay press graphically describe how homosexuals in America have been forced to exist in a climate of brutal fear: fear of losing their jobs (once discovered, Out); fear for their personal safety (homosexuals are fair game for street gangs who are tacitly encouraged by the prejudice and hostility directed against gays by society); fear of rejection by friends and family (the shame of it); and fear of being arrested (especially in a common case of entrap-

ual is tired of running ment). The New Homosexscared. He wants to assume first-class citizenship, with a right to his own feelings.

Teal's book is a solid, substantial and scholarly account of this current phenomenon. His study is pertinent and interesting both to the social historian and to the general reader.

ALSO IN THE vanguard of this new awareness is Something You Do in the Dark (Putnam, $6.95), a novel by Daniel Curzon, who captures in fiction some of the nightmare world in which the American homosexual lives. Pre-publication readers affiliated with the gay press have touted this book for its honesty and beauty as a "true to life beauty as a "true to life portrait of a gutsy gay male." All the grievances enumerated in Teal's history, all the embarrassments and agonies inflicted on the gay, and all the animosities and aggressions directed against homosexuals ultimately find their way into the life of Cole Ruffner, Curzon's angry hero.

He is entrapped, abused, convicted of practicing homosexuality and sent to

Donn Teal

prison. Embittered and outraged, Ruffner plans to fight back, to re-establish his personal value and identity and not to allow society to condemn him. His journey, of course, takes him into the straight world, back into the lives of his mother and father; into the life of the girl who loves him. Cole, furthermore, refuses to sup-

press or deny the "other" world, of gay bars, public parks, turkish baths and various acknowledged spots of gay assignation.

The life is hell. The life is violent. And Curzon's novel is no social reformer's simstanding. It is a toughminds ple cry for pity and undered attack on the system, and Cole Ruffner's courage soars far beyond the senti mental.