loathing and disgust what was most beautiful and meaningful in life to him.

That fellow lost his life. But society lost more-itost him. And he was a guy who had a lot to give.

There is no good reason why society should not provide round holes for pegs of that kind. This is done in vocations, to the enormous benefit of society as a whole. But where human love-life is concerned, unless every peg fits the same round space it is junked. This results in great social waste.

There is a widespread tendency to think that the only justification for sexual activity is the production of children. This view degrades human sexuality to the level of the stud farm. The heterosexual marital relationship is not considered a sacrament because marriage eventuates in children, but rather because the human love relationship is a microcosmic counterpart of the soul's union with the Divine Spirit. I am quite sure that sexual love may possess just as profound a meaning for the homosexual as for the heterosexual couple. I also believe that Plato, in "Symposium," made a valid case for creative, as distinguished from procreative, love. One does not have to share Plato's contempt for heterosexual love in order to see the realism, the workability of the ideal of creative homosexual love.

Back in the twenties, when "Well of Loneliness" first appeared, the critic, Kenneth Burke, reviewed it for "The Dial." He did not like the book. He found it a long lament which he summed up more or less as follows:

"Because I straddle a horse instead of riding side-saddle and because I like to wear my hair cut short like a boy's I won't be invited to coming out parties."

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a great many things in life more interesting and pleasurable than attending coming-out parties. I think he's right. At the risk of belaboring the point I think many homosexuals tend to sentimentalize the heterosexual way of life, the "wife, home and babies" routine. There is always a tendency, it seems, to compare the ideal married life with homosexual life at its worst.

I suppose that a certain amount of vice is bound to exist in even the best regulated societies. And that goes for heterosexual vice as well Furthermore, we as homosexual. know that even the saints have had to struggle desperately against their own vicious tendencies. Why, then, should we believe that any of us ordinary mortals, regardless of sex' orientation, are free from viciousness?

I recall that Christ once reproached an admirer who called him "good," telling him, in, effect, that only God is "good." I don't think of that as mock-modesty on the part of Jesus, for He was a moral realist.

Let's not exaggerate the virtues of either sex world, and let's not exaggerate our sins, or be crushed when others exaggerate them. Nearly all thinking on the homosexual problem has stressed the invert's difference. Perhaps it's time to realize that there is one enormous similarity between both sex worlds: Each kind of love represents a union of one human being with another; however abortive, however temporary it may be, even the attempt of two human beings to unite is good.

Finally, a concluding remark to those who still prefer to regard the homosexual as a cripple. Take the fem.ous and marvelous Negro dancer, Feg-Leg Bates, as an ideal. That man has been stopping shows all over the world for a quarter century, is still going, and keeps improving all

Burke seemed to imply there are the time.

mattachine REVIEW

PLAY

without a

STAGE

It is not unusual to review plays solely from the book, which in a tremendous sense, restricts the critic. He cannot say that Miss Blank projected her role brilliantly, or that Mr. Doe was quite miserably miscast. Nor can he comment on the staging, the direction or the costuming; he has only the author's virgin product to deal with, the play unplayed.

But with GAME OF FOOLS, it is well that we are able to read what the author has to say before it has been transmuted by production (too often a watering down process) into something quite different. This reviewer was most happy to read this work first rather than to have seen it acted, for GAME OF FOOLS is an outspoken play, such as few staged performances are, or perhaps can be these days. How often we hear that a certain play had far more punch,

This article is actually a review of the play, "Game of Fools." first of a series on the homosexual theme. by James Barr Fugate. The play was issued in a limited edition in book. form by One, Inc.. 232 S. Hill St., Los Angeles, on June 20. Price of the attractive volume is $3.95. Because of the importance of such a new book, the Review herewith presents Lyn Pedersen's review of it as an article, rather than as a departmental feature.

By Lyn Pedersen

more honesty, before the producers toned it down. And for the play produced first and published later, the produced version becomes the only version, for better or worse.

GAME OF FOOLS is the first contempory play in the English language to deal powerfully with the subject of homosexuality without those cardinal sins, Ineptitude, Prejudice and Pussyfooting..

But, one asks, is it now commonplace for Broadway to bravely tackle the "unmentionable" subject? It is true that big commercial treatments of the homosexual problem are becoming more frequent, but to what effect? We find a subject of dreadful realism handled as tragic farce; or worse, the subject of the several plays recently in this category tend not to be of homosexuality PER SE, but rather more studies of false 11