In his column, Coates quoted the father:

"It's a pretty awful thing," the young father told me. "When. they come to take my boy, that's the first I heard anything was wrong."

"I figured they was the law. And if they said they had to take him, why, we had to let them. They told me. it would all be cleared up right away."

"What does the boy say when you go to visit him?" I asked. "Does he know why he's being held?"

The mother shook her head.

"He doesn't say much," she replied. "He cries some when we get ready to leave:

"He thinks they're, keeping him there because he played doctor with a neighbor girl,'

The probation officer, Coates wrote, originally claimed he was recommending the child be kept in custody because there were threats against his life. Here again is a portion of the column in reprint form:

But I talked to the people in the mining camp. There have been no threats. Rather, the father's co-workers took up a collection to help him'pay expenses in trying to get the youngster free.

And, of course, if there had been a threat against the child's life, it would make considerably more sense to arrest the adult who made the threat.

I spoke to the boy's schoolteacher. "He's just a normal, average kid," she told me. "A little unruly. But I'd worry about a boy who wasn't. And the parents have always been very co-operative with me."

I talked to others in the camp who spoke bitterly about the men who had made the complaint against the child. "It all started about a year and a half ago," someone told me, "when the kid's family got in an argument with that other. family over the kid riding his bike on their lawn."

Tomorrow, this fantastic case will be given a hearing. It seems to me impossible that the child will not be released. And that will be the end of the story.

But for the 7-year-old "sex suspect," it will be just the beginning.

He'll have the rest of his life to try to cope with the deep feelings of guilt instilled in him by a brand of justice with all the intelligence of witch-burning.

On January 4, newspapers headlined the hearing with ""Sex” Offender, 7, Learns Fate foday." Superior Judge Russell L Waite, a father himself, was to hear the case. The child was released to his parents--with no provision for probation department supervision. A further hearing was REVIEW

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scheduled for April 15.

The sheriff's juvenile division had instituted proceedings to make the boy a ward of the court. Their petition, according to newspapers, charged that his act of putting his hand under the dress of a five-year-old girl indicated he was in danger of leading an idle, dissolute, lewd or immoral life"!

At a recess, however, Judge Waite said, "Whenever I have one of these youngsters before me, I try to look at him as if he were one of my own. There have been times when one of my own children could possibly have been in my court.. I'll base my decision on the feeling I've gained in my own life as father."

In the Next Issue.....

James Barr returns to these pages again in the third (May-June) issue

of MATTACHINE REVIEW, after telling how he faced friends in his home town in the first issue. His second feature will bring the U. S. Navy's "DISCHARGE UNDER HONORABLE CONDITIONS" into focus.

**Another look at the legal picture will be presented under Mackinnoth Fingal's by-line He is author of the criticism of a review of the sex laws in North Carolina in this issue. His next' is called, "The Coming Model Penal Model # Code."

事

R. S. Rood, M.D., superintendent and medical director of Atascadero State Hospital in California (an institution where-psychopathic sex offenders are committed) has written about his work in that field, with emphasis upon theraphy applied to rehabilitate patients there.

"The transvestist is one who at least has the courage to signal, if with mistaken colors, his dilemma," writes a prominent author who is authority on the psychology of costume in an article that will appear in the next issue. It is entitled, "The ·Problem of Appearance"

Other articles will deal with religious and mental health aspects of the problem of the homophile. In addition, more information about the Mattachine Society and its program will appear, together with many inter. + esting and lively departmental features. THE ISSUE WILL APPEAR AFTER MAY 15DON'T MISS ITI