MATTACHINE SALUTES A. C. L. U. (Continued from page 4) manner and stated that he was able to identify most of the 88 who were arrested and had seen them engage in indecent dancing. His testimony was backed up by Inspectors Pomeroy, Perrara, and Sgt. Moran of his department. All of the law enforcement officers testified that they had been at this bar; known as "Hazel's", on several prior occasions and had observed males dancing with males and had made no previous attempts to make any arrests. They also testified they had been at the bar on Sundays and had observed dancing but had made no attempt to stop it, in spite of a county ordinance prohibiting dancing on Sundays in public places.

Conflict In Testimony

The Sheriff and his deputies also stated that they had seen each of the three defendants at the bar on several previous occasions. One of the defendants, Fred W. Aykens, however, testified that he had been out of the state for eight months and had only returned the night before the bar was raided. He, together with Randolph Wallace, were convicted by the jury, although both emphatically denied that they had done anything other than have two drinks at the bar. The only defendant who admitted he was dancing was Harland Martinez, who was acquitted. He stated that He and a group of friends had done some jitterbugging steps and were "fooling around."

Validity of Laws Challenged

Speiser challenged the constitutionality of both laws under which the men were charged, and Deputy District Attorney Rowson agreed with him that there was a serious question of the constitutionality of the charge of outraging public decency and, prior to trial, moved that that charge be dropped. The motion was granted.

Sentericing was set at a date too late to be reported in the NEWS. An appeal will be taken raising the questions of the denial of due process involved in the police raid, the ignoring of the statutory requirement for a speedy trial, and the constitutionality of the vagrancy law under which tha man were convicted.

mattachine REVIEW

BOOKS

"AGAINST THE LAW" STIRS FUROR AMONG GUARDIANS OF BRITISH MORALITY

by John Bowen

AGAINST THE LAW, by Peter Wildeblood. We idenfeld & Nicholson, London, 1956. Autobiography of a principal in the Montagu trials in England. The following comment upon the book was printed in Der Kreis, Zurich, February issue, and taken from Truth, magazine of London. Reprint here is exactly as it appeared in Der Kreis, which accounts for continental punc tuation and spelling.

Late last year Peter Wildeblood's book Against the Law was published by Messrs Weidenfeld and Nicholson; it was reviewed in «Truth» by Ludovic Kennedy. Mr. Wildeblood, one of the defendants in the «Montagu Case», had been sentenced to eighteen months' imprisonment for a homosexual offence, and his book is an account of the events leading up to the trial, and of his experiences in prison. In it he propounds three theses; that homosexual acts committed in private between consenting adults ought not to be considered criminal, that in any case prison is an environment that encourages homosexuality and not cures it, and that, in Wormwood Scrubbs in particular, living conditions are so squalid that, whatever the deterrent effect of prison may be to most criminals, its rehabilitating effects do not exist, and that in this respect English prisons compare unfavourably with the prisons of the USA, the USSR and many continental countries.

Against the Law is written seriously and without self-pity. It has been favourably reviewed in Truth, The Spectator, the New Statesman and Nation, The Observer (in which Eward Crankshaw has listed it as one of his «books of the year»), the Manchester Guardian, the Daily Telegraph and The Listener. The News Chronicle carried a leader on it; the Daily Express and Empire News quoted from it in their news columns. It has appeared at a time when the Church Council, the BMA and a Royal Commission (before which Wildeblood himself has given evidence) have all been concerned with the position of the homosexual in our society, but all its topicality and its serious sponsorship have been unable to keep it from being considered, in certain quarters of respectable opinion, as a «dirty book to be sold under the counter and kept from the shelves of libraries.

An indication of this is the fact that so far Against the Law has had a much higher sale proportionately in London than in the provinces; the