could not feel sympathy for every unhappy lad who has inherited from some ancestors a tendency to feminine interests and feminine ways of life. Cer tainly, he is not culpable 'in any way; he is not responsible

for what happened to him before he was born. Let us all remember that, but for the grace of God, this disaster could have happened to any one of us. It was just an accident of genetics or of glandular development.

As I was writing this, I stopped to talk for nearly two hours with a fine young college man who is terribly distressed because he has found that he is to some extent mixed-up in his sex. He can go with girls; he can enjoy their company; and he hopes some day to marry; but he knows this is dangerous for him because he feels such great attraction for an occa,sional man whom he meets.

Such a man is very companlonable to him because he can understand my patient's problems and unhappinesses, and his feelings of great loneliness in the world. But, realizing that such close friendships with men are extremely dangerous for him, my patient is fighting hard to keep away from them. Where Can He Get Help? As he says, he needs help

in this constant psychologic battle, and he asks me where he can find it. He already has tried several psychiatrists but has not gotten help from them. Some of the wisest of these men told him frankly and honestly that they doubted if they or any one else could change his psychic make-up, any more than they could change the psychic make-up of a normally heterosexual man who adores his wife. This is my strong. impression about the subject, and I have studied it for years among both books and patients.

I fear he will have to keep making the fight largely by himself. I would urge him to avoid doing anything that would cause him to be blackmailed or throwr. into jail. I would urge him never to marry, simply to get a home or a better "front." It is a miserable trick to play on some poor girl to marry her without the ability to love her properly. have talked to many women who got caught in such an unhappy marriage, and hence I know whereof I speak.

(Released by the Register and Tribune Syndicate, 1959)

Categories (From the London Daily Telegraph)

HE "problem of homosexube homosexuals, on one ground or ality," incessantly discussed another, adequate or inadequate, in the Press, on radio and must have increased enormously television, and soon in Parliament, during the past year or so. Perhaps that was the whole idea anyhow. is becoming as big a bore as the problems of smoke abatement and senile delinquency.

Whatever else it has achieved, this relentless nagging must have had one important effect. Until recently there were large parts of this country where homosexuality was hardly known, for the simple reason that most people had never even heard of it.

This is so no longer. Suggestion is a powerful thing. The number of men who now believe themselves to

It is all part of a wider process by which people are no longer allowed to be people, but have to be forced into some abstract category or other, as homosexuals, teenagers, neurotics, housewives, consumers and so on.

It is all extremely sinister. Once people are sorted into categories and told exactly who and what they are, it becomes much easier to sell them things, to mould their opinions and finally to run their lives for them. altogether.

mattachine REVIEW

"on re-reading

gay books..."

BY DICK TYNER

I have been re-reading some of the classics of homophile literature. For the most part they were better reading this time. It is true I found myself skipping the more purple effusions, philosophical maunderings, and precocious speculations; but I do. that while reading the more standard classics. (I became quite impatient reading Green Mansions for the fourth or fifth time.)

Classic is sometimes used to denote the opposite of romantic. In this sense, I have used it inappropriately: most homophile fiction is certainly romantic; that is, it is characterized by "liberalism in form and subject matter, emphasis on feeling and originality, the use of imaginative suggestion, and sympathetic interest in primitive nature, medievalism, and the mystical." Too often romantic applies in a derogatory sense, "with implications of unrestrained sensuousness, vague imagery, lack of logical precision, escape from the realities of life." (These quotations are from the New Twentieth Century Dictionary.) The books I have been reading, however, are the BEST of their kind. They are classics because they are freer of the less pleasant aspects of the romantic. They are not the only good books in the field but they should be remembered for comparison with anything else we read. I wonder what the reaction was of homophile readers to The Picture of Dorian Gray at the time it was published. Literary London pretended to be scandalized. Some biographers surmise that Wilde had not yet become aware of his homosexual tendencies. This seems unlikely though certainly we read more into the story now than could Wilde's contem poraries. At any rate, the painter, Hallward, is unmistakably homosexual and Lord Henry may be Wilde himself as he was later reputed to be; today Dorian would be called "trade" (an equivocal term, to say the least.)