MATTACHINE EIGHTH ANNUAL CONFERENCE

FOR WANT OF A CHANCE...

One of the most pressing domestic problems today is employment. And among those experiencing the most pressing squeeze in the vice are sex offenders, veterans with less than honorable discharges, and others just released from correctional institutions.

Mattachine Society's forthcoming Eighth Annual Conference at San Francisco on Sept. 2 (Saturday) will bring this problem into a sharper focus, with commentary and suggestions from a number of experts. And, it is hoped, with reports of significant accomplishments from some agencies responsible for helping these people who are handicapped jobwise.

But a lot needs to be done in examining and defining the problem, with a view to pinpointing exactly those pressures, policies, attitudes and resistances which make it so difficult for the unemployed sex variant or offender to be accepted on a job, and to hold it once it may be revealed that the individual has a "police record" background.

So many questionnaires and investigations reveal information which is so often gathered and presented so as to make the person unacceptable on all but the most menial tasks. A prevailing attitude among so many employers is that anyone who has had a scrape with the law in civilian life or who has been discovered to have homosexual tendencies while in the armed forces is a fiend, a second class citizen, and/or certainly no one to be employed. Can we afford this attitude which results in such a waste of manpower? Can we cast aside this body of creative talent, technical skills and administrative capacities on the basis of these old notions? And can we continue to be guilty of giving only the most meager lip service to the humanitarian concept of rehabilitation for these people?

Telling an offender, or these veterans who are stigmatized with any of a number of "bad" discharges to "go get a job and straighten yourself out" is one thing, and so easy for various authorities to pronounce. But his getting a bare subsistence kind of job is quite another. Too often the despair, discouragement, rejection and the poverty itself combine to thrust these many deserving people right back into the web of law, courts, correction and so on all over again.

We say these people deserve a chance-but how can they get it? That's what Mattachine hopes to explore at its annual meeting this year. Be there and offer your ideas, won't you?

mattachine REVIEW

LETS GO SLOW ON FREE-WHEELING LEGISLATION

Congressman John E. Moss of California (3rd. Dist., Sacramento Valley) says go slow on current anti-pornography bills now up for consideration as they would specifically apply to the District of Columbia, the area for which Congress acts virtually as a city board of supervisors.

As reported by Edward H. Dickson, Washington correspondent for McClatchy newspapers of California (the "Bees" of Sacramento, Modesto and Fresno), Mr. Moss is described as stating his House colleagues were erratic as lefthanded shortstops when they approved legislation aimed at tightening the law against "pornographic" literature for the District.

Not that Moss favors the publication of such literary efforts-he distinctly does not but he claims the present law is sufficient and the proposed new one is vague and ambiguous if not outright unconstitutional.

The proposed measure would prohibit, among other things, the publication of any printed matter devoted mainly to "scandals, lechery, intrigues between men and women, and immoral conduct of persons."

The objective may be fine and dandy, the Congressman states, but the fine print in the bill for one thing does not spell out what "scandal” is. Would it, he asks, be a scandal if a newspaper printed an expose of the padding of expense accounts by federal employees or corruption in the police department?

As to "intrigues between men and women," he inquires whether this would prohibit the publication of news about the Parent-Teacher Association, of the meetings of various women's bridge clubs. He goes on to imply that it might be illegal to distribute the works of William Shakespeare because there was plenty of intrigue involving fellows like Hamlet and Macbeth.

"Basic weakness of the legislation," Mr. Moss states, "is that the law could be interpreted according to the whims of the arresting police officers and the prosecuting attorneys, some of whom are not distinguished as literary critics."

Mr. Moss also views with alarm the broad seizure powers the bill provides for. He maintains that if a newspaper printed a large number of articles on sex crimes its presses could be seized, as could the operation of a magazine which printed a condensation of the famous reports of Dr. Kinsey and his staff on sex behavior. The congressman also claims that an automobile owner delivering one of the more sensational New York tabloid newspapers to a friend could go to jail and his car could be confiscated under provisions of the bill, if the paper contained headlines and news about "scandals, intrigues, lechery," etc., as described in the proposed legislation. It could be pointed out that few tabloid newspapers have none of the material which the bill would define as illegal.