casual, promiscuous ones. And not only do they encourage people to face up to their own position and accept themselves honestly; they also help them to establish franker and more sincere and honest relationships with their families, with their employers, even, and with the community around them. Their whole aim is not to separate homosexuals off from society and bring them together in a little cliquish group, but to integrate them with the community. In other words, they do not encourage them to live the whole of their social lives within the homosexual group; they rather try to provide an atmosphere of background relaxation which will enable their members not only to be friendly amongst themselves, but to be more sociable with other people and to mix in heterosexual society. This, I think, is a good thing-this aim at personal integration into the community, rather than at separating the homosexual's life as a homosexual from the rest of his life. If the Dutch can do it, why is it so impossible in this country? Even if it cannot yet be done in an organised way, because of the law, why is it impossible for people to attempt it individually, by bringing more of this sort of spirit into their own lives and into the lives of others?

I ask this because I do feel that the sort of attitudes and behaviour that one finds among numbers of English homosexuals are not particularly healthy, or particularly helpful to other people. At the Albany Trust we do come up against some hard cases, and one cannot help seeing what a large part human selfishness plays in creating a lot of needless unhappiness. The callousness with which so many people treat others, when they ought to be only ' too aware from their own experience of life how vulnerable other people can be, is quite lamentable. Over the past month, for instance, I have seen about twenty people whose basic trouble was the same in every case: they were all lonely. And several of them had reached the pitch of depression needed to drive them into our office to talk about it because somebody else had let them down.

I should like to think that most of the Albany Trust's active supporters are not in the habit of letting people down, and that they would even make a point of seeking out--instead of running away from-the difficult person who presents a bit of a problem, and trying to repair some of the damage. I do think that a lot of the personal problems which homosexual people have in their lives, and the dangerously nervous states which many of them get into, are caused by the legal and social attitudes of our society, because these cause a "splitting off" of the sexual part of a homosexual's nature, and of his sex life, from all the rest of it-his working life and his family life-so that everything becomes unnecessarily difficult and confused for him. In these circumstances, it is scarcely surprising that some homosexuals develop rather fragmented personalities, and become incapable of sustaining a really deep, mature relationship with anyone.

Now, you may fairly ask me, "What are you doing about it at the Albany Trust?" So for the rest of my talk, I want to give you a

mattachine REVIEW

brief outline of what we are doing, and what we hope to do in the future if we have the resources. I am not going to say a great deal about law reform tonight, because we have had two talks on this and it has been fairly exhaustively discussed, but the Homosexual Law Reform Society is continuing as much active publicity as it can afford. Executive Committee members are giving various talks, there are quite a lot of articles being written, and altogether we are campaigning as hard as we can. Recently I have taken part in two university debates, which I won respectively by 147 votes to 1, and by 63 votes to 3. We are going ahead with selective local advertising in various large towns, in the hope that this will stimulate support in these particular areas. When the time seems suitablewhich probably will not be until after the next General Electionwe shall of course promote a Bill or have the subject raised again in the House of Commons.

Í believe that our main achievement in the five years that we have existed is to make it possible to discuss this subject openly at political meetings, university union debates, rotary clubs, religious groups and sometimes even Mothers' Unions. Until about five years ago, homosexuality was totally unmentionable, and it is a very good thing that it is now an accepted topic for the average discussion group's winter programme, so that over this winter we have been getting a request for about two talks a month.

The Albany Trust is pursuing three main aims-those of education, research and social help. In the field of education, we publish, besides Man and Society, various pamphlets and literature aimed at parents, teachers, magistrates, doctors and other people who have influence or authority, and who should know about this problem, with the aim of making them more acquainted with the facts (as distinct from the myths) about homosexuality. We have just cooperated with the National Council for Civil Liberties in producing a booklet called Arrest, which is a guide to the citizen's rights if he is taken into custody by the police.

As regards research, we have two projects in blueprint, and are only waiting for the necessary funds in order to get them started. Fund raising is a long and difficult business, and one has to be patient, however unwillingly. The first of these research projects is for a study of court cases during a specified period in the London area, and also in a provincial centre. The second proposed research would attempt to find out what public opinion about homosexuality is, as distinct from what we are told it is. We are always being told, by Home Secretaries and Members of Parliament and other knowledgeable persons, that there is a terrific weight of opposition to this reform. Yet whenever we go around speaking, we always win debates by huge majorities: we always find everybody we talk to agrees with us once we have put the case for reform to them, and they are often quite indignant that the law has not been changed long ago. Perhaps we would find, through some research, that most