RANSVESTIA

the letter as a means of getting me into court on the magazine and post office box issue. As I said, this was in the era when they were after the gays and they assumed that I (and all of us) were gay. So, one day I went to the Federal Building and up to the office of the judge who had heard the case. I was talking to his secretary when he came in. She told him I would like to speak with him for a few minutes and he said to come in. I went into his office and sat down and he wanted to know what he could do for me. I reminded him of the case and of the sentence he had handed down and then I reminded him of the DA's comments entirely directed at the maga- zine and post office box and barely mentionoing the letter which was the nominal subject of the trial. He recalled that. Then I showed him. the letter from the Solicitor General and told him I felt that the whole matter of the letter which they had had possession of for a whole year was merely a mechanism for getting at the magazine. We discussed a few other issues and finally he said, "have your attorney file a petition for dismissal of probation." I did so and five months after he had given me the sentence I was free of the probation. The post office was defeated in their attempt to prevent Transvestia being published and circulated.

Later that year I was to go to New York and decided to go down to Washington, too. I took a number of testimonial letters from readers about how much the magazine had helped them, a bunch of letters telling how they had been treated by postal inspectors and some scientific material about the subject by Dr. Benjamin and others. I went to the Post Office building. Outside it, I called the former postal attorney and told him what I was about to do. He was not very happy about the idea and made me feel that if I ever went into that building I might not get out again. That was sort of frightening, I thought, but this was the United States-and not the Soviet Union, so I went in and went to the office of the Chief Inspector, Mr. Montegue. I told him what I was doing there and he told me that Mr. Callahan of the mailability section was the one to talk to and called him in. He took me into his office and I brain washed him for an hour and a half about the whole field of TVism and the fact that we weren't gay and that his inspectors had overstepped their bounds on a whole lot of occasions and showed him the letters saying so. He was polite, under- standing and cooperative. After that visit, I heard no more complaints from around the country of inspectors giving TVs a hard time. So I think I was able to change the thinking of the whole post office department and their handling of our kind of people.

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