sen's SEX HISTORIES OF AMERICAN COLLEGE LEN and PORNO GRAPHY AND THE LAW; and of course the Kinsey Reports. Probably the roams of material written in passionate defense of the homophile have done less to further the cause of tolerance than Kinsey's single, detqohed statement that 37 per cent of the men and 19 per cent of the women whom ho interviewed admitted having had overt homosexual relationships.

For people who have no special reason to be interested in the subject, however, or who think they have none, fiction is the entering wedge. We buy stories to be entertained; we learn from them without meaning to.

In view of all the problems that face a writer on offbeat subjects, we should be glad that some works on these topics do get into print and that they do reach people. I've been following the Ann Aldrich controversy in THE LADDER with a great deal of interest. There are times when I feel that Miss Aldri oh does a beautiful, sensitive job and other times when I feel that anyone who has Miss Aldrich for a friend doesn't really need enemies; but I do disagree with Jeannette Foster when she says in the August issue, referring to letters reprinted in the Aldrich books, "Miss or Mrs. Aldrich wrote every word of them or edited with such vigor that they are all unmistakeably from one pon." They may have been edited, but I have similar letters from a secretary in a Canadian university, from a WAC, from teen-age girls. So if the books did nothing but give aid and comfort to a few scattered people and remind them that they're not alone, they would be worth writing.

But they do a great deal more. They present to the general reader a subject about which he cannot learn in any other way. Unfavorable or even distorted as some books are, they usually come a little closer to the truth than the average person's understanding of what we may call the emotional minorities. Most people are in the same category with a former fellow-worker of mine who read one of my books (with horror and fascination) and asked me, "Where did you hear about people like that? I've heard about them, but I've never seen one Or the good, kind neighbor who couldn't understand why her nephew and his apartment mate didn't seem interested in going out with