No Exit

Writer's Note:

A Story by Colleen Stoin

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Perhaps I should have given this story the following title: "No Exit with Apologies to William Tenn," for it was due to one of his weird science fiction stories that this zany piece of imagination was concocted. The story appears as "The Tenants" in a book of his entitled OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS, published by Ballantine Books. My contribution is a hybrid of Tenn's science fiction and the editorials appearing in THE LADDER pertaining to the gay bar problem.

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Tom Porter had recently been assigned to patrol a new beat along the waterfront of New Boston, a West Coast city of some five hundred thousand inhabitants whose outward morals paralleled those of a puritanical farming community one-fourth the size.

Side,

Porter's beat covered the waterfront of the West in addition to the outer reaches of Skid Row, which comprised First, Second, and Third Streets. His beat was bounded on the north by College Avenue and on the south by Ironside Boulevard. Assisting Porter on his beat wero two other members of the police force. In addition,

various plainclothes members of the city's vice squad also patrolled the area, since dope traffic, prostitution, and all of the other vices flourished most abundantly there.

Just before Porter began his new assignment, his chief had held a briefing session with him in his office. "I see, Porter, that you've been working the Uptown section for the last three years. I guess I don't have to tell you that this new beat won't be any Riverdale Heights residential neighborhood. Up there, your work was pretty routine, mostly checking on a few prowlers and

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