Letters

UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES DO THE EDITORS FORWARD LETTERS FROM READERS TO OTHER PERSONS NOR DO THEY ANSWER CORRESPONDENCE MAKING SUCH REQUESTS.

vance. I don't want anyone else to have to defend me against such pious treacle. Dale Jennings,

Dear ONE:

Editor, ONE, 1953-'54 Los Angeles, California

I've been reading ONE for three years and have attended several Mattachine meetings here. It seems from many letters in your columns that many gay people are prejudiced against the Swish. Well, I am one and I want to live.

To that group of old aunties who don't practice what they preach a swish is a maladjusted homo displaying hostility. The gay world must realize that there are variants within the sex variant group. I'd rather be an honest, loud-spoken swish than a sugar-coated phoney.

Mr. D.

Greenwich Village, New York

BRICKBATS To ONE:

Had Bob Hull known the line his eulogy (December, 1962) would take in this Magazine, it's quite certain he'd have taken the editorial staff AND Harry Hay right along with him when he committed suicide.

In many ways, Bob was one of the most direct thinkers among the Holy Five who gathered in the basement of my home to conspire the sophomorically-named Mattachine into existence. For this reason, he would have deplored the indirection of that funeral valentine, its tasteless melodrama ("Dead By His Own Hand''), and, above all, the casual way in which it robbed his death of any point it might have had.

He'd have smiled at Harry quoting one of his least favored authors in that bilge-filled finale and at the grammatical errors in the paragraph above. But he would not have been amused at the misleading corn of Hay's, "Oh, Bobby, how did we fail you!" The social point of Bob's death should be obvious. He died because the pressures on homosexuals today in the United States are often intolerable. Because of them, some of us drink, some withdraw, some become giddy or write, and some suicide.

It is astonishing that both Hay and the editorial staff should have missed the very point that gives this pamphlet its reason for existence. How blandly you bleed his pathetic act of all significance and allow that Jesse Crawford of the typewriter to imply that Bob was just too neurotic in his personal life to "take it' like we strong ones do.

I did not like Bob. I did admire him, and I do resent this clearly patronizing eulogy. If this quasi-pedant intends doing eulogies on all of the Holy Five, please print them in ad-

one

Dear ONE:

Here is my subscription again, even though ONE appears to represent only the Southern California homosexual type. As I have written. more than once (in article, story or letter you did not publish) the gay-bar individual is a very small minority of the quiet living individuals with homosexual preferences. ONE represents ONE, just as surely as D. W. Cory represents the articulate, ivory towerish groups.

The worst reportorial retching ONE printed in 1962 was Tangents effusion in June on the couple caught in a public toilet. This was too Winchell-bent, peep-hole business trying to justify public rooms being used for the most intimate pleasure. The civil rights aspect was entirely overwhelmed by presenting such unfortunate characters, and it could only gladden ONE's critics with its sick-sick approach.

Often ONE gets off the track of presenting homosexuality's naturalness, probably forgetting the majority of your subscribers are not heterosexual in any way.

EDITOR'S NOTE:

Wilfran Nichols Boston, Massachusetts

Readers, including Mr. Nichols, whose complaint was written in December, 1962, are referred to Marcel Martin's Editorial (September, 1962) which contained the following passage: "ONE will continue to report and to consider as victories for the homophile movement such decisions as the two under consideration but, no more than the courts, or society in general, does ONE condone the type of behavior which brought these cases before the courts in the first place."