I approach all my writing with a meticulous compulsi on to get truth and only truth into the book. For this rea son, I have been from one end of Greenwich Village to the other, getting to know more about gay life first hand than most old timers would like to unearth. And invariably, I became very invol-

ved with my subject -20

you can gee.

Although

now I may be considered as a Beat Goro ration writer (a straight novel that I

am

now completing is in this category), I abhor

the tag and would prefor to bo called one of the optimists in the crowd

Billio's and my hobbies are reading Sappho in an

cient Greek and Catullus in Latin, and going to colle go at night.

Simultaneously with the second novel for Beacon, I am at work on a major novel which has had some offers from minor publishers but is still in the process of settling upon a suitable one. This novel deals mainly with a big Joke that a chain of repressi ons plays on four latent homosexuals. It is written in a modern style close to Gertrude Stein's. ODD GIRL was also written that way, but Beacon's editorial department blus-pencilled all of that as not belonging in a sex novel. ODD GIRL is not strictly a sex novel, however. It took four years to write and it was a serious attempt on my part to communicate a way of life and thought as concretely as possible to a world that denies the stability and logic of that way of life.

In many ways, ODD GIRL has failed, and yet in a very poculiar manner. To those repressed friends and to the homosexual haters whom I was able to que sti on, ODD GIRL has only served to discourage their hopes of entering gay life. And yet to homosexuals whose comments I havo he ard, ODD GIRL has tended to give a word of hope and oncouragement that not all of gay life is shallow. I won-

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