AN exclusive formal ball will mark Halloween in San Francisco this week.
In couturier gowns and elaborately confected masquerades, the couples
will whisk around the floor until 2 a.m., while judges award prizes for
the best costumes and the participants elect an “Empress.” By then the
swirling belles will sound more and more deep-voiced, and in the early
morning hours dark stubble will sprout irrepressibly through their
Pan-Cake Make-Up. The celebrators are all homosexuals, and each year
since 1962 the crowd at the annual “Beaux Arts Ball” has grown larger.
Halloween is traditionally boys’ night out, and similar events will
take place in Los Angeles, New York, Houston and St. Louis. Though they still seem fairly bizarre to most Americans, homosexuals
have never been so visible, vocal or closely scrutinized by research.
They throw public parties, frequent exclusively “gay” bars , and figure sympathetically as the subjects of books,
plays and films. Encouraged by the national climate of openness about
sex of all kinds and the spirit of protest, male and female inverts
have been organizing to claim civil rights for themselves as an
aggrieved minority. POLITICAL PRESSURE Their new militancy makes other citizens edgy, and it can be shrill.
Hurling rocks and bottles and wielding a parking meter that had been
wrenched out of the sidewalk, homosexuals rioted last summer in New
York’s Greenwich Village after police closed one of the city’s 50
all-gay bars and clubs on an alleged liquor-law violation. Pressure
from militant self-styled “homophiles” has forced political candidates’
views about homosexuality into recent election campaigns in New York,
San Francisco and Los Angeles. Homosexuals have picketed businesses,
the White House and the Pentagon, demanding an end to job
discrimination and the right to serve in the Army without a
dishonorable discharge if their background is discovered. Some 50 homophile organizations have announced their existence in cities
across the country and on at least eight campuses. Best known are the
Mattachine societies , and the Daughters of Bilitis
