The Petal paper. [volume] (Petal, Miss.) 1953-19??, 1957-01-03
Tea And Sympathy

II took courage and wisdom to put Broadway play,
with homosexua theme, on the screen for the mass
audience
But OF course neither the play the picture came
near the real problem In fact the Hollywood ending"
with Its inevitable goods and bads hardly be cal
lea contribution to mature and enlightened ap
proach to matter which every single COM
mun1ty in the length and breadth of our country
The problem is NOT the boy who is unusty or
should say enormously labeled homosexual This is
unjust and unpleasant, but it million miles from
nowhere The problem is the boy who is homosexual
and what to do about him. and for his continued creativ
ty and what to do about attitudes laws remedies
if any, and what to do in the of human relations
That is the problem The motion picture of course en-
pnaslzes the fact that this boy got what NOT CON-
ING TO HIM; he had been unusy accused The implica
ton being that if he had not been unustly accused he
may have indeed deserved the distress and the agony
which drove him to the brink of suicide On that basis
TEA AND SYMPATHY adds nothing to either "1natur-
ty more enlightened and uniform legal approach
remedy" if any,
The word SISSY" had entirely different meaning
when was boy on the lower East Side of New York
1t carried implication of h6mosexuality at ALL Of
course this sexual disturbance old mankind but
did not hear of it until quite few years later and
think this be true of many of the boys my block
In my day boy was called SISSY" if he read books
and/or always looked particularly Clean especially the
wore of those Buster Brown collars With discretion
book-reader guy who always looked freshly
scrubbed could concevably escape the stigma but there
was no way out with the Buster Brown collar Somehow
the immigrant mothers learned about this style;
OF them even spoke of Lord Fauneroy pans velvet jobs
which fitted around your thighs like silk dress clings
to Marilyn Monroe All of this fancy stuff caused many
heartache in the tenernents
Personally, beat the SISSY" rap by using my head
was very careful not to read books in front of my
friends and was worried about being too Clean
On the East Side had developed the knack of read
ing on the street It sight to see boys
and girls, grown and women, walking along the
street reading book turning the pages without hitch
There trick to this that you learned through
perience and have lost the know-how But in the
early days used discretion about it. On the way home
from either night school the library closed the book
within block of my neighborhood then took off my
necktie and tucked the clean collar under my sweater
and walked into the block nonchalanty maybe cast
ing deprecating look the books under my arm as if
to say Look what am being forced to do against my
will"
Sex, of course, all around u.s. it encrcles
the earth and the life of every single of it's inhab
tants but often wonder in surprise how possible
to maintain the uncanny silence the subject which
existed within society where hundreds of thousands of
people lived within arms length of each other.
Taboo was the overwhelming attitude with respect
to Sex, and there many legends like for instance
that masturbation would result in insanity and that if
you went near girl before you married would
catch disease that ate big chunks out of your body No
one told u.s. at least there is recollection of spe-
cific "lesson' or "briefng".
Here and there of course boy strutted around the
block with the boast that he had been to Fourteenth
Street, which to meant the "Red Light district. This
RED Light" district term which may have been
coined by the most improbable of men, Colonel Theodore
Roosevelt when he Police Commissioner of New
York He changed the regulation street lamps on the four
corners of streets with brothes that strange wo-
lost in the neighborhood, looking for rela-
ves would know enough not to walk between those red
street lamps This is not mentioned in Menckens history
of the American language neither is there hint OF
it any of the hundreds of books the life and career
of Mr. Roosevelt but it is mentioned and quite casually
by of Mr.. Roosevelts Police Commits
soners, General Theodore Bingham.
But in our homes you spoke about such
things" except by innuendo and warning Occasionally
you'd hear mother scoldng her daughter, perhaps be-
cause she had been out late - sYou want to wind up
14th Street, And standard warning to the boys was,
"You won't grow up to be sailor if can help it.
The regular Army and Navy had bad regulations IN
those days. probably undeserved, but it was common
practice for judge to sentence man to year in the
penitentiary suspended he joined the Army or Navy
l am not SO sure about this teaching OF sex in the
homo instead If Gin the street, as we call it. do not