Dear Editor
Dear Editor United Nations In his peremptory review of William F. Buckley Jr.'s United Nations Journal ("Notes of an Indignant Diarist." NL, November 25, 1974), Richard C. Hottelet dismissed the...
...To think of the UN as something it ought to be but manifestly is not is to commit self-deception and to suffer all the consequent disappointment...
...While the statement is absurd, the fact that it was made by a veteran American UN reporter is especially distressing...
...But all this was in my original article, and only Moses' emotional overinvolvement or intellectual underdevelopment prevented him from seeing it immediately...
...One of the few clear things about it is that the UN is not a parliament, passing laws to correct injustices or preserve peace...
...Evidently he has polled those faces that "stand out immediately in any theatrical lobby during intermission," and knows they are homosexuals "even if they have female companions...
...On the other hand, Starr does not emphasize enough the discrepancy in national policy that permits a President to offer $7.5 billion in loans to high-income families the same week he was threatening to veto a bill that would have authorized $3.5 billion per year in subsidized housing of various sorts for low-income families...
...Apparently he does not wish to consider the ability of two persons of the same gender to have a sexual-emotional relationship to be a human resource...
...Philadelphia Morris Milgram General Partner, Partners in Housing Despite Roger Starr's well-deserved reputation as a man with a snappy answer, he has written some of the most thoughtful evaluations of national and local policy...
...Environmental preference is not restricted to those who can afford the artificially imposed high price of suburban living...
...Reporters here and elsewhere render the greatest service when they present what they can learn in the richest context, thereby preserving the public from the real dangers of misconception...
...2. "Western correspondents . . . should be -so one would hope-the moral and intellectual guardians of the organization's principles...
...It seems, though, that Hottelet, along with some anemic politicians and several of his prominent colleagues, has surrendered to the trend generally referred to as realism...
...But the fact remains that in New York certainly (and in Minnesota probably, though perhaps less noticeably) one encounters in the lobbies of theaters and concert halls, among other places, a very pronounced type that homosexuals and heterosexuals alike immediately identify as homosexual, not because they are bent on seduction or persecution, but because certain characteristics are salient and unmistakable...
...Needless to say, I have very little difficulty in distinguishing between them...
...Millions of citizens live in indecency and at rents far beyond their means...
...New York City Gloria Steinem Seldom have I read anything in The New Leader as poorly thought out as John Simon's disappointing essay on homosexuals...
...Inasmuch as SAI has never owned and does not now own any land, it is unfortunate that Starr chose this case to illustrate his theme about the need for nonprofit groups to acquire land as a basis for challenging exclusionary practices...
...To sum up: would that the UN were the guarantor of peace, justice and human dignity...
...The most controversial notion in Starr's essay is the admission that there are some low-income minority families whose presence destroys the neighborhoods of others with less destructive propensities...
...but perhaps Steinem means national monument, and, in any case, her writing has never been her best feature, nor are we principally concerned with stylistics...
...People who make such moves often view interracial living as a positive value to be deliberately sought...
...Of course, Arabs, Jews, Xs and homosexuals are assimilable or disguisable, and I would not dream of being able to identify correctly all members of any category...
...Families may use the private market as best they can to find the type of neighborhood that satisfies their needs, but public laws should neither be used nor defended that protect such private interests when the consequence of their protection is the denial to working-class people and to racial minorities of their right to decent shelter and location of their own choosing...
...They accept the idea of an integrated neighborhood without reservations, regardless of whether the minority element is black or white...
...Starr is among the few who are willing to recognize that this has become one of the most urgent problems of public policy, and that the attitudes of some minority groups in some cities has changed markedly...
...Whatever one may say about the UN Charter, whose aims are admirable, it defines nothing...
...ad nauseam...
...No useful purpose is served by pretending it is better...
...reasoning that, by its indulgence in stereotyping, works against the growing recognition of the value of the homosexual artist as a commentator on the human condition...
...As usual, though, it draws too heavily upon New York City's experience...
...It is an arena where contending forces clash-forces that dominate the untidy world the UN represents...
...Apparently women do not even come up to the level of stereotype, being too un-serious to be "sick" and too untalented to be "witty...
...On the contrary, showing what it is may arouse public opinion to improvement, if possible...
...If Moses disagrees with me, let him present some counterarguments and show why my "praise" applies "with equal logic" to homosexual relationships...
...And the key to site selection for integrated housing is careful study of the location...
...Certainly there are equally pronounced Jewish...
...More and more whites, especially younger families, are willing to move into racially mixed neighborhoods-even if they should find themselves in the minority...
...lesbians, though, are mentioned in my article...
...The roots of this delusive trend go back to the early postwar years, when Stalin took over Eastern Europe and put its nations— quite literally and visibly-behind the Iron Curtain...
...Starr might well have cited the Madison, New Jersey, zoning case where SAI's attorneys represented minority plaintiffs excluded from the town and twice succeeded in having its zoning laws declared invalid...
...Yet, in truth, he offers no leadership along these lines...
...but the organization does...
...Homosexuals I have just read John Simon's "Homosexuals in Life and the Arts" (NL, October 28, 1974...
...By focusing on a case where SAI was not involved, Starr used an extraneous point to demonstrate how difficult it is to attack exclusion...
...I have encountered several heterosexual men who, because of certain mannerisms and an effeminate appearance, were lumped into the category of "homosexual" by people like Simon, who equate stereotypes with reality...
...A second unfortunate choice was the subtitle for the section, "Busting Zoning...
...If a great deal is not made of them it is because there have been very few if any homosexual women playwrights noticeable in our theater, and virtually no women of any kind making theatrical films...
...moreover, any mention of "spotting Jews" immediately implies organized discrimination and persecution, whereas I made it very clear that I was against such things...
...I agree with Simon that this concession is all a huge waste...
...Should that prove to be the case, the nation may face a protracted battle for a new policy not unlike that over the Housing Act of 1949...
...On the other hand, it should have been clear from the beginning that totalitarian regimes, all of which are built on terror, would be bound to support terrorist movements...
...It has, from creation, been interpreted in different, even conflicting fashions...
...Clearly, if a writer wishes to communicate with such an audience, he is going to have to make some concessions to this attitude...
...Paul, Minn...
...As it now stands, the UN is under the domination of not-as U.S...
...Certainly he does not appreciate the fact that his praise of heterosexual relationships applies with equal logic to homosexual relationships...
...In fact, he tends to lean over backwards in understanding and even supporting those who would work to further disadvantage the housing poor...
...The proposed mixed-income community in the vicinity of Candlewood Lake was a project of Garden Cities Development Corporation, a nonprofit developer...
...The country believes that it has a desperate housing shortage and massive 19th-century slums because New York has these conditions...
...The New Leader could render another public service by calling for a conference— perhaps with the support of the Tamiment Institute-to discuss ways of putting into practice some of Starr's proposals...
...but that (b) even in such a stinking piece lesbians should have been given full representation...
...The fact is that exclusion has been successfully attacked without acquiring "a commercial interest in land value that compromises . . . social aims...
...It is so blatantly wrong, prejudiced and archaic that Simon is only committing suicide in public...
...For reasons Simon articulates quite well, predominately heterosexual audiences perceive the presentation of homosexual activities or relationships as "seeing their most cherished beliefs trampled underfoot...
...My experience in developing about three dozen interracial communities around the country has been that locations far from areas of minority concentration, and well beyond the path of black expansion, are ideal, if the rise of future ghettos is to be avoided...
...It is not a right to be bargained away in order to protect the interests of private parties to live in homogeneous neighborhoods...
...If they were given control of their neighborhoods, they might very well implement policies quite different from those that have prevailed in the past...
...1. I have not "dismissed the UN's clearly defined obligation...
...SAI has very successfully litigated against restrictive zoning in situations where it owned no land...
...continued on next page Dear Editor Housing Challenge In "America's Housing Challenge" (NL, September 30, 1974), Roger Starr has done a superb job of outlining the tremendously complex problems faced by all of us who are engaged in providing housing in the United States...
...Nonetheless, Starr has given us a splendid, succinct summary of where we stand in housing needs, tenure, finance, technology, and public policy...
...Yet it greatly distresses me to see such fallacious reasoning as he displays in his column...
...Further, it has no executive authority, except as contained in Chapter Seven, and depends for its peacekeeping capacity on the cooperation of its sovereign member states...
...The country believes that it has a problem of widespread abandonment because New York and three other cities have this problem...
...Arab or X characteristics, but those pertain to races, and are explicable genetically-which is precisely what made me raise the biological question...
...delegate John A. Scali has remarked-the tyranny of the majority, but the majority of tyrants: dialectically polished, ideologically excused and transparently arbitrary...
...Yonkers, N.Y...
...3. Simon blames the homosexual writer for what is, in reality, that artist's audience's problem...
...A good example of this can be found in the section discussing the field in which my organization...
...I even found one metropolis whose officials thought they had serious racial difficulties with a 3 per cent minority population because they had seen riots in Detroit, Washington and New York on TV...
...Some differences are bigger and more basic than others...
...Italics mine, P.D...
...Perhaps both he and his article should be sprayed with plastic and preserved as a national park...
...I also note, however, that he assumes all homosexuals in the arts to be male...
...The key to the successful development of multiracial communities is site selection...
...Or is his talent for spotting homosexuals of the same sort as that for "spotting a Jew a mile away...
...The incredible cynicism that tolerates such an anomaly ought to be the subject of a whole issue in itself...
...Their methods as well as objectives have an identical permanence: to seek and maintain power through and in the name of violence and revolution...
...This pains me almost as much as it does Steinem, but it is a different subject from the one I was writing about...
...NL, November 25, 1974), Richard C. Hottelet dismissed the UN's clearly defined obligation to uphold its Charter as a popular misconception...
...Lastly, if on point 3 Moses concedes that he agrees with me and that I articulated well, is it not likely that I have more on my side on the other points than his blanket dismissal ("seldom . . . anything...
...Fortunately, the Congress has hung cn to some basic principles requiring a local plan and program as a condition of blank-check block grants for community development purposes...
...I certainly did not intend to suggest that the Institute "compromises" its principles in order to profit from land deals, but rather that those who oppose its work in specific locales regard its connection with land ownership as placing it in a compromising position...
...Unfortunately, it may develop that the Administration is willing to demand housing plans of local governments but unwilling to finance those homes...
...and that (c) she protests in behalf of all women of whatever sexual preference, she falls into the worst abyss of irrationality...
...Western correspondents assigned to that key post should be-so one would hope-the moral and intellectual guardians of the organization's principles...
...At the conclusion of his essay, Starr speaks of the need to instill housing policy with a sense of moral urgency to improve the conditions ot those who are inadequately sheltered...
...The challenge to those of us who work in the housing field is to stand firm for the principle that a decent standard of housing at reasonable cost is a basic right...
...Only well-organized minority neighborhoods are allowed to devise the means for excluding, even evicting, such families, and then only if they are circumspect about it, since the principle of exclusion and eviction is regarded as evil in high-income suburbs and has a respectable body of adverse court decisions...
...In responding, I would like to concentrate on three fundamental flaws: 1. Simon defines "sickness" as "something thai lessens the capacity for using all of one's human resources," and then proceeds to praise heterosexual love (or, perhaps more accurately, heterosexual sex, since he says "it is in their sexuality that the difference between men and women is fundamental and crucial...
...On those grounds, and on behalf of all women whose creative talents and contributions have been denied and ignored, I object with all my heart...
...During the last two decades, great changes have occurred...
...Good environment is the result of applying good planning standards to growth, not of denying opportunity to a substantial portion of our population...
...It is primarily a political body, and since all its members have sovereign equality it is pointless to try to prove which one is lying, to what extent and for what reason...
...They were incredulous when I told them it would be at least two generations, and probably four, before they reach the state that some Eastern cities had reached a half-century ago...
...I am also suspicious of minds that draw facile parallels between the homosexual problem and the Jewish problem (if such there be...
...One can welcome his desire to explore the entire range of issues, especially at this juncture when the national Administration has all but abandoned a housing policy...
...Paul Davidoit Executive Director, Suburban Action Institute Roger Starr replies: While I have come to believe, as indicated in my essay, that the issue of suburban zoning is less one-sided than many advocates of racial desegregation had assumed, Paul David-off and the Suburban Action Institute are properly entitled to expand on the telescoped remarks in which I tried to cover the very complex question of American land policy...
...His special issue on housing is no exception...
...As to principles, see above-remembering that we live in a world where one man's democracy is another man's tyranny, one man's terrorist another man's freedom fighter...
...But he fails to answer the key question of policy that he poses at the outset: "What are the proper and practical limits of government action in the social sphere...
...I'm not sure that lesbians would benefit from equal treatment in such an article, but it is often true that being totally ignored is even more evidence of oppression than being ridiculed or opposed...
...The truth is, and I doubt Starr would disagree, one man's "comforting homogeneity" is another man's "white noose...
...Starr completely misunderstands the savage impact local exclusionary zoning has had on both the constitutional rights of minorities to travel freely-that is, to find a location of their own choosing within a metropolitan area-and their ability to find a location that offers proximity to the growing job base of the suburbs and at the same time affords the possibility of decent shelter, living environment, and educational and recreational opportunity within their neighborhood...
...as poorly thought out") would indicate...
...It is not...
...What I say to Moses applies a fortiori to Gloria Steinem's letter...
...Incidentally, I doubt if one can spray anything with plastic and so, even metaphorically, turn it into a national park...
...Since its main notion seems to be that homosexuals are "sick" but "witty," the article at first seemed not worthy of reply...
...The seemingly everlasting complex of legal requirements and prohibitions that imposed discrimination in housing has been outlawed...
...Among bleeding-heart liberals, this is inadmissible...
...The Tamiment Institute is to be congratulated for having supported this pithy analysis and The New Leader for making it generally available...
...I am certain Davidoff agrees that the pledge of decent housing for all Americans is meaningless without the opportunity to participate in the economy, and that changes in zoning patterns to encourage housing construction for low- and moderate-income families make most sense when they are associated with job and educational opportunities...
...Communities developed under these conditions generally stay integrated with black minorities, even in cities whose populations are largely black...
...that exclusive heterosexuality may be as diminishing to the human spirit as exclusive homosexuality...
...To begin with, Starr distorts the subject of discrimination by incorrectly identifying the work of SAI...
...But it does not have any reliable means to compel that cooperation, even on mandatory decisions of the Security Council...
...As a developer of integrated housing, I would like to add some encouraging words...
...No one suspected then that ihis euphemism for totalitarianism would eventually become the nominal creed of the UN's vast majority, or that it would consist of aggressive delegates from sham socialist dictatorships around the world who would invariably refer to the representatives of the free nations as imperialists and capitalists...
...His failure apparently even to notice- what my arguments were is not the best recommendation for a logician or debater...
...New York City Laszlo T. Kiss Richard C. Hottelet replies: I am sorry that Laszlo T. Kiss did not get my point...
...We are concerned with logic, however, and when she says (a) that my piece, unsprayed, stinks...
...Heterosexual women have nothing to do with the matter at hand...
...The country believes that public housing units cost $45,000 apiece because they do so in New York...
...The 25-year-old Congressional promise of decent shelter and environment for all Americans remains only a promise...
...Berkeley William L. C. Wheaton, Dean, College of Environmental Design, University of California Roger Starr raises many issues in his housing piece, his prose style is a delight and, above all, he writes about a murky subject with great clarity...
...Even those who still hesitate to accept the reality of a pluralistic society sense they are fighting a rearguard action...
...Suburban Action Institute (SAI), is engaged: eliminating discriminatory zoning...
...Indeed, I am grateful for his comments...
...Though the environmental preferences of suburbanites are treated with sympathy, Starr neglects the pollution of the slums and ghettos that results from the concentration of poor people who are barred from choosing where and how they will live...
...Obviously those homosexuals who do not conform to Simon's stereotypes (and there are a lot of them, probably the majority) will escape his attention...
...The use of a pejorative makes it difficult to consider the many shadings of this difficult subject, and Starr himself has problems developing an approach, as evidenced by two statements: "In a country as heterogeneous as the United States, local zoning control offers a way of preserving a comforting degree of homogeneity": and, on a preceding page, "The battle against suburban exclusivity and the struggle to loosen the white noose that threatens to strangle the central city were causes whose ultimate virtue was taken for granted by progressive Americans until a few years ago...
...Thus it might have been more productive to talk about the possible "alteration" rather than the "busting" of zoning patterns, at least to the extent of trying to arrive at a more democratic sharing of land/housing resources...
...2. Simon proposes a physiological basis for homosexuality, founding his argument on his perception of certain homosexual stereotypes...
...Across the country, I find a growing acceptance of integrated housing...
...Stalin did, however, make a farcical concession to the UN's democratic principles: He labeled his satellite regimes "people's democratic republics...
...In the aftermath of this colonial expansion, the realism of Soviet vetoes prevailed over ratified rights and, subsequently, the dust of permanent wrong settled on the Charter...
...I was at some pains to explain why I do not consider a homosexual relationship as much of a "human resource" as a heterosexual one...
...Jeffrey Moses John Simon replies: My piece may have been poorly thought out, as Jeffrey Moses says, but not so poorly that inadequate reading could not make it seem poorer yet...
...Let me try to make it again by responding to two of his...
Vol. 58 • January 1975 • No. 1
