In 1961 while helping promote the concepts of gay and lesbian equality on America's East Coast, I initiated occasional correspondence with Don Slater whose public gay work as a journalist had predated mine and who was among those few West Coast legends who'd helped mightily to set the stage for the unfolding of our great freedom-quest drama that ensued.

Pioneering peers on the East Coast—Frank Kameny, Kay Tobin Lahusen, Barbara Gittings, George Weinberg, Dick Leitsch, Lige Clarke, Lilli Vincenz, Randolfe Wicker—appreciated—as I did--that Don Slater's editorship of ONE (America's first widely-circulated lib magazine) had led to one of the most important U.S. Supreme Court decisions affecting our movement, providing our cause --celebrating and equalizing same-sex love-- with its lawful right to speak its name in print.

The Court, because of Slater's talents, decided that ONE magazine's themes were not—as the U.S. Post Office had foolishly argued—obscene.

Our little band of East Coast revolutionaries followed as best we could—sometimes with a bit of dismay—the occasionally tempestuous flare-ups that rose from differences of opinion among our West Coast sisters and brothers. Don Slater, in the mid-Sixties, broke from W. Dorr Legg (a founder of ONE) and established The Homosexual Information Center. In 1968 I mailed Slater a sheaf of gay liberation poems—as well as love poems I'd written for Lige Clarke. He responded appreciatively and thereafter we remained in touch, often through his loyal assistant, Billy Glover.

In 1970 while Clarke and I were editing GAY, America's first homosexual news-weekly, we sent Ken Gaul to interview Slater and thereafter published a two-page spread with photos of him, sub-titling the interview: Yesterday's Pioneer with Tomorrow's Vision. It was clear to me then that Don Slater's vision for our movement was inclusive.

Later, I met his nemesis, W. Dorr Legg (whose actual name was William Lambert) and was privy—after spending a private hour with this pioneer—to the antics of a delightfully diplomatic personality, perhaps not as pugnacious as was Slater, but a kind of proud elitist, nevertheless. Thenceforward I've continuously wondered about the disagreements that arose between Slater and Legg and that persisted across decades.

Slater, to me, had always seemed a man whose presence itself inspired a great degree of trust. He was a modest pioneer. He did nothing to advertise himself as a pioneer. He lived with wholesome dignity, wrote and published and put together a massive collection of same-sex archival matter.

Though Slater had refused to toot his own horn, there were those like his faithful (aforementioned) Homosexual Information Center assistant, William Glover, and ONE columnist and author Joseph Hansen, who immediately set about--after his passing—to memorialize the scholarly journalist-pioneer.

Sidenote: Unexpectedly, while reading A Few Doors West of Hope I discovered that GayToday's elfin film reviewer, Leo Skir, is recalled by author Hansen as having written a particular poem of genius.

Slater's early life and his lifelong love affair with Tony Reyes form an important part of this inspirational story. The long-ago feuds—theoretical and otherwise--feuds that erupted between the strong-willed Slater and the imperious Legg are illuminated by Hansen and the history of the West Coast's gay movement gets clarified thereby. A Few Doors West of Hope captures the color and intrigue of the gay and lesbian movement's birth-pangs in California's City of the Angels.

This book tells not only of Slater's accomplishments, but of that time (the early 50s) when to be "a homosexual" was considered worse than being a murderous-communist heroin-pusher. We're now privy, through Hansen's poetic remembrances, to the integrity of the kind of gay life and movement that the pioneering Slater represented. This invaluable source book provides history buffs with material that so-so search engines have missed.