Abstract
IN LATE 1973, ALETTER FROM a prisoner named Eddie Koopman appeared in the Gay Alternative, a gay liberation magazine published in Philadelphia. In his message, the twenty-two-year-old explained that he was serving a ten-year sentence in the Maryland Correctional Institution at Hagerstown for "unnatural and perverted sex acts" and that he needed a job and a place to stay so that he could qualify for parole. Koopman did not know who might read his words, but he addressed them to a community to which he felt he belonged—and from which he could, therefore, expect help. "Not one of you know me as a person," he wrote, "[but] I feel I'm your Brother." Concluding with a stirring appeal to gay solidarity, he insisted: "I'm not writing to an organization, but to every person who took part in the Gay Pride March, to every person sitting now in a Gay Bar, to every person who believes they are right in themselves being Gay."