From "Camp" Reporting to the Name That Stuck. As a young executive director with a masterÕs degree in English and aspirations to write definitive books about homosexuality, Dick Leitsch took great pains with the monthly newsletter of the Mattachine Society. He and his partner Bob Amsel produced the bulk of its content. "Price Dickenson," listed as its editor, was actually their friend and flat-mate Mrs. Madolin Cervantes. Cervantes was one of the handful of hetero-sexuals that MSNY counted as members and elected treasurer of the group. Leitsch had been socialized as a homosexual in the earthy gay circles of Louisville, but he had educated himself about homosexuality during his four years in the thick of running MSNY. To familiarize himself with the full range of published literature, he read through his groupÕs sizable library. By exploring the middle-class gay-male subcultures of Manhattan, he burnished his already "camp" sensibility, and became adept at using it to win friends and influence people through his speaking and writing. Camp is the kind of outlandish, ironic, sexy, and self-deprecating humor that was then popular in gay male subcultures with a social component. "Price Dickenson," for example, was a camp double-entendre so outrageously vulgar that even Madolin Cervantes never grasped what it alluded to. The term "camp" was commonly used as an adjective as well as a noun, though "campy" was an equivalent term for describing someone or something considered camp. To supply Mattachine members with his insiderÕs take on the first two nights of rioting on Christopher Street, Leitsch wrote a three-page report which he named "The Hairpin Drop Heard Around the World." His title was camp because it was a facetious play on the most famous line of a...continued on next page. Toby Marotta revisits Stonewall Riots in Greenwich Village, Toby Marotta Community Roots Archive, American push for civil rights for homosexuals, American push for civil rights for homophile movement, Stonewall grassroots drive for freedom, Stonewall grassroots drive for power, Stonewall grassroots drive for community. Tobymarotta.com and the Stonewall Riot, Tobymarotta.com and the gay liberation movement, Tobymarotta.com and a closer look at civil rights.