86 Tickets to these affairs are sold through the homo- sexual underground, bartenders at the gay bars, department store clerks and the like. Addmonally, there is a mailing list of old diehards who wouldn’t dream of missing the Halloween ball. The queens spend weeks buying material and mak- ing their dresses. Homosexual hairdressers are paid top fees to create fancy hair-dos. Cars are hired to drive them to the ballroom. Since police take a dim view of such affairs, in- volving as many as a thousand milling homosex- uals, sloshing liquor as fast as they can get it down, the organizers of the drag balls hire a number of security guards. Despite their best efforts, near-riots have often broken out. Police have had to be summoned. The police would like to ban such gatherings of ‘homosexuals but are powerless. To legislate against a holiday party where men dress up as women, simply because those who attend are homosexuals, would be discrimination. So the drag ball becomes the highlight of the social calendar for the fall season to many members of the homosexual underground. What happens the rest of the year? Wearing women’s clothes is a conipulsion shared