For Rio de Janeiro Correspondent Barry Hillenbrand, the reporting for this week's story in the World section on the conference of Third World foreign ministers in Lima began like a routine assignment and ended like an episode from a comic opera. On his way from Rio to the Peruvian capital early last week, Hillenbrand stopped off for a half-day in Buenos Aires. The city, he found, was alive with talk of a coup against the government of Isabel Peron. Connecting with a flight that arrived at midnight--"All flights seem to arrive in Lima at midnight," he notes--Hillenbrand spent six days covering a long round of speeches and committee meetings at the conference site at the Crillon Hotel. The rather quiet routine was enlivened briefly by the speech of General Juan Velasco Alvarado, head of Peru's leftist military junta. Resplendent in his full-dress uniform, Velasco held up Peru's revolution as a model for developing nations. But at week's end, while filing his story to New York, Hillenbrand heard a brusque announcement over the pressroom television that Velasco had been deposed by a coalition of military leaders. He quickly switched gear from reporting the conference to piecing together an account of the swift coup. "The experience," observed Hillenbrand, "was like Gilbert and Sullivan: a lot of generals running around energetically but, thankfully, no real violence."

This week's cover story deals with a subject that is both sensitive and difficult but demands attention: the continuing efforts of homosexuals to win greater acceptance in society. The story draws heavily on reporting from TIME correspondents across the U.S. Once all but taboo, the subject of homosexuality is now being treated with increasing--and increasingly open--concern in psychological, clerical and political forums as people like our cover subject, Air Force Sergeant Leonard Matlovich, struggle for what they regard as full civil rights. It is a struggle that often alarms the "straight" world.

To assess the impact that the gay movement has had since our previous cover story on the subject in 1969, our correspondents talked with homosexuals in a variety of occupations and situations. Among the signs of changing attitudes by and about homosexuals, they discovered, was the proud willingness to be interviewed on the part of young gays who have "come out" before friends and family. The assignment occasionally took the correspondents to gay bars, once noted for their gamy ambience. Many have now become clean, well-lighted places where straights feel unthreatened, if not wholly at ease. Behavior Writer John Leo wrote the story, which was researched by Anne Hopkins and Gaye Mclntosh and edited by Ruth Brine.

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