Her next play, "The Drag", dealt with homosexuality, and was what West called one of her "comedy-dramas of life". After a series of try-outs in Connecticut and New Jersey, West announced she would open the play in New York. However, "The Drag" never opened on Broadway due to efforts by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice to ban any attempt by West to stage it. West explained, "The city fathers begged me not to bring the show to New York because they were not equipped to handle the commotion it would cause." West was an early supporter of the women's liberation movement, but said she was not a "burn your bra" type of feminist. Since the 1920s, she was also an early supporter of gay rights, and publicly declared against police brutality that gay men experienced. She adopted a then "modern" psychological explanation that gay men were women's souls in men's bodies, and hitting a gay man was akin to hitting a woman. In her 1959 autobiography, "Goodness Had Nothing to Do With It", a memoir compiled by ghostwriter Stephen Longstreet, West strongly objected to hypocrisy while, for surprising and unexplained reasons, also disparaging homosexuality: "In many ways homosexuality is a danger to the entire social system of Western civilization. Certainly a nation should be made aware of its presence — without moral mottoes — and its effects on children recruited to it in their innocence. I had no objection to it as a cult of jaded inverts... involved only with themselves. It was its secret, anti-social aspects I wanted to bring into the sun. As a private pressure group it could, and has, infected whole nations." This perspective, never elaborated upon by Mae West in other books or interviews seems inconsistent with the Mae West persona. In her 1975 book "Sex, Health, and ESP," Mae West writes on page 43, "I believe that the world owes male and female homosexuals more understanding than we've given them. Live and let live is my philosophy on the subject, and I believe everybody has the right to do his or her own thing or somebody else's -- as long as they do it all in private!"