Senior Correspondent Ruth Mehrtens Galvin first interviewed Dr. William Howell Masters and Virginia Johnson for a 1970 TIME cover story marking the publication of their landmark study, Human Sexual Inadequacy. So when Galvin, who has specialized in reporting on the behavioral sciences for ten years, learned earlier this year that the researchers were about to publish a major study of homosexuality, she read the book in manuscript. Her report led TIME'S editors to the conclusion that here was an excellent opportunity not only for an exclusive preview of the new research but also for a more general look at homosexuality in America. Galvin then spent a few days as the guest of Masters and Johnson (who married in 1971) at their six-acre estate in St. Louis. There she interviewed the couple at length, and Dr. Masters showed her two buildings on the property that in the past have usually been off-limits Ruth Galvin to journalists: the handsome hilltop house where the homosexuals of their study stayed during the research, and a small cottage where the interviews were conducted and records kept.

This week's cover story, the third in the past decade to feature the subject of homosexuality, is something of a first for Senior Writer George Church. In the decade since he joined TIME, after a distinguished career at the Wall Street Journal, Church has written and edited primarily in the magazine's Economy & Business and Energy sections. "Homosexuality is about as far removed from business as you can get," says Church. "In economics writing, you can always fall back on statistics. But there is no census of homosexuals, and with so many in the closet or only half emerged, we may never know their actual number."

Church's overview of the continuing frustrations and the emerging self-confidence of homosexuals today is based on dozens of interviews by TIME correspondents with legislators, educators, executives, clergy and other articulate members of the growing "gay" minority, and on the correspondents' firsthand observation of their lifestyle, from San Francisco's Castro Street to New York City's Christopher Street, from Macon, Ga., to Mankato, Minn. In exploring the new book's findings, Ruth Galvin learned from Masters and Johnson that gays and straights have more in common than perhaps most people thought. Says she: "My biggest surprise was to discover how much heterosexuals could learn from homosexuals about closeness, warmth and communication. I had always assumed that it was the other way around."

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