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BOOK REVIEW

THE STRAIGHTS' COMING OUT: A REVIEW OF CONSENTING ADULT

(CONSENTING ADULT, Laura Z. Hobson, Doubleday & Company, New York, 1975, $7.95)

Another novel on the gay life by a woman? Again a novel of male gay life by a woman? Well, not really. But Laura Z. Hobson's Consenting Adult is more than another tour de force for the gay community. For this recently published novel really represents the "non-gays' coming out!" It is a moving story; though occasionally idealistic, it is honest; and it is timely.

At the age of seventeen, Jeff Lynn writes his mother from his prep school. As implausible as it may seem, he casually announces that he is a homosexual and would be grateful if she could arrange for analysis. It is 1960, and Tessa Lynn is stunned. Not shocked. Not angry.. Not repulsed at least not at her Ison. She even has the presence of mind to dash off a wire stating, "Proud of you for letter...." From this point until the novel ends thirteen years later, it is really Tessa's story, not Jeff's.

I must admit that the opening chapters had me doubting Laura Hobson's credibility: now really, letters and telegrams! But there slowly grows in the reader a depth of understanding for Tessa; for her husband, Ken, whose life is racked by the fact that his own son is gay or even thinks he is; for Jeff's sister Margie and her husband reporter, Nate; and amazingly enough and this is author Hobson's real talent: for all those around the gay who are not gay themselves, but who are struggling with "gay" because they I love the person.

The fact is that Ms. Hobson does not focus in on the gay and her reasons for doing so quickly become apparent. Before too long, this reader put aside his impatience with the author's emphasis on Tessa's mental gymnastics. Nonetheless it is difficult at times to accept Tessa as totally real. It {begins with her reaction to her teenaged son's declaration. Though a seemingly liberated middle-aged woman who is rising in the publish{ing business as a successful editor,

she often demonstrates a stereo{typed weakness or at least naivete, from attempts to get "progess {reports" on the analysis Jeff undergoes for some five years to frantic fantasies of what kinds of sex homosexuals engage in.

Slowly though, Ms. Hobson begins strengthening her real main character by educating her to the realities of the gay movement. Through the clever interweaving of actual historical events and trends, such as the "Stonewall Revolution" and the American Pyschiatric Association's resloution removing homosexuality from the list of mental disorders, the author adds credibility to what seemed at first a shallow and unreal character.

By MARC LEWIS

HIGH GEAR

1essa finally comes across as a strong, intelligent and sensitive heroine.

Ken Lynn faces the same struggles as his wife, but he possesses not only an inability to accept his son's homosexuality, but even refuses at first to face his son * (something Tessa never hesitated doing). Deliberate departures from their New York apartment at holidays and even his rescheduling a business trip to avoid attending Jeff's high school graudation make Ken Lynn a pathetic figure through most of the novel.

It isn't until Jeff has been at medical school on the West Coast for some years, that Ken begins to acknowledge his son's chosen life style. After having met a friend of Jeff's while visiting him in California, the tired father reports to his wife "...somehow I hoped they meant a lot to each other.... I got to thinking, what it would be like, to get old, if you hadn't ever had somebody you'd shared your life with. I suddenly got to thinking about Jeff. I never did before."

and,

What support and understanding Jeff lacked from his father he thought, from his mother were made up by his loving sister Margie and her genuinely empathetic husband Nate. It is Margie who keeps the love of family flowing evenly and Nate who uses his own journalism career to help not only Jeff but all those being unjustly treated gay or otherwise. His battle against gay opression is heightened by his relationship to Jeff and to Tessa. And he sees -as eventually does the reader -that it is the Tessa of the world that he is helping as much as the Jeffs.

Nate's dogged determination to get the gay message across to the public provides the pivotal element for the plot's emphasis on Tessa's education into the ways of the gay world as well as for the incorporation of the actual historical events that add to edge of reality to the fiction.

Author Hobson seems to have exhausted herself on these leading characters, leaving all to little imagination for the creation of clear-cut minor characters such as the family doctor, a girl friend of Jeff's, his brother Don and wife, and the two psychiatrists who "treated" Jeff. But the development of the major characters was sufficiently bright to allow for a few shadowy minor characters.

And finally, though Consenting Adult is essentially a character sketch of Tessa Lynn, there is a universality in the creation of this character that makes the novel also a fairly comprehensive statement on the development of public attitudes toward homosexuality over the past decade and a half. From terrifying taboos and pentential pomposity to greater sensitivity, liberation and acceptance, this

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novel records in fiction what hopefully will be reported as fact before too long: that the world has begun to look at "gay" through the eyes of Tessa. And as important for gays: that they begin to see Tessa in "straight." That's Laura Hobson's dual purpose, and when the reader finishes the novel, the title will shout that dual purpose. (If reviewer's name is given, please use Marc Lewis.)