BOOKS:

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If being relegated to a minor position means being accepted, we may assume the homosexual has arrived as a human being in the contemporary novel. That is, in the novel intended for the general reading public and not for the reader of the latest fad or of the little magazine. For the character who "happens to be" in this dangerous category appears increasingly in books for popular consumption. It is more difficult to do this on stage where the subject is either the core of tragedy (as in the currently successfully revived Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour) or as a subject for comedy in its broadest burlesque sense (as in Philip Barry's Here Come the Clowns or on any current television program featuring almost any major comedian). On the screen, by mutual agreement between the major American producers, the subject is verboten and only minor characters in minor comedies may hint at the existence of transvestitism and no more."

But writers with more latitude and fewer inhibitions round out their work more realistically. In Betty Smith's Tomorrow Will Be Better it is not important that Miss Smith's heroine was married unhappily to a man who became alive only when he was with homosexuals. What is important here is that a novelist whose first book sold close to three million copies should choose to write of a man who neither simpered nor sighed, but was one with millions of ordinary working people, who could only say what so many have said before when confronted with this problem, "I don't know"; and that this novel should not only have a first printing of a hundred thousand copies but should also be chosen by the Literary Guild and go into almost three quarters of a million more American homes without requiring second thoughts or compunctions.

It is a matter of simple recognition, of simple honesty. For instance, the villain of Hester Pine's Beer for The Kitchen (1935) loses his villainy when he is met today; he has come into either the tragic focus (as in Charles Jackson's under-rated The Fall of Valor) or the acceptability of a number of characters in the assorted works of Gordon Sager, Nancy Mitford, Christopher Clark, Theodora Keogh and other writers who grace not only the best-seller lists but the miles of marketable pocket-books as well.

Martin Block

*It is of particular interest here to note that four years ago during the major British effort to crack the American film market Arthur Rank spent $22 million on a musical featuring an American director, American songwriters and Britain's highest paid comedian Sidney Fields, on a Technicolor feature called "London Town". This film

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