There are quotations from the Manual of Military Neuropsychiatry published in Philadelphia and W. C. Menninger's Psychiatry in a Troubled World. The author is quoted as justly appalled with the Georgia laws against homosexuality (maximum sentence: life imprisonment) and ends with the comment that it has taken a long time even for psychiatrists to advance to a humanitarian attitude toward the homosexual. He adds ironically "For we live, indeed, in the age of humanitarianism!"

Nearly every edition of The Way has a good-sized article devoted to a famous person who is supposed to have been homosexual: Frederick the Great, Michaelangelo, etc. There are usually a couple of poems, nearly always sentimental, occasionally a call to arms (Heine's "Warnung" in the March issue). Sometimes you find a rather scholarly essay such as that in the April edition, "Gustav Aschenbach, Attempt at a Meaning," dealing with Thomas Mann's leading character in the short story, Death in Venice. There is always a good-sized "personals" column in which men of thirty to seventy advertise for "young, blond, good-looking" youths to accompany them on a trip into southern France. The advertiser usually insists upon a picture before the arrangements can be consummated but insures the "utmost secrecy" in handling any information entrusted to him.

A main objection to the magazine is that while it places really embarrassing emphasis on the rather naive notion that homosexuals are more artistic, more sensitive-in short, of finer clay-than the rest of mankind, the literary efforts of this elect as revealed in The Way hardly support the theory. It is surprising and a little touching that our minority in Europe, so much more advanced in many ways than we, should harp on this idea which may be true but certainly has no basis in scientific evidence and seems to me to be very poor propaganda. It seems to be a magazine for male deviates only; can it be that the German lesbian's place is also in the home? Moreover De Weg really has no policy or, more accurately, no theory upon which to base its efforts. The result is that it has, in final analysis, nothing to offer our people as a socially conscious and responsible force in society. It says merely, "We are gay. Quite so; we like boys, and besides we are really superior."

David L. Freeman

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