The sociological enlightenment in Denmark is still marred by prostitution which, in certain public localities, is not hard to find. The police show disfavor of it by occasional mass questionings and arrests. In the event one meets a member of this ancient profession and later finds himself in the midst of rough stuff, the law, I hear, sides not with the bad boy but with his customer. In fact, anyone has option of reporting or "turning in" any person, male or female, who makes a pecuniary suggestion. Otherwise, any agreement between people over eighteen concerning their mutual pleasure is completely accepted by law, whatever the erotic affiliations may be. Legal prejudice against our people there was removed by popular referendum in the late 1930's.

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Leaving this country of wine, laughter and song, I stopped at several places in Germany on my way south. My first port of call in the Fatherland was that lusty seaport metropolis of Hamburg. Of all the large cities in the post-war Reich, Hamburg presents to the tourist an external picture more like the old, pre-catastrophe Germany than any other I found. For some odd reason the terrific bombings of 1943-44 left great portions of the old center of town intact, so that the traveller gets a comfortable impression of there never having been a war.

In Hamburg the general seediness of the night life is exceeded only by the appalling abundance of male and female prostitution. These facts plus the over-all emotional vacancy and pecuniary phlegm that characterize so many erotic meetings form a dramatic contrast with the astounding energy of the city's material life and its physical reconstruction whose signs are everywhere evident.

In this north German seaport, the yawning emptiness of inner life within the minority seems to take symptomatic flight from hopeless reality in male transvestism which has for these people an astonishingly serious, almost cult-like appeal. An appreciable number of our group there actually live continuously in "drag." Evidently they claw out an existence as prostitutes or as waitresses in the gay bars, or both. Hamburg's civil administration is predominantly Socialist, the party which in contrast to Adenauer's Christian Democrats, includes in its platform the removal of the discriminatory Paragraph 175 from the Penal Code. Therefore a transvestite is countenanced by the police so long as he registers with them as such. This registration is not so much to comply with any legal prejudice, it seems, but exists more to placate the eternal German demand that all things be "in order!"

All Hamburg bars have dance floors where male couples swing their partner to the thudding rhythms of Teutonized tangos, whose heavy wheeze of nostalgia is but a faint reminiscence of that carefree Spanish dance. Instrumental combinations consist usually of accordion, piano, saxaphone or violin.

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