BOOKS & PUBLICATIONS

Notices and reviews of books, articles, plays and poetry dealing with homosexuality and the sex variant. Readers are invited to send in reviews or printed matter for review.

Camping in the Bush

This is not a review of The Men In The Trojan Horse, Kurt Singer's excellent book on the spies and spy systems of the world today; it is a presentation of thoughts aroused while reading the third chapter of this book, thoughts that interest me keenly as a homosexual, and as such, a "security risk" in the eyes of my government. The title of the chapter is, "The Psychology of Espionage." Though the word homosexual is mentioned only once in the volume, and then when Mr. Singer states that any country will enlist spies of all types from homosexual personalities to dollar-a-year men, (which could be one and the same, a point he does not make), obviously much of the psychology he discusses is most applicable to the security problems involving the homosexual minority today.

He begins by quoting J. Edgar Hoover on Harry Gold, an intellectual and a spy. Mr. Hoover points out that Gold thought of himself as an idealist, above the law, whose ends justified his means because of a misguided compassion for the underdog.

Mr. Singer then discusses briefly the emotional factors of Klaus Fuchs' early life that led him to betraying his adopted country: his pacifist, pro-Communist father whom he hated and loved and who tried to make him feel different from the average boy, his underground life in Nazi Germany, his exile, his unjust interrment by the British in the same camp with Nazi prisoners of war he'd feared and hated all his life, his persecuted, stateless, confused, insecure formative years, and finally his ambiguous sense of humanitarianism that caused him to spy for the Communists to revenge himself upon both Germany and England.

Is there not here a close parallel to the formation of many homosexual personalities: the doting parent, the sheltered life, the feeling of being different, the schoolyard persecution, the defiant determination to prove one's worth, and if necessary, one's superiority to the brutish and canaille, the unequal struggle, the lulling happiness found only within the group of one's own kind? Such a homosexual would never become a professional spy, but like Klaus Fuchs, could he not become a similar victim of circumstances? Circumstances created by the well rooted ignorance of psychology, and the stupid persecution of misunderstood minorities, the greedy drives of reactionary churchmen and politicians who sell segregation and such inequalities to the inadequately educated masses by playing on their fears and petty prides.

Knowing only what it does about the homosexual, and lacking the foresight

27