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.

The writer of the following review has just learned that Robert Lindner has died. He was only forty-one. He had more genuine respect for homosexuals than anyone I've ever known. But he was rough on phoneys of every sort. His capacity for work was formidable, yet his thinking was always fresh and daring. His ideal was Promethean. He lived up to it. His capacity for friendship was heroic.

L. A.

MUST YOU CONFORMY

Rinehart & Co., New York

Robert Lindner

One of the most original essays on homosexuality to have appeared in a long time is included in this volume by the highly unorthodox psychoanalyst, Robert Lindner. This essay, called "Homosexuality and the Contemporary Scene," is tolerant but pessimistic.

Dr. Lindner does not believe that we are in the midst of a sexual revolution as many people seem to think. "The same fears persist and the same fictions prevail. . . . The popularization of sex and the appearance of liberalism in attitude and behavior represent little more than flourishing defenses. . . . When the veneer of our contemporary system of defenses against the age-old conflict over sex is stripped away, there is to be discovered the same hostility for the invert and his way of life and the same abhorrence of him as a person that have been traditional in Western society. That we now employ such terms as 'sick' or 'maladjusted' to the homosexual appears to me to make but little difference so far as the basic attitudes and feelings are concerned. As a matter of fact, I suggest that precisely these designations reveal the ugly truth of our actual aminus toward homosexuals and the sham of modern social sexual pretensions; for in the current lexicon such words reflect the non-conformism of their referents-and nonconformism is the major, perhaps the only, sin of our time."

"Why... after all... should homosexuality or any other kind of sex behavior be legislated against? So long as minors are not involved, and so long as harm is not done to the parties involved, where is the crime? The confusion, naturally, lies in the word 'harm,' which has finally to be interpreted in a physical sense. To give the term moral implications, as we do now, is to substantiate the charge that our society is actually sex-confused and sex-hating."

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