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.

THEY STAND APART

A Critical Survey of the Problem of Homosexuality Edited by J. Tudor Rees & H. V. Usill. Contributors: Visc. Hailsham, Dr. W. Lindsay Neustatter, H. A. Hammelmann and the Rev. D. S. Bailey. Macmillan, London and New York, 1955, $3.75, 220 pp.

Unfortunately, this will probably be the most influential of all the current crop of books on homosexuality, not because it is the best (it isn't) but because it is disguised as a definitive survey of authoritative views on the subject, and is aimed at swaying the Departmental Committee which will largely determine whether or not to amend the English law.

As for impartiality, the editor's words should suffice: ". . . each contributor has been left entirely free to ask whether this thing is a 'cancer of the soul,' a 'twist of the mind,' 'a bodily affliction' or a commixture of them all. . . . Whatever it may be there can be no doubt about the potential evil. . . resulting from the practices associated with homosexuality."

All sides of the homosexual question are presented-except the homosexual side. Still, there is a remarkable amount of disagreement among the contributors, and if only for the resounding clash of authoritative claptrap, the book makes lively reading. And not all is claptrap.

For the student, the book is valuable. The abstracts from Parliamentary debates and the survey of laws in western Europe (why nothing on Russia, the U.S., etc.?) are most thorough, though the bibliography is unbelievably sparse. Drs. Bailey and Neustatter refute much of the trite nonsense of Messrs. Rees and Hailsham, yet as a whole, the book is worse than worthless for the general reader.

Since, however, this presumably represents a compendium of the most authoritative views of the medical, judical, and clerical professions, more deserves to be said here.

For the late Judge Tudor Rees, known as one of England's kindliest justices, the entire subject is clearly a loathsome matter, which he was forced by his position to consider. He was capable of pity (an emotion which conveniently does not dislodge prejudice). His generalizations about homosexuals were based on one or two cases that came before him-he assumed for example that all homosexuals must have an uncanny