BOOKS

SODOMA PIDE FUERO (So-

domy Flouts the Law), by F. Ferrer Torrents and Joan d'Oc, Mexico, D.F., 1959.

I have just finished reading the most preposterous book it has been given to me to read in a long long while "Sodomy Flouts the Law," by Ferrer Torrents and Joan d'Oc. It is doubtful that many, if any, of ONE's readers will feel any desire to read this book or ever even have any occasion to do so though it is not unentertaining. The book which was, apparently, privately published by the authors, is, of course, written in Spanish and it is unlikely that it will ever be translated though stranger things have happened. It is being reviewed here only because it is hard to believe that such balderdash could be written in this second half of the twentieth century.

The book has as its point of departure and inspiration a statement in Donald Webster Cory's "The Homosexual in America" that, based on figures supplied by the Kinsey Report, there are over twenty million. homosexuals in America. Most critics of Kinsey and his methods, or of any apologist for homosexuality, immediately feel it essential to prove that any figures given are much too high. Señor d'Oc is quite, to the contrary, only too willing to accept these figures at face value. What shocks him and fills him with abomination is that Cory should have been so presumptuous as to have entitled his book "The Homosexual in America"and this is a point on which Latin Americans are somewhat touchy rather than "The Homosexual in North America," or even more specifically, since "North America" includes Mexico

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and Canada, "The Homosexual in the United States." Joan d'Oc bitterly resents any implication that conditions. as described by Mr. Cory might exist elsewhere. "In all countries of the world." he writes, "there are homosexuals, but the type of homosexual one finds in the United States who pretends to have overcome the hypocrisy of civilization in his filthiness, who flouts the law, who hopes to attain a position of respectability from which the better to carry on his proselytizing, who feels himself to be not the victim of his own abnormality but the victim of a society which despises him and for whose scorn he should be grateful since it provides the goad to make the effort to set himself aright . . . this type does not exist in the Latin world."

This book, which falls more or less naturally in two parts, is primarily the work of Joan d'Oc, a hypnotist, with the collaboration in the second part of the book of Dr. Francisco Ferrer Torrents. The collaboration of Dr. Torrents is quite noticeable in that the style, figures of speech, and even vocabulary of the latter part of the book differ markedly from that of the first.

The first section of the book, no matter what else it purports to be, is primarily a diatribe against the United States. All the traditional animosities of Latin America for the "colossus of the North" come tumbling out one after the other with fulminations against its ill-advised and harmful political policies, its iniquitous economic exploitation of Latin America, and its crass, materialistic, obscene and frivolous social behavior.

In this area Señor d'Oc plays both ends against the middle: what other kind of behavior can be expected of a country which nurtures twenty million homosexuals in its

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