with a certain charm of style. One could but wish that it reach the audience for which it is obviously intended, those with good intentions, perhaps, but who are carried along by the conventional currents of ignorance, bias, and prejudice to sustain laws which are "at once cruel, sadistic, unreasonable, and unjust." I fear that we have another case of the gospel being preached only to the saved.

T.M.M.

"A survey of the Treatment of the Homosexual in some plays," by Roger Gellert. Page 29, Encore, No. 29, Vol. 8, No.1, January-February 1961. London. Between several of the spokes of the large driving wheels of a locomotive there is found a solid connection. The purpose of this dead weight is to insure a smooth flow of motion from the forward impulses of the driving engine. I wonder whether every movement of social reform and progress is given stability from the seemingly inevitable opposition and setbacks which it encounters. The failure of Parliament to act on the Wolfenden Report, the upsurge of police harrassment of the Kreis group in Zurich and the continued unreasoning and unbalanced censorship of mail in the United States have been so discouraging just when a new forward movement seemed imminent. In sharp contrast to these negative points, the magazine Encore, which purports to be "the voice of vital theatre," of London, publishes a sane and exceedingly well-balanced critique of modern plays dealing with the homosexual theme, some directly and others merely as a secondary line of interest.

The author's first generalization holds that most dramatists dealing with the theme make it "social and tragic" rather than "personal and comic, as it so often is." It may be tolerated as an eccentricity or even a

one

mild illness or neurosis but is rarely taken in stride in the modern world as it was by the Greeks. Judaism and Christianity gave the serio-tragic character which made it a "hellbound evil." The Elizabethan drama was the first to bring it to the surface in modern times, but with no consistency of approach. The Restoration dramatists treated homophiles somewhat as a comic interlude. After two centuries of comparative silence, the modern era was opened in 1933 with Shairp's The Green Bay Tree. After this historical introduction, the author of the article presents an analysis of a number of plays having homosexuality either as a primary or a secondary theme and presented after the Second World War up to our own time. He concludes a somewhat detailed consideration of the plays by saying that "no clean pattern emerges from the miscellany of variations on the homosexual theme." However, "at this stage of our knowledge, it is no longer enough to treat the homesexual merely as a pathetic invalid or an amusing grotesque." A heartening example of a sensible approach is found in Miss Delaney's A Taste of Honey. "The queer boy, Geoffrey, is presented as a person, not as a social issue, and Jo's open-minded curiosity. and realistic approach . . . accurately reflect the good, tolerant side of teenage morality." "I hope we can go on from there and let some unsentimental light in on the tangle of irrational fears and preconceptions."-"As understanding of homosexuality increases, the comic potentialities will outweigh the tragic . . The comic side is just as real and important and may do even more good in clearing the air. Above all, what we need on the subject is not emotion so much as knowledge and reason. The funniest and most moving thing in the world, really, is truth." While few of the plays present a satisfactory view of the sub-