In summary: the literary anthology is not worth the money: the few good works included-by Mann, Gorki, Fordare easily available in cheaper editions. The collection of psychosocial studies is neither a good popular survey nor a work of solid or accurate scholarship, but it does include titillating titbits of neurotica (homo and hetero), and, almost incidentally, a few interesting ideas.

T. P. WE TWO WON'T LAST by Ann Aldrich, Gold Medal, 1963, Forty cents, 159 pp.

A non-fiction homophile work so interesting and readable that one is compelled to finish it at one sitting is rare, but this paperback was such for me. It is a very subjective sociological survey, in a freewheeling and often witty style, of how homophiles live and what we're like. Many of the observations, such as those on the differences between male and female, or the lesbian compulsion for transvestism and monagamy, are brilliantly shrewd.

However, as readers of her prior works know, Miss Aldrich is "antiorganization," so hysterically so that when she writes of homophile organizations she becomes simply a shrew. It is just not rational to expect excellent journalism from, and to work so hard at ridiculing, any publication coming from our yet embryonic homophile movement. And when she gets around to ONE, it is amusing to hear from someone who makes "a practice of studying the homosexual scene" that she has never seen anything in print concerning social services, such as aid on jobs, lodging, or the law. Or that the classes and seminars at ONE INSTITUTE "flimsy bull sessions." (The last seminar course I had was on Freud, in which his basic work on homosexuality was seriously studied sentence by sentence, using both English

are

translations, and the prior classes were as serious and informative). Miss Aldrich is also, as shown by the title of her book, one of those who believes that pathology is inherent in homosexuality, and significantly she mentions most every doctor in the field but two-Dr. Evelyn Hooker and Dr. Virginia Armon.

But shrewd or shrew, Miss Aldrich should be read. She is a very serious student and sharp observer of our minority. She is completely sincere. You may not like some of her viewpoints, but a different way of looking at a situation is often healthy. And when it is as well written as this, it is also very enjoyable.

A. E. Smith EROS: AN ANTHOLOGY OF MALE FRIENDSHIP edited by Alistair Sutherland and Patrick Anderson, New York, Citadel Press, 1961, 432 pp., $5.95.

Eros is a destructive force. Destructive, that is, of the kind of civilization that has been evolving for the past 2,000 years. Now, as western man awaits the dawn of a PostChristian Era, perhaps those of us who still have the power of belief may pray for the rebirth of this god.

SHOW magazine sees the actor Paul Newman as a contemporary reincarnation. And the type of hero he impersonates, especially in such a film as "Sweet Bird of Youth," seems, even in its distorted, tortured, debased manifestation, nearer to the original of the Greek classic myth. Nearer, that is, than the over-idealized picture painted in the introduction to this anthology. I am inclined to find this idealization suspect; yet who can quarrel with the conclusion: "In our own period science and technology run wild, when the dominating images are of metal, plastic, smoke and fire, can we have enough of generalized Eros?"