Encyclopedia of Sexual Behavior. So that my voice was still speaking and my pen was moving, but during most of this period, I felt it unnecessary and unwise to summarize my approach to homosexuality in the form of another book. Many friends urged me to do so. but I felt that, for the most part, I had said what I had to say, and that a second book would be a weak echo, and would suffer from redundancy and restatement.

At this time in collaboration with John P. LeRoy a Second Cory Report is about to appear. Approximately the same length as The Homosexual in America, the new work is called The Homosexual and His Society: A View from Within. At this time I should like to answer the questions: why a second book, why a collaboration, and what has happened in the intervening dozen years that will be reflected in this work.

To answer these questions, I shall first address myself to stating what. in retrospect, I regard as the major purposes, themes, and accomplishments of The Homosexual in America. These were threefold: (1) the subjective approach; (2) the placing of the subject within the framework of majorityminority group relations, particularly in the U.S.A.; and (3) the depiction of all that I saw as sordid, socially disorganized, and emotionally unhealthy, in a way of life which I was defending and for which I was pleading. And out of this I hoped would emerge, not a statistic, but a person but live, real human beings struggling to make their lives worthwhile.

For many years, I had been impressed by the gap in the literature of homosexuality; a gap that could be filled only by stating what the homosexuals themselves felt, how they saw their lives, how they reacted to each other. It was not merely that the penologists or the psychiatrists could not hope to meet a cross-section of these people, and not merely that they could

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never observe them under their normal living conditions. But, more than that, they could only observe them from without; they could describe their behavior, or relate their dreams, or discuss the theories of the etiology of this phenomenon. But they could never feel what it means to be one of them nay, one of us. They could never know the invisible wall that separates the group from a mainstream of society. They could never know the longing in the heart of a young man (or woman), who feels that he is an outsider amongst the very people who love him; who feels that he is accepted by a family that does not know him and that would reject him in a moment if they could see through his mask. There could never be an understanding of homosexuality in this society unless those within the group described the group, even as those outside were doing.

Not that this was the first such effort. A few case histories in the medical literature consisted of diaries and letters, but they were brief, descriptive rather than analytical, and could not pretend to be a homosexual's view of life. A subjective study, entitled The Invert and signed by "Anomaly," had appeared, but it was published by a medical house, it had had no circulation or influence among laymen (homosexual and hetero), and it suffered from many defects among others, a basic acceptance of the necessity of the homosexual's carrying a cross in an antisexual society. For obviously, a work that states that there can be no proper and ethically righteous sex act outside of the sacraments of the marriage bed — such a work can offer the homosexual only further confusion and guilt, and must make a reader doubt the forthrightness and honesty of the author. Then, there was Gide's Corydon, once published in only a few copies for private circulation, but now available in many languages and in numerous editions.

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