BOOKS

Notices and reviews of books, ar. ticles, plays and poetry dealing with homosexuality and the sex variant. Readers are invited to send in reviews or printed matter for review.

& ARTH

BOSIE by Rupert Croft-Cooke, W. H. Allen, London, 1963, 406 pp., Index.

This often laughable and often horrifying biography of Lord Alfred Douglas is written in a furious white heat, mostly against that "vindictive little queen," Robert Ross.

That Douglas has been overly blamed for Wilde's downfall is obvious from The Letters of Oscar Wilde. Wilde's ethical code was a mess, and this book shows that Douglas' was also-and even worse. Living longer, into an over-ripe old age, Douglas brazened through life with his child-like personality, his vicious. anti-semitism and other hatreds, renouncing and denouncing homosexuality, marrying a rich wife who pensioned him off, suing for libel right and left. Our present biographer, Rupert Croft-Cooke, himself convicted almost a decade ago on homosexual charges, and Boise's friend for 25 years, has unintentionally written a damning chronicle. However, this book is a gold mine for literary homosexual name-dropping and gossip of that period that will be found no other place.

A. E. Smith

SEX-LIFE AND THE CRIMINAL LAW by John Roeburt. New York, Belmont Bks., 1963. 157 pp. $.50

I hope that many a reader, seeing

this paperback at the corner drugstore, will be led to question: "What am I doing here, among adulterers, fornicators, miscegenators, prosti tutes, rapists, sadists, murderers, psychopaths, exhibitionists, voyeurs, fetishists, pedophiles, necrophiles, nymphomaniacs, abortionists?" I hope you will ask this question, reader, and be shocked into awareness of the fact that in the eyes of the law (in all but two of the fifty states. in our country), that is where the homosexual, per se, belongs: among the criminal classes, the maladjusted, the sick, the guilty ones.

I hasten to add that such is not Mr. Roeburt's attitude toward the homosexual community. But, I have the impression that I am dealing with two books here: one a serious attack on judicial inequities, the other a somewhat more sensational and therefore more "marketable" product. As an example, the chapter dealing with sadism and lust murder may be a little too graphic in its description of acts which are virtually insane. -Yet their perpetrators are, after all, human beings: a fact which many jurors and judges overlook in their eagerness to cry, "They deserve to die!" This inhuman attitude should be unthinkable in a moral (or, for that matter, Christian) society.

Mr. Roeburt makes a strong case for reform in the area of legal juris-