of sexual communication proceeds another step. The police inspector takes Querelle to a lonely spot. On the way the sailor communicates by tone of voice, glance, wrinkles of skin, twist of mouth and the police inspector replies (also in non-verbal ways, but also verbally) to express his authority. He beats the boy, and then drawing his weapon demands oral intercourse. "The hot anger of the policeman must serve to facilitate the unrolling of the drama." The young sailor speaks without words of his guilt, in the way he fights and submits. The policeman prepares to assert his authority, knowing himself master and enjoying the power of life or death which he holds over the youngster. He revels in his cop's role, fascinated by what is demanded of him by something unknown in the soul of the silent boy, who feels as if he were in a panther's cage. The policeman senses that the boy wants to kneel abjectly and make a confession that he can not put in words. He jostles the saliva in his mouth, enjoying and dramatizing the idea of the amorous debauch which is a new experience for both of them. He feels the boy's despair before his authority and he uses this power to require the boy to submit and make his non-verbal confession.

Literature is full of illustrations of sex as celebration, communicating joy. One is reminded, however, of a true incident of a small town high school football team that was looking for an orphan boy to be mascot-waterboy. Discreet inquiries as to why it had to be an orphan revealed that the team feared a boy with a father, because in the school bus on the way home from the game, the team always celebrated victory by "f————— the waterboy." They would rehearse and relive the moments of victory to a point of sexual excitement in the joy of victory. Sometimes they also sub-

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jected boys who "goofed," but this rarely reached the point of intense joy and celebration of the Sultan who conquered Constantinople (a scene hardly accurately portrayed in a recent Finnish novel) who demanded the fourteen-year-old son of the Greek leader, Notaras, and indeed sent word that the Greek father should come and watch the sexual conquest and enjoyment of his son. The custom of giving each soldier a conquered boy for his pleasure to celebrate the night of victory goes back, of course, to Roman days, when many commanders allowed each soldier to have one catamite boy.1

This incident calls to mind the varied emotions expressed through sexual acts in the novels of James Baldwin, especially Another Country, where white and Negro persons find it impossible to have ordinary conversation and experience, because of the intensity of racial injustice which the Negro characters have felt. "They fought each other with their hands and their voices and then with their bodies: and the one storm was like the other." The author says that it was not love which the Negro man and white woman felt during these acts of love; "drained and shaking, utterly unsatisfied" he fled to the bars. Over and over the novel repeats the theme of bitter, angry, hard-felt injustice and the sexual efforts to communicate the misery of the trodden-upon soul. The characters, most of them at least. search for a love to communicate, but meanwhile they communicate what they feel in cruel and brutal ways.

These illustrations are probably sufficient to make the simple point which this essay has proposed. One could cite many other novels, and the varied thoughts and emotions which are communicated. One recalls, for example.

1Modern armies also rape in celebration of victory, and in Le Peau Malaparte tells how the victorious Moroccans in the allied armies in Italy insisted upon having young Italian boys, even though their commanders threatened a death sentence.

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