BOOKS

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

BOD

FFT

RETURN TO LESBOS by Valerie Taylor, Tower Publications, 1963, Fifty Cents, 189 pp.

At last a lesbian novel has been written wherein the heroine neither commits suicide nor homicide, she doesn't go to a psychiatrist to get "cured," or get religion to help her squelch her impulses. In short, a lesbian novel with a happy ending has, at last, been found. High time!

Miss Valerie Taylor's Return To Lesbos, written as a sequel to her novel, Stranger On Lesbos, or one might venture to say, written as a penance for her former work, is an outstanding, unforgettable contribution to lesbian literature.

In her Stranger On Lesbos Miss Taylor ran through the whole gamut of "what the editor wants to make the fishes bite-the 'fish queens,' that is. The married woman, Frances, bored and ill-fitted for marriage with a man, finds herself involved in an affair with Bake, a girl. It was a sincere affair, but obviously Frances lacked the moral courage to break off her marriage with Bill. So feeling very righteous and above all, "secure" Frances went back to hubby Bill and son, Bob. "Dear, familiar, safe, the stuff of day-by-day living," as Miss Taylor has Frances describe dear old Bill.

In Return To Lesbos Miss Taylor decided to chuck all that "secure" stuff and swap it in for a much more

valuable commodity-a thing called love.

As the story opens, Frances is still trapped in her joyless marriage with husband, Bill. Son, Bob, has mercifully been married off-he's out of the way.

Bill has just been offered a business promotion in a small town in Illinois, with a beautiful home provided and all. They move. And there Frances meets THE WIVES, the numberless array of spouses of the other executives. THE WIVES put the finishing touches on Frances' despair and plight with their endless marital chatter.

Plunging out in sheer desperation, at last, Frances finds what she is looking for, via the boy, Vince, who owns a book store in the town. In this desperate plunge Frances remembers what a friend told her once, "if you really want someone to love, you'll find someone. Never fails."

Vince is gay and he has a girl friend. Erika, also gay, who often comes to the store. Frances and Erika meet, and from the very first, Frances feels that she has met the girl whom she could really love, and moreover for whom she could make sacrifices.

Erika, who has previously lost a lover through death, is not so easily convinced. Erika has decided at this point that happiness is only for other people.

But through Vince's intervention and Frances' dogged persistence, Erika

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