Race and Sex -Andrew Bradbury

James Baldwin, in Another Country, is but one of a number of current writers who is discovering a homosexual dimension to the current Negro revolution.

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On one hand we note the guilty feelings of the white youth, sometimes expressed by his willingness to be "cannon fodder" as the New York Times, July 3, 1964, quoted one white civil rights worker in Mississippi. At other times these feelings. of guilt are expressed in a need to atone for injustices committed by whites upon Negroes in the past. As hinted by Baldwin, it is interesting to note how many young whites submitting sexually to Negroes are southerners. Recently in New York, I checked into nearly a dozen cases of "homosexual marriages" between Negroes and whites in which it was well known that the Negro partner was regularly beating his white partner, and in every case but one the white was a southerner.

This, of course, is only a natural reversing in these times of the wellknown, if widely ignored sexual exploitation of Negro by white in the south. The exploitation of the Negro girl by the white man is now being discussed and admitted; the lightskinned Negro everywhere present, presents evidence that can not be denied. Much less has been said about the opposite, the frequent insistence

of white males that Negro youths submit to homosexual relations. This has its roots in slave days, and across the centuries whenever one group has slaves-that is, has power of life and death to do anything they wish to another group, there has always been homosexual exploitation of younger, better looking male slaves. We cannot deny the evidence of this in the American south given by Kyle Onstott in Mandingo. He tells of the teen age white boy who insists that his family purchase for him two lightskinned slave youngsters that he lusts after. He tells of the slave dealers lust when he sees beautiful Negro twin boys, whom he sells to a Frenchman in New Orleans, who also sends for the mother of the twin boys, in the hope that if he purchases her and keeps the twins sucking her milk the twins will stay younger and freshskinned longer. In subsequent books, Onstott has continued to expand the picture, extending it in The Tattooed Road, to Cuba and Africa.

And after slave days in the American south, there was hardly a southern city where colored boys were not readily delivered up to white men at hotels and saloons. Haywood Patterson, recounting his experiences in Scottsboro Boy suggests that boy street-walkers were the products of the southern prison system:

"But there was no reform school

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