it is likely to be intensified in a situation where a portion of the population is seething with a sense of continued humiliation and injustice. A Negro man, who had been forced by a white man when he was only 8, recently spent $50 which he could not afford to enable the pimp referred to above to provide him with an 8-year-old white boy. "Turning up an 8-year-old boy isn't easy," the pimp reported, "especially when you know he's going to get busted open and hurt plenty. But in this town you can arrange anything for three ten dollar bills." While we cannot justify any such episodes, we can in a way "understand" them, in a situation where the emotional demand for racial justice far exceeds the supply. This emotion is expressed in demonstrations, strikes, riots, and in such personal acts of retaliation and revenge. At this moment in New York, and perhaps other such cities, there are many white boys subjected to these emotional thrusts which cannot be discharged in more healthy ways, at least not yet.

The reaction of some whites, however, is more difficult to explain. J mentioned the cases earlier of nearly a dozen southern white men who were now in the north living with Negroes who beat them. "I would never let a white man beat me," one of them said. "But the intense sensations I feel when he beats me, I could never have imagined." These men are homosexuals, and the question their experiences raises is: when do homosexuals want to be beaten? Does anyone, normally, ever want to be whipped? Perhaps sexual pleasure from such pain is always the result of the addition of other emotions. such as the highly emotion charged situation of race. We are not here. of course, discussing the dynamics of masochism, which are adequately treated elsewhere. But there is some evidence in the experience discovered in these recent interviews, that (1)

one

among homosexuals, racial guilt feelings may lead to a wish to be beaten, and (2) among heterosexual males racial guilt feelings may lead one to submit sexually to a member of another race.

Much of what has here been written thus far has said little about the extent to which the relaxing of racial taboos, may make it possible for normal interracial couples to come into existence. Certainly it is now easier for white and Negro to associate together socially, go to theatres and restaurants together, and to live together. With the relaxation of many prohibitions, Negro men are marrying white girls and vice versa larger numbers. Natural homosexual friendships between white and Negro are also more frequent and possible. We would not want to suggest that there are sadistic and masochistic elements present to exaggerated proportions in every interracial relationship. Yet the picture painted by James Baldwin in Another Country is a compelling one. I know happily married men and women who find their marriage continually threatened from within, precisely at this moment when such interracial marriages are less threatened from social pressures without. Emotions built up across centuries of slavery and injustice and inequality exist deep in the subconscious of every person, much more than he can ever realize. And these emotions are especially likely to be present in homosexual affairs, perhaps in part because the social disapproval of the community at large not only exists, but is intensified in an interracial situation. I spoke recently with a well educated, sophisticated Negro who has lived some years with a white friend in what has been one of the happiest relationships. Recently, however, when little Negro children have been jailed and murdered in the south, he has found himself burdened by feelings that have overwhelmed