uality is discussed fully and unprissily. There is a fascinating bit on how Symonds searched out Ulrichs, who could be termed the founder of our movement, only to find him completely withdrawn from the movement and editing a journal in Latin. Also fascinating are the contacts and correspondence with other literary bisexuals of the time. This book contains the only statement I have seen on the homosexuality of a longtime suspect, Sir Edmund Gosse.

The material on Symonds has always been written as if everybody had reservations about him as a person. This author is no exception, and her detailed picture of him explains why. He was often two-faced, devious, and snobbish. The worst thing was his tattling (at a time when he knew he himself was homosexual) to his father of an affair between a schoolmate and the schoolmaster who his father hounded from that and other jobs.

As with Proust, Gide and Stein, Symonds inherited money, was not dependent on any job, and so was not super-secretive about his abnormality. Not only his wife and father knew about it but the four daughters, who regarded their father's romances with "affectionate amusement," a bizarre situation.

This biographer had access to, and drew freely from, Symond's memoirs which cannot be published until 1976. She says they have to do mainly with his homosexual life. While they may be interesting for leads and as personal homosexual narrative, they probably will not be as valuable as this judicious all-around biography.

A.E.S.

THE LESBIAN IN AMERICA by Donald Webster Cory, with an introduction by Albert Ellis, Ph.D., New York, 1964, 288pp., Citadel, $5.95.

The Lesbian in America by Donald

one

Webster Cory, with a preface by Dr. Albert Ellis, Ph.D., may serve the personal ends of Dr. Ellis and Mr. Cory, but does no service to the Lesbian in America or anywhere else.

Dr. Ellis is pleased to state that "an objective study of full fledged lesbians (as well as of fixed male homosexuals) would show that many or most of them are not merely neurotic, but are actually borderline or outright psychotics." Such a study might bear out Dr. Ellis' thesis. Again, it might not. However, it is an oft-repeated warning in textbooks on scientific method that the preconceptions or predelictions of the investigator or experimenter may influence not only the form and conditions of the experiment, but the interpretation of the results.

To judge by the case of Joan R., which Dr. Ellis cites as an example of one of his cures, he is unable to distinguish between homosexual activity as just one more act of rebellion, which in this case it clearly is, and true homosexuality. He, like Cory and Bergler, equates distressing manners, financial instability, sordidly untidy living quarters and, above all, social and sexual associations which will lead at least to embarrassment and in many cases to entanglement with the police, with typical homosexuality.

Since I know that happy, financially responsible, and socially acceptable homosexuals exist, I can only assume that Ellis, Bieber, Bergler, et al, are judging from the small neurotic (psychotics are by definition not worried about their problems) sample that falls into their hands. However, the priapic Dr. Ellis admittedly has a stake in curing real or imagined homosexuals and in the hope that he may give these troubled people some comfort, we will dismiss him with a caveat but what about Mr. Cory?

Mr. Cory has some problems-personal problems. Mr. Cory wants to be