it could only bring us to our common destiny of social rejection if our thoughts could be revealed.
Physically we have no common denominator. I am a huge, physically powerful man in my mid-forties. I have met others who are slight and and graceful. Some of us are important figures in the business, entertainment, artistic and athletic worlds. Some are common laborers performing the most physically demanding of tasks. Some are students, merchants, salesmen, bums.
Our dreams are as varied as our persons. A correspondent in the East adores taffeta gowns of the most elaborate style, enjoys being wigged and corsetted, gowned and made up in the manner of the gracious lady attending a ball. Hundreds of us would enjoy being French maids in short-skirted black satin or taffeta uniforms, bending to the will of severe mistresses. My delight is in being
BOOKS
BOOD
LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN by Hubert Selby, Jr., Grove Press, New York, 1964, $5.00.
Last Exit to Brooklyn, a collection of short stories of varying length about life and death and violence and lust and squalor and ambition in a great city in one of the world's most progressive and enlightened countries, is, indeed a frightening book. It is not a book for the squeamish nor the easily shocked; at times it may re-
dressed in satin by satin-clad accomplices, having my breasts gently stroked through the lovely, gleaming, everso-tactually-satisfying fabric and being thoroughly aroused. Another friend loves the feeling of nylon hose and panties. A bloomer fetishist in the southeast, a lover of purple velvet in the mid-west, a Canadian who draws pictures of obvious men in skirts, the lines broken by male equipment, a Chicagoan who adores sheer garments and jewelry-these are a few of the hundreds I've met in person or through the mails, who share my hunger and my lonely secrecy.
Occasionally we find someone who loves us enough to encourage and assist us in fulfilling our needs, a man who will portray the man to our woman, a woman who will accept us as a sister, platonic or lesbian. But usually we are alone, alone with our secret desire and our unalleviated, ever-powerful dream.
quire sheer determination just to keep on reading it but even more to lay it aside for long.
Most of the men in these stories are brutes or thugs or faggots; most of the women are whores or slatterns or exhausted beaten wives who might better be whores. All are struggling in some perverted way to achieve some kind of destiny. There are both pathos and meaning in their struggles, but their choice of goals-twisted and perverted-fills us with a feeling of horror which is greater than the horror induced by the violence of the action itself. For Georgette, a transvestite faggot, her great and rather touching romantic ambition is to make it with Vinnie, a neighborhood tough-but not just to make it, but to be loved and to walk hand in hand with him in the twilight; for Tralala. who thinks her enormous breasts make her irresistible to any man, suc-
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