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.

COUNSELING THE INVERT, by John R. Cavanagh, M. D., Bruce Publishing Co., Milwaukee, 1966, 306 pp., $7.50

Dr. Cavanagh is a noted psychiatrist, a special lecturer for the School of Sacred Theology of the Catholic University of America, and the author of a number of respected texts along counseling & psychiatric lines. But, since he certainly would take pains to warn his to warn his public against the moral dangers inherent in ONE's publications, readers of ONE should also be warned to expect in his book precisely what his background in Roman Catholicism suggests -a predictably narrow, biased, and nonobjective point of view.

This is all the more a pity because of the obviously extensive amounts of research, clinical experience and dedication which have been put into this volume. The first 15 chapters, or "clinics," as he calls them, are goldmines of information on current and historical studies of the subject, and on scientific and doctrinal opinion, almost outdoing Dr. Marmor's Sexual Inversion in their comprehensiveness. The notes are most instructive, the bibliographies truly impressive. The reader might even be able to tolerate Clinic 11, in which Dr. Cavanagh asks -not "IS a Homosexual Unsuitable for the Religious Life?" but "WHY IS a Homosexual Unsuitable for the Religious Life?", and then, and then, having presumed his unsuitability to begin with, liste nine reasons, most

of them of a pragmatic variety, in support of his assertion. But on reaching Clinic 16, Dr. Cavanagh discards the mask of objectivity completely, and exposes, naked for all to see, the ancient bigotry of the church.

He begins by commenting that statistical frequency of a sex act, such as a homosexual act, is not a guide to its morality or normality, asserting that the "conceptional" (reproductive) & the "relational" aspects of coition "may never be entirely and permanently separated." Any coition, he says, not reproductive as to purpose or intent (which plainly categorizes all homosexual and many heterosexual acts) is contra naturam (against nature) irrespective of statistical frequency. Then, using familiar semantic tactics, the "unnatural" is quickly eased into the framework of the "immoral," and this piece of verbal legerdemain commonplace enough in popular arguments over sexual morality is here so blandly accomplished that only the alert reader will notice the transformation.

In his discussion of "the moral question," Doctor Cavanagh shows a limited knowledge of homophiles comparable to Doctors Bergler, Bieber and others, and like many paychiatrists dealing with this subject, he formulates field theories and conclusions from the limited evidence of clinical cases. In order to pass "proper judgment," he goes on, " (the moralist) must bear in mind that in most cases (of sex

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