GILBERT CANT, associate editor of TIME, reviewed the Bergler book in the January 7 issue of THE NEW LEADER. He joined the successful New York psychiatrist in pointing at "Cory and his ilk--who are now coming out of the woodwork with increasing numbers...to deceive us and seduce more of the innocent..."

The Malad

Homosexuality: Disease or Way of Life? und Bergler.

Jang. 302 pp. $5.00.

of Sexual Inversion

BEETHOVEN had syphilis. Robert Louis Stevenson had tuberculosis. Dozens of other great figures in the pageant of arts and letters have suf. fered from chronic and sometimes vile diseases. Yet none of them, so far as I can recall, has ever rated his disease as a badge of pride, or sought deliberately to spread it among those who, happily, were uninfected. (By. ron once expressed a yearning for TB, but that was in one of his less responsible, more Byronic moments.)

The question before us in this book is twofold: Is homosexuality a dis ease, and is it permissible to try to spread it? To the first, Edmund Bergler, a Manhattan psychoanalyst, answers an unequivocal yes; to the second, an equally unequivocal no.

It is well to recognize at once that

Reviewed by Gilbert Cant

Dr. Bergler is far from being either an unimpassioned or impartial wit ness. We are entitled to take cognizance of the fact that, while basking in the limelight from his Broadway analysands, Dr. Bergler still feels such great need for the hotter Klieg lights of personal publicity that he is forever writing books on whatever is uppermost in the layman's mind

frigidity, marriage and divorce, Kinsey, the middle-aged man and his past-bloom mistress. Having read Freud and some of the post-Freudians who have dared to analyze Freud himself, we are entitled to wonder what intimate psychodynamic need Bergler satisfies by his all-out attack on homosexuality. But when we have examined the man and questioned his motives, we are left with a dis

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branch as the result of some twisting of the twig in childhood. He has no hesitation in branding homosexuality as a perversion-though he must know that his use of that word will lose him the agreement of many sup posedly open-minded readers. There are, he says flatly, "no healthy homosexuals."

Along the line, Bergler has to make a distinction between the homosexual hose disease has determined his "lifestyle" and the ignorant, heterosexually frustrated adolescent who stumbles into homosexuality for a single "outlet," in Kinsey's laboratory-refrigerator term. This leads Bergler into a violent attack on Kin. sey for having, he alleges, encouraged

comfiting body of facts, which re mains valid even if we were to put Bergler's opinions aside and I don't think they should be put aside. I remember clearly my own shocked surprise, in the davs shortly after high school, on learning that some of my best "male" friends were practicing homosexuals. Equally fresh in memory is the glow of righteousness that I felt on deciding that this was a permissible and tolerable deviation since these people kept their private affairs private and asked only to be left alone on a "live and let live" basis. They did not try to make converts. I remember just as clearly my surprise (as an immi grant) to discover that this tolerance was unfashionable in the United homosexuality—and perhaps pushed States: The American Legion mental many borderline cases across the diity prevailed; it branded all deviates vide-by demonstrating the statisti as perverts and suggested that flog cal normality of an occasional homo. ging at the tail of a cart was too sexual episode. good for them-they should be machine-gunned and buried in quick lime. Since World War II, there has been a marked increase in overt homosexuality, and homosexuals are openly seeking to make converts to their abnormal pattern of life.

Here I think Bergler's hostility (of which he has a surprising amount for a thoroughly analyzed analyst) is pushing him so far so fast that he ignores his own best evidence. The seeds of homosexuality are usually sown, as he has shown, in infancy. Is Bergler. in condemning this The shoots are well sprouted by ado. most recent trend, turning the clock lescence. The number of men in Kin. back? I do not think so. He believes, sey's locked files who had one or two as do virtually all authorities on the homosexual experiences but who are subject (whether sociologists, anthronow happily ensconced in the bosom pologists, biologists, psychologists or of heterosexuality must vastly outpsychiatrists), that homosexuality is number those who have slid all the not an hereditary trait and that no way into lifelong deviation-prob. body can be born with it. It is, thereably in exactly the same proportion fore, not a natural way of life, but a as heterosexuals outnumber homodeviation which develops in the sexuals in the whole population.

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