BOOKS

COMPENDIOUS BUT WORTH IT

P.,

THEY WALK IN SHADOW, by J. D. Mercer. Comet Press Books, New York, 1959. 573 $5.95. Reviewed by Wallace Maxey, editor, SEX & CENSORSHIP magazine; and author of "Man Is a Sexual Being.

"THEY WALK IN SHADOW' is really a compendious collection of the views held by scholars in various schools of thought on the fact of 'sex deviation.' To this compendium the author inserts his personal views, criticisms, conclusions, and suggestions for dealing further with the problem that has plagued the social, academic, and political orders of mankind for centuries.

To the student of sexology, the book will have special value. In one volume, J. D. Mercer has adroitly assembled 'views' given by the originators of such varying opinions as Freud, Stekel, Hirschfeld, Henry and Albert Ellis. If one can wade thru the 573 pages, he will come to the conclusion there is very little agreement on the subject of 'sex deviation' in the academic world and far less in the social or political order.

To the reader who is familiar with 'The Homosexual In America' by Donald Webster Cory (Greenburg, N.Y.), I suggest reading THEY WALK IN SHADOW. Cory's Book is a sort of motherly thing. The advice given in general, assumes the 'sex deviate' is outside religious-social-political structure of the contemporary setup. The best he can do is play straight, even though his heart isn't in it. He should not be so foolish as to think anyone can presently change the status quo.

Mercer takes a far more militant stand on the issue in THEY WALK IN SHADOW. He would agree with Rene Guyon that the 'sex deviate', heterosexual or homosexual or both combined, does 'have the right to estab lish international organizations and procedures to combat and suppress throughout the world the sexual conceptions that many disapprove.' Mercer is definitely in the pro-sexual field. He is opposed to more laws that would tighten the reins in controlling sex behavior. Again, with Guyon, The probably would admit that humanity in general has allowed itself to become a 'slave of the prohibitory laws that govern it.'

Mercer's opinions will be challenged by many authorities, both legal and academic. He will be denounced by the 'disease school' of thought in psychiatry, psychology and psychosomatics, for his treatment of 'sex deviation. In his approach he nearly opens the door of the existential school of psychoanalysis but never quite makes the grade.

The greatest criticism I have of the format of the book is its lack of mattachine REVIEW

index. Perhaps when the second edition is published this may be added. The chapters are too long, and should be broken down under sub-headings. On the whole THEY WALK IN SHADOW is a very courageous addition to thinking in the world of sexology:

THE GIDE OF JAPAN

CONFESSIONS OF A MASK, by Yukio Mishima. Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1958. Translated into English by Meredith Weatherby. Reviewed by Anton Desmannes

'CONFESSIONS OF A MASK' was first published in the original Japanese ten years ago. The 33 year old author, who is both novelist and playwright, ranks high among Japan's post-war men of letters. Readers of English can be grateful to the transaltor for making available this remarkable work by a young writer of whom Christopher Isherwood has declared, 'Here is a Japanese Gide.'

The novel appears to be autobiographical, The narrator-hero, Kochan, is reared beside the sickbed of a neurotic grandmother. Exercising the Oriental mother-in-law's immemorial privilege of tyranny, she virtually kidnaps this sickly grandson and crushes him to her bosom with a possessiveness that rules out all play with other boys. 'At the age of twelve I had a true-love sweetheart, aged sixty.' The always delicate Kochan contracts tuberculosis in infancy, and nearly dies of an attack of autointoxication just before his fourth birthday.

In such an atmosphere the nascent sexuality of an imaginative child can hardly escape the morbid. Kochan's childhood dreams are haunted with 'death and pools of blood and muscular flesh,' fed by dueling scenes from his reading. A painting of the martyred St. Sebastian sets the precocious boy on the road to self-understanding, concretizing an early-awakened sense of agedy into a sense of alienation from the mass of humanity. The atmosphere of alienation-'my grief at being eternally excluded-has seldom been described so truthfully in the literature of homosexuality. For the homosexual's sense of exclusion differs in kind from that felt by other 'minorities,' as does the homosexual's 'strange, piercing unrest' at the thought of growing old, an emotion also not confined to homosexuals but having special poignancy for them. The pressure of society and the power of the man-and-maid romances that form the bulk of Kochan's youthful reading are so compelling that the boy is long unaware of the true nature of his 'difference'—a universally attested phenomenon among homosexuals growing up in a non-homosexual environment.

Yet unmistakable signs point the direction in which Kochan's deepest desires are oriented. In stories it is always the prince rather than the 23