Chester Alan Arthur III, writer of the letter below to Albert Ellis, Ph.D., is a grandson of a former president of the United States. Mr. Arthur has written a book, "The Circle of Sex," now ready for publication. In the book, he sees a variety of sexual types in males and females blending into one large circular continuum, and describes these types in terms of the hours on a clock. These varied types, Mr. Arthur says, are a part of a natural scheme, and represent beterosexual and homosexual men and women, from the slight to the extreme in each. Mr. Arthur's letter was prompted by a critique by Dr. Ellis which appeared in the June 1959 REVIEW.

DEAR DR. ELLIS.........

My dear Dr. Ellis: Just now I have read with interest your pontifical, excathedra (and therefore, no doubt, infallible) pronouncement on the opinions of my friend, Blanche Baker, M. D., Ph.D. Having also been a good friend of a predecessor of your name, but of a much humbler, calmer and seeking mindHavelock Ellis, M.D.~ I cannot help wondering what that wonderful old man would have thought of your cock-sureness. I can see that humane, loveable smile, and hear him. mutter: "I wonder how he can be so certain that he is right?"

I met Havelock Ellis through his close friend and fellow Fabian, Edward Carpenter. I can remember Havelock's saying, during our first talk in that book-cluttered study in Brixton sometime in 1923, "People who think that all homosexuals are neurotic ought to meet Eddy (Carpenter). A saner, more balanced, happy, contented man I have never met. And yet he has never felt the least desire for intercourse with a woman, though many attractive women have tried to go to bed with him."

I had met Edward Carpenter through Mrs. Despard, sister of Lord French, sometime Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. My wife and I were dining in a house near Dublin shared with Maud Gonne (to whom Yeats wrote most of his poetry). Mrs. Despard was asking me whom I had come all the way across the ocean to sit at the feet of-Yeats? Dunsany? A.E.? I replied that if I had hero worship for any one man in the British Isles it would be Walt Whitman's disciple, Edward Carpenter. "Oh, Eddy!" the old lady exclaimed, "Dear Eddy! I walked with him at the head of 80,000 people in Manchester, marching for women's suffrage. It's so ridiculous of people to think that all homogenic men hate women. There is no one more beloved by the working class of both sexes than Eddy. Women particularly feel his warmth, his sympathy, his tolerance, and, above all, his inward peace." (This opinion is shared, by the way, by the great Canadian alienist, Maurice Bucke, M.D.) Mrs. Despard had somehow mislaid Carpenter's new address, so she gave me a letter in care of the Independent

Labor Party in Sheffield. There, in the industrial heart of England, I was asked to tell several hundred workers

why I, as an American, was so proIrish Republic. And I was amazed how I was cheered even though I pul-

led no punches. Next day I went down with some members to Guildford, and they pointed out Carpenter's cottage. He received me as a long-lost son, not because of Mrs. Despard's letter, not because his trip to America to see Whitman had been during my grandfather's administration, but be cause he recognized in me a kindred spirit yearning toward real democracy, toward a sane, humane attitude toward all minorities-women, Negroes, Jews, homophiles. My then wife, niece of the Columbia biologist, Edmund Wilson, liked the old man as much as I did, and later became an equally close friend of Havelock Ellis, who later gave us a letter to a “Design for Living" trio in Switzerland, rather like his own triangular arrangement with his wife and Olive Shriner. He was so pleased when Noel Coward's play came out, and said he thought people of the future would be freed from the taboos of Noah's Arkthat everything must always be "two, by two."

Carpenter was by no means the only completely homophile man I have met who was happy and well-adjusted. But our ridiculous prejudice makes it impossible to name the ones still alive or with relatives. If every single homogenic or ambigenic person had the courage to admit his own feelings as Edward Carpenter did, the world would be indeed astonished. And yet

nothing happened to him, even though he states in his biography which one of the "histories" in Havelock Ellis' book is his (Carpenter's). It is the furtiveness forced by society on people without the extraordinary courage of Carpenter that makes these people neurotic and unhappy. When the attitude of society changes, you will find that homophiles will be just as balanced and happy as anyone else.

Havelock Ellis agreed with me that originally it was a question largely of geography. In Greece, a rocky country with many inlets of the sea, not fertile enough to support a large population, and where so many of the men were sailors, sex was considered for its re-creative value as well as its pro-creative. In Palestine, at that time part of the "Fertile Crescent," the Hebrews were constantly in fear of being enslaved Egypt or Assyria, every sex act had to be procreative. Look at the complacence with which Jehovah regarded Lot's daughters' getting their father drunk so that they might conceive by him!

I do agree with you that Dr. Baker makes an untenable statement when she says that homos are "almost universally gifted people." This is like saying that all Negroes can sing.

(Editor's note: Dr. Baker prefaced that remark with the important qualifi cation, "But the people who come to mewould say that almost univer sally my homosexuals are the artists, the gifted people, etc.). Here she is, like the great Freud (I quote Havelock Ellis) "prejudiced by her clientele.” the brainless little faggots who cre

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