The following is the preface to the new U. S. edition of AGAINST THE LAW, written by Max Lerner of the New York Post

Preface

This is a book that leaves a scar on the memory. It took courage for Peter Wildeblood to set down so nakedly, for posterity to read, not only the fact of being a homosexual, but also the whole painful story of his involvement with Eddie McNally, his arrest and trial, his prison ordeal.

To be sure, it was on the court record and in the newspapers for a spell. But where another man might have hoped that time would erase the memory and traces of it, the author has chosen to keep them alive-partly to confront people with the ugly visage of what the law, the police, and the prisons are doing in the name of morality; partly also, one guesses, to confront himself and come to terms with himself.

The problem of the homosexuals in our society is one of the seemingly insoluble problems of our time. To deal with it we have need of an imaginative effort of insight, and a large measure of compassion. From the homosexual, in turn, it demands self-knowledge and a kind of stoicism in the face of the hostility of others and his own tangled plight. With the example of the author's stoic honesty before him, what reader can fail to be stirred to compassion, or to get at least the glimmer of a new insight?

For the American reader there are some differences to be noted between the treatment of homosexuals in Great Britain and in the United States. The sharpest difference is in the role of the police. In America the surveillance of sexual behavior is left to the local authorities: it is not the concern of any Home Office or of a national police administration like Scotland Yard. Neither the Home Office nor the police

REQUESTS FOR SPEAKERS: Mattachine Society often receives requests for speakers to address other groups. On Cot. 14, a representative served on a sex panel discussion at San Jose (Calif.) State College. In New York, another representative will address the National Council of Jew ish Women in Queensboro on November 17.

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come off well in this book: they are shown to be capable of harassing tactics, of driving ruthlessly to get a conviction, even of doctoring some of the evidence. As for the prison administration, the vivid documentation of its blunders and stupidities would make the book notable if there were nothing else in it. Nor is it surprising that Home Office, courts, police, prisons, should all be drawn into the web of evil. Once you start with the proposition that men are to be punished for behavior in private that harms no one, all the rest follows: the spying, the search without warrants, the ingenuity about means and the blindness about ends. The infection spreads and becomes gangrenous. Even in the American case, the local police "vice-squads" have at times not hesitated to provoke the very conduct for which they then arrest their victim.

Nor can we Americans be proud of the influence of our own hysterias upon the wave of arrests of which the Lord Montagu case was part. Wildeblood is a good newspaperman, and there is an authentic ring in his narrative when he tells how a high Home Office official came back from talks with American security officers, who had impressed on him the need for rounding up homosexuals, on the theory that their presence infected the defense forces and made officials in "sensitive" government posts more vulnerable to blackmail and therefore prey for the Russians. It was the kind of tortured reasoning which found itself at home in a nation haunted by the "tortured problem," and still bedeviled by the baleful legend of Oscar Wilde.

The American experience was in some ways even zanier than that of the British. There was a period when the "State Department scandals" dominated the Washington scene, and when able officials all through the federal government were hounded out of jobs and careers under the guise of a campaign against Communism. As it happens my own interest as a student of homosexual behavior, and of national attitudes toward it, first began in earnest when I went to Washington to track down the truth of the crusade by Senators McCarthy and Wherry, and studied the operations of

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