the Vice Squad of the District of Columbia police. It is a curious fact that the ordeal of Peter Wildeblood should stand at the end of a circuitous train of events stretching from Oscar Wilde's blunder in pushing a libel suit, and taking a wide detour through the American security syndrome in the McCarthy era, and the episodes involving the atomic spies, until it reached two young men in London in their private, if also shabby and unhappy, relationship. History sometimes has a crazy logic and wild indirection of its own, and those who seek rationality in it will be frustrated.

As the author points out the British and the Americans stand almost alone, in the modern world, in their archaic legal prohibitions in the area of homosexuality and their fitful spells of intensity in carrying them out. They manage these things much better, for example, in Norway, Sweden, France, and the Netherlands. It is clear, of course, that the British and American laws on sexual offenses come from much the same sources in legal and religious history, and the barbarity of the statutes is also similar, although in America their absurdity has mostly meant their non-enforcement.

In at least one respect the British case is worse than the American: the British, as C. H. Rolph has pointed out, know terribly little in a factual way about the extent of the problem. To be sure, the police records show a dramatic tenfold increase in "reported offenses" in the quarter-century between 1931 and 1955. But this may not prove much nore than greater police zeal and greater public awareness of the problem. The British have never had a Kinsey statistical study, as the Americans have a study which, whatever its inadequacies, offered massive evidence that homosexuality is not a matter of the wilfulness of a few, to be broken by the police and the courts, but a widespread phenomenon which in its origin and its life-history is related to the emotional structure of the family and to other deeply rooted elements of contemporary life. What the British do have, to complicate the problem, is the "public school" tradition which the author movingly describes, which takes a boy away from his family at an early age, and

mattachine REVIEW

brings him up in an all-male society, where brutality is all too frequent.

In one respect, however, the British are ahead of the Americans. Since this book was written, the Wolfenden Committee has issued its report, which deals with homosexual offenses as well as with prostitution. It is notable that the committee recommendations jibe almost exactly with the basic position taken in this book. While agreeing that homosexuals who exploit minors must be punished, as well as those who make a nuisance of themselves in public places, the Report draws a sharp line there. Private homosexual relations between adults, it says, are their own private affair, and the police and courts would do well to keep out and leave them alone.

I might add that this represents what has been for some years the weight of opinion among psychologists, psychiatrists, welfare workers, legal thinkers, churchmen, and other serious students of sex and society on both sides of the ocean. Yet it has not prevailed to bring about a reform of the criminal law on sexual offenses in either nation. Even in Great Britain the Wolfenden Report is still only a Report, and none of the major parties has dared take the risk of pushing it into legislation. Judging by public opinion polls, the popular mood is still against making a formal change, although I agree with Wildeblood that in many concrete cases the people as a whole are more compassionate and understanding than their officials.

Much then still remains to be done in clarifying public understanding of this agonizing problem. My own study of it makes me believe that there is a greater chance for success from psychiatric treatment than Wildeblood seems to believe. In America, at least, there is a cautious but growing confidence among psychiatrists that the situation is not hopeless. But if further progress comes, it will be because of the fierce honesty and the stoic courage in books like this

one.

New York, July, 1959

MAX LERNER