of Brazil, the Arab Shieks of Morocco, the Berbers of Khartoum and the Fasimbas of Zululand.

Woven into the patterns of these cultures where representative characters practice the "live and let live" doctrine as they freely demonstrate attraction among members of the same sex are many "select" but typical tourists, career diplomats and bored but not so idle rich from America, England and Rome. They are busy soaking up the sights and kicking over the traces as they unashamedly sample the mores and the flesh of many national groups little known to them, although we are all seeing their names in the headlines today. Sometimes these worldly visitors get in trouble, sometimes not; but more often get away with a lot with only minor embarrassment and expense. The whole is a humorous, exciting and highly informative travel adventure, with plenty of surprises for those of us who have never been there. Who would guess, for instance, that the tapioca pudding we eat is a first-rate aphrodisiac when prepared from the natural root by the Urubus of the Amazon? Or that Berber Sultans still buy boy slaves of lavish beauty in the Catamite Bazaars of the Sudan? Or that two bull elephants are gay lovers living on a private island of their own at the foot of Victoria Falls? Not us. But all of these things and many more leap from the pages of Camel's Fare well with piercing reality in a fictionalized quest of an erudite. Bostonian who is on his way to Natal to learn why his uncle had been royally honored by the Zulu natives a generation before. He learns the answer-and furthermore he receives the same royal mantle from the tribe.

NEW STUDY ON HOMOSEXUAL MALES

A MINORITY, A Report on the Life of THE MALE HOMOSEXUAL IN GREAT BRITAIN. Prepared for the British Social Biology Council by Gordon Westwood. With a Foreword by Sir John Wolfenden, New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1960. 216 pages. $7.00. Reviewed by Jack Parrish.

This is perhaps the most important non-fiction al work on the male homosexual to appear in several years. Most of the studies on the subject which have previously appeared in book form have had very little statistical backing. Usually they have been based upon the observation of a very few highly disturbed individuals who have applied for psychological treatment. When material has been compiled over a fairly large area, it usually has been published in articles in journals with which the general public has no contact, as with those of Dr. Evelyn Hooker.

Mr. Westwood's report is based on interviews with one hundred and twenty male homosexuals. The persons interviewed ranged in age from eighty-four

mattachine REVIEW

to eighteen, and came from all walks of life. While most of them lived in London at the time of their interviews, they had usually come to it from other cities, others from villages. Over half of them were given a follow-up interview a year after their first contact with the interviewer.

All the phases of homophile existence are covered. The family and environmental backgrounds, the earliest sexual experiences, attempts to combat the tendency, heterosexual interests, type of sexual adjustment, the legal situation, work and leisure, etc. Through it all the writer carefully and precisely distinguishes between the definite facts uncovered and his own personal theorizations.

Everything stated as a fact is substantiated by a graph giving precise statistics. Unlike so many studies in the past, and this is one of the most exceptional things about the book, Mr. Vestwood does not cite a few extreme cases to support the views of the school of psychological thought to which he adheres, and say nothing about the ones which do not support his views. All too often in the past homosexuals have been helpless figures of straw in the hands of psychiatrists and psychologists. If a writer subscribed to one school of though the generalized on the basis of the cases that supported his views, if he followed another he cited still other types of cases. Since the homosexual has no way to make his voice heard publicly he has had to listen helplessly while the authorities argued and had a field day with his life. Both he and everyone in his circle might know the inaccuracy of what was said, but there was no way for them to publicly disprove it. Another great flaw in most previous studies has been that they did not cover a wide enough area. They were usually of individuals rather than an attempt to see the group as a whole.

In an appendix Mr. Westwood points out what he feels to be deficiences of the report. For one thing, because of the lack of time and money, his organization could not interview any more individuals than they did. As he says, no one knows precisely how large the homosexual population is. Figures have been suggested by Kinsey and others, but because of the present social and legal stigma there is no way of taking a census and finding out the exact amount.

Nor was it possible for the interviewer to contact married men who have occasional homosexual experiences. As he says, even Kinsey found this the hardest type of material to obtain from interviewees. And, there' are also the persons who, for lack of a better term, are loosely termed "bisexuals," that is, un married ostensibly heterosexual persons who occasionally indulge in homosexual relations about which they are extremely secretive. Such persons, as Mr. Westwood states, usually have no homosexual friends and io not mix in such groups. Persons in these categories were lifficult to contact