in the vicinity of six o'clock-matriarchy! Is it surprising that Isis eclipses Horus and the White Goddess in the form of a "Blessed Virgin" should outdistance the divine son, and virginity be taken for goodness.

Next on this agenda, God forbid, is the reign of the clubwomen.

་་

Mr. Arthur, too, is prone to some of the mistakes built into Western culture by this inscrutable Zeitgeist. He refers in several instances to the "average man", forgetting that his own theory disallows of such a nebulous reference. Does he perhaps mean the twelve o'clock, paterfamilias, Darby type? Or does he? Again, he refers to the "extreme categories", forgetting that on the rim of a circle there are no extreme categories. And Mr. Arthur certainly does like circles.

Or do I fail to comprehend the purpose of this work? The clock-face is an excellent mnemonic device, but.....

And though he claims that we should all appreciate the tremendous variety of these categories, he definitely favors certain types-notably the three o'clock (Dorian) and five o'clock (unfortunately termed Lady C); while at the same time, in spite of attempts to apologize, he betrays a distaste for the seven o'clock (Clubwoman) type. He says there are good women in this group but he fails to note sufficient examples. Yet we see them in any Westem movie, complementing the one o'clock pioneer type. They are the girls the cowboys say "yes mam" to, and sometimes marry. They are a civilizing influence and are capable of great suffering. Unfortunately, they are too frequently represented as puritans.

If I have appeared over-critical of this book, it is because I believe it to be worthy of close scrutiny. In quality of observation, it lays to filth the premature ejaculations of the aforementioned "psychologists", which, in actuality, are nothing more than age-old taboos expressed in a new lingo. The Circle of Sex, unlike the declarations of this new priesthhod, has cast off the shackle's of heterosexualism; and in doing so, becomes a significant light on a long obscure horizon. But at the present time it is not likely to 'cause much stir in our culture, founded as it is in sexual prejudice. Nevertheless, it is a giant step in the right direction.

I recommend it highly as a guide to persons who have difficulty in understanding and accepting the fact that the sexual orientation of other persons is frequently different from their own, but wish to follow Christ's commandment.

mattachine REVIEW

CRUISE OF A DOWAGER QUEEN

MADAME, by John Selby, New York: Dodd Mead, 1961. 313 pp, $3.95. Reviewed by Noel I. Garde.

For those nervous about being caught reading primary gay novels, or professing to be allergic to them, but who nonetheless find an added attraction if a worthwhile novel has a major homosexual character, this book can be highly recommended.

The central character, who gives her name to the title, is a rather fantas tic combination of Louella Parsons, Dorothy Kilgallen, Mary Margaret McBride and Hetty Green. As the story opens, Gertrude Oliver Donner (whose initials symbolically spell G.O.D.), for decades the nation's most famous columnist (and for good measure also publisher of a magazine called The Manbatter-apparently based on the New Yorker), and now turned seventy, is receiving an honorary degree from a small midwestern college. The entire story is told, with the liberal use of flashbacks and memoirs, within the succeeding three days, as Madame insists on making a sort of "royal progress" back to New York, in her $25,000 Rolls Royce, with fawning French maid, chauffeur, hotel managers, etc. going through a well-organized big production at every stop.

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As the blurb puts it, "Starting life humbly as a child of French-Canadian parents in an obscure Maine lumber-mill town, Gertrude has been progressively parlor maid in a Great Barrington, Massachusetts, establishment, coowner with her husband of a suburban music store, small-town journalist, and, finally, the leading human-interest columnist of the entire nation." Before the death of her husband, trapped into marriage by Gertrude with the fictitious pregnancy routine, Gertrude had managed to have three children. All of them turn out in some way abnormal: Don is an alcoholic and has a satyr-like interest in women; both Don's sister Harlow and his brother Larry have an insatiable interest in the male sex. And it is in; the rather comprehensively covered, and not unsympathetic portrayal of Larry that most readers will be interested.

In the cases of Larry's brother and sister, the inference is that Gertrude's completely self-centered life, and constant interference with her children's wishes, both amorous and vocational, made them what they became. But in Larry's case the lip-service to Freud is no more than that. Larry is shown from the earliest age much too pretty, rather effeminate and with a precocious interest in transvestism (he's a smash hit in a school play). At an early age there is already an affair with a neighbor's boy in the small Con+ necticut town where the children are raised. Immediately after the move to 21