A series which appeared in the NEW YORKER MAGAZINE and which met with considerable success was gathered together in book form and called VERTICAL AND HORIZONTAL by Lillian Ross, Simon and Schuster, 1963. The author's motives are hard to discern. She is obviously pointing more than slightly sarcastic fun at psychiatry but the point of the book is still very obscure. The homosexual man in it is the very vicious stereotype variety. Critics raved over it, but... Another unpleasant, but not unbelievable, major treatment is included in THE BIG ROCK CANDY by Annabel Johnson, Crowell, 1957. This is another of the many overlooked books well worth locating at your library.

Also overlooked and very good from both a writing and a homosexual standpoint is George Johnston's CLOSER TO THE SUN, Morrow, 1961. It is the gentle story of a group of people who live in a Mediterranean town, both the native inhabitants and the "permanent" visitors. The visitors, of course, are the assorted expatriate artists and writers and former diplomats and the like that make such good fictional fodder. There is very little plot, the book depends heavily upon characterization and description of the beautiful scen.ery, but it is a much more enjoyable reading experience than many current novels. The homosexuals are well presented, neither glorified nor damned.

Because of our society's present restrictions on sexual 'behavior, the frustrated of the world dominate the scene. You've seen it, I've seen it, a dozen times each day--the not quite homosexual struggling to keep his breath in a world of anxiety--the fall over the imaginary cliff into the imaginary hell of homosexuality that so many people make for themselves. BREAKING UP by W. H. Manville, Simon and Schuster, 1962, Dell, 1963 is a good example of this personal hell of indecision and anxiety. It is a novel of many surfaces. On one level it is the simple "end of the road" theme for a heterosexual marriage between advertising executive, Bill, and his wife, June. On another level it is Bill's ever present, but nearly rejected, feeling of love for men. The constant meticulous, loving, homosexual detail he sees about him in his daily life: the ever present wanting and the recounting of every little bit of homosexual activity he witnesses. For June it is a story of the failings and inadequacies she sees in herself that make her turn fromBill to a male homosexual who is dying of tuberculosis and whose

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mattachine REVIEW

love for her is wholly maternal. He wants her only as his mother and masochistically she wants him as a man. In a scene between Bill and June she calls him "Mary" endlessly and considers the very obviously heterosexual woman he is dating (Helene) a "dyke". It is a neat bit of transferance. June is frigid and full of Lesbian desires and Bill staggers nearer and nearer to overt homosexuality. The future of these two is never in doubt, they haven't any future. The fu tile ugly ways in which they fight themselves and each other. are poignant proof of our need, and soon, of a new and cleaner moral code, where sex is in itself accepted regardless of its outlet. From the standpoint of literature the book is a tour de force and Mr. Manville is a very talented man.

It isn't only in fiction that we find the recounting of theo retical heterosexuals fighting homosexual tendencies. The trend in honest autobiography has disclosed many such cases. THE MEMOIRS OF A PUBLIC BABY by Philip O'Con nor, British Book Centre, 1958, London House & Maxwell, 1963, is a good example of this. Mr. O'Connor, unfortunately, cannot write worth a damn, but the book is interesting as a case study, if not as literature.

It is unlikely that literature differs from life in any substantial degree, and, accepting this, it is very clear from the more honest books written since the end of the second World War that people simply cannot be divided into comfortable male-female dichotomy. The constant attempt to do this is, at least, foolish and it is in our black and white world of all one or the other that we create our own foolish swishy boy and his "rough trade" counterpart or the "dyke❞ girl and her femme other half. The less honest novelist attempts to present the evenly divided camps. Hans Hellmut Kirst in his novel, THE OFFICER FACTOR, Doubleday, 1962, 1963, Pyramid, 1964, describes a training school for Nazi officers in 1944. For several hundred pages we are -treated to descriptions of "bad guys" and "good guys". Needless to add, all the bad guys are homosexual and sadistic; all the good guys are heterosexual and purer than Lancelot, who, after all, was an adulterer. Mr. Kirst may feel some national guilt he has to expitiate; but his novel is an unnecessary item--even in his character's names he vents spleen, i.e., Captain Ratshelm, the gym instructor. A much more honest portrait, and a very frequent dilemma, is presented in INSIDE DAISY CLOVER, by Gavin Lam· 23