and the hero will take you with him on a journey you both understand. You'll enjoy the trip.

Multi-talented Steven Allen's one contribution to homosexual literature is an outstanding one. His short story, "Houston Incident, " in FOURTEEN FOR TONIGHT, Holt, 1955, Dell, 1956, 1957, is about a tramp type picked up by an aging and kind homosexual. Many stories have been written on this bitter theme of taking without giving but this one is a superior example. The author manages to make your feelings of sympathy extend to both the homosexual male and the cheating tramp, rather than limiting the viewpoint to the one character or the other.

Robert M. Coates, surely one of our finest short story writers in the "New Yorker" genre, produced in 1943 a realistic ugly and powerful story "One Night in Coney," in ALL THE YEAR ROUND, Harcourt, 1943 (also in THE AMERICAN MERCURY READER, Blakiston, 1944). This was years before the current run of polemic stories and has never been touched for accurate and poignant description of the cruelest of all homosexual dilemmas: the senseless wanton beating of a man simply because he is gay.

Readers who loved William Maxwell's, THE FOLDED LEAF, will equally enjoy David Cornell De Jong's sensitive evocation of boyhood and inter-male awakening, THE DESPERATE CHILDREN, Doubleday, 1948, 1949.

For years much has been made of the multiplicity of male homosexual symbols in Western movies and more recently in the television shows. Years ago Frederick Faust as his famous pseudonominous self, Max Brand, wrote THE NIGHT HORSEMAN, Putnam, 1920, Dodd, Mead, 1952, Pocket Books, 1954. It is an unusual western -almost a fantasy and the hero is a strongly homosexual figure. His unexplained effect on other men can only be considered homosexual. This is decidedly a minor title and is mainly included because of the rarity of any homosexual content in the "Western," outside, of course, of the symbolic occurences.

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Today, with novels faithfully depicting every grunt and groan for the reader, subtle intense eroticism is lost. Robert O. Bowen's, 1953 novel BAMBOO, Knopf, 1953, Signet, 1955, etc., is an unusually exciting and sensual book. It combines many odd facets it is a straight-forward

mattachine REVIEW

easily read narrative on the one hand yet it reeks with lush symbolism. It manages very specific, highly-erotic homosexual passages and yet keeps a little of the spice for the imagination.

William Laurence Coleman (Lonnie) is justifiably famous as the author of one of the most moving male love stories of all time in SHIP'S COMPANY, Little, Brown, 1955, Dell, 1957, etc., and also as the author of the somewhat sensa tional straight-forward, SAM, David McKay, 1959, Pyra mid, 1960, 1962. Many years before the famous SHIP'S COMPANY his novel, TIME MOVING WEST, Dutton, 1947, (also as THE SEA IS A WOMAN, Dell, 1948) provided sure vision of his future books for it contains just as moving a series of sequences on all male love. Lonnie Coleman treats male homosexuality with an unashamed healthy romanticism which is so much more emotionally satisfactory than the lusher teary items from the 1930's and considerably more satisfactory than the current "peep shows" of love behind the ash can, under the bridge and inside the garbage dump.

While it is common enough to meet or know an individual who leads a physically bisexual life, the truly emotionally ambivalent are very rare. Literary depictions are either sensational or wholly sexual; or the complete opposite so vaguely drawn that they pass unnoticed or not quite res lized. An exception to this choice of unrealistic approaches can be found in James Chace's novel; THE RULES OF THE GAME, Doubleday, 1959, 1960. Peter Swain, the major protagonist, exhibits all of the characteristics of a repressed homosexual male. His affairs on an emotional and or physical level with women are clearly destroyed by his homosexual inclinations. He is an exception in that he knows the tendencies are there and he makes use of the male homosexual, Rupert, who loves him. The handling of the virtually insolvable situation is excellent, albeit unhappy. The portrait of Rupert is exceptional and this alone makes the book special.

As you go up and down the brightly lit aisles of your local paperback story, don't be overly put off by the hideous tasteless covers still used by the "sensation" paperback houses. Sometimes albeit not often enough, -a garish