be that it's all right to rape little girls of 13 so long as you're not a member of the family.

A third taboo is race. After STRANGE FRUIT the market was flooded with books about interracial love all acceptable

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so long as the parties involved aren't happy together. Apparently anything goes, just so everyone is miserable in the last chapter. I have out a story of love between two young girls of different races, which no one will publish, although everyone seems to like it. The characters aro sympathetic, the love scenes are handled delicately, and the editors like the style but they make it clear that the hindrance to publishing it is not the Lesbian element, but the racial one. Again we can formulate a rule: if you must break the law, break it with a member of the in group.

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The fourth taboo is perhaps the most serious of all. It's almost impossible to deal with love between members of the same sex in a realistic manner. You can get absolutely clinical in describing heterosexual intercourse; some of our popular novels read like those little textbooks on how to be happy though married, lacking only the diagrams. But I've never found a book dealing with love between two men that offerred any physical data. Stories dealing with Lesbian love have a little more latitude, but not much. It's rather hard to see how the younger generation is to be contaminated by these works if they can't even find out what the people are doing.

Why are we considering these things? Because each of us here is interested in legal and social justice for at least one group of persons, an increasingly articulate group, and books are one means through which the general public can be informed and influenced. There are other and perhaps bettor ways. Direct political action is one. But some of us happen to be writers, and we must use the tools at hand.

I'm considering fiction because it's my field, not because it's more important than the sociological and psychological studies that have been published. I hope that overyone here owns at least a few books such as D. H. Lawrence's SEX, LITERATURE, AND CENSORSHIP; Dr. Frank Caprio's THE SEXUALLY ADEQUATE MALE and THE SEXUALLY ADEQUATE FEMALE; John MacPartland's SEX IN OUR CHANGING WORLD; Lewinsohn's HISTORY OF SEXUAL CUSTOMS; Phyllis and Eberhard Kronhau-

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