Volume 5, Number 7 · November 11, 1965
Queer Lives
By Stanley Kauffmann
Midnight Cowboy
by James Leo Herlihy
Simon & Schuster, 253 pp., $4.95
Two People
by Donald Windham
Coward-McCann, 252 pp., $4.95
Slowly, By Thy Hand Unfurled
by Romulus Linney
Harcourt, Brace & World, 214 pp., $4.50
Sex has almost ceased to be a topic in contemporary fiction and has become a terrain. No frontiers of expression need to be advanced; there is nothing in sexual practice or language that has not been used by now in novels. Now sexual novels can take place comfortably within those frontiers. There will always be police and clerical harassment, but at least a state of tension—rather than blanket suppression—has been established, and American novelists may now write about sex of any kind without having to 'dare' or to insist that it is beautiful or to equate it necessarily with love.
Review, 1683 words
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