Mind of an Outlaw Read Online Free PDF Page A

that we feel anxiety because we are driven by unconscious impulses which are socially unacceptable; dread we are told is a repetition of infantile experiences of helplessness. It is induced in us by situations which remind our unconscious of weaning and other early deprivations. What is never discussed: the possibility that we feel anxiety because we are in danger of losing some part or quality of soul unless we act, and not dangerously; or the likelihood that we feel dread when intimations of our death inspire us with disproportionate terror, a horror not merely because we are going to die, but to the contrary because we are going to die badly and suffer some unendurable stricture of eternity. These explanations are altogether outside the closefocus of the psychological sciences in the twentieth century. No, our century, at least our American century, is a convalescent home for the shell-shocked veterans of a two-thousand-year war—that huge struggle within Christianity to liberate or to destroy the vision of man.
    ----
    * An excursion could be made into a parallelism between Marx and Freud, for Marx, the first of the social psychologists, created the psychic exposition of how the worker is alienated from his work.

The Homosexual Villain

(1955)
    THOSE READERS OF
One
who are familiar with my work may be somewhat surprised to find me writing for this magazine. After all, I have been as guilty as any contemporary novelist in attributing unpleasant, ridiculous, or sinister connotations to the homosexual (or more accurately, bisexual) characters in my novels. Part of the effectiveness of General Cummings in
The Naked and the Dead
—at least for those people who thought him well conceived as a character—rested on the homosexuality I was obviously suggesting as the core of much of his motivation. Again, in
Barbary Shore
, the “villain” was a secret police agent named Leroy Hollingsworth whose sadism and slyness were essentially combined with his sexual deviation.
    At the time I wrote those novels, I was consciously sincere. I did believe—as so many heterosexuals believe—that there was an intrinsic relation between homosexuality and “evil,” and it seemed perfectly natural to me, as well as
symbolically
just, to treat the subject in such a way.
    The irony is that I did not know a single homosexual during all those years. I had met homosexuals of course, I had recognized a few as homosexual, I had “suspected” others, I was torealize years later that one or two close friends were homosexual, but I had never known one in the human sense of knowing, which is to look at your friend’s feelings through his eyes and not your own. I did not
know
any homosexual because obviously I did not want to. It was enough for me to recognize someone as homosexual, and I would cease to consider him seriously as a person. He might be intelligent or courageous or kind or witty or virtuous or tortured—no matter. I always saw him as at best ludicrous and at worst—the word again—sinister. (I think it is by the way significant that just as many homosexuals feel forced and are forced to throw up protective camouflage, even boasting if necessary of women they have had, not to mention the thousand smaller subtleties, so heterosexuals are often eager to be so deceived for it enables them to continue friendships which otherwise their prejudices and occasionally their fears might force them to terminate.)
    Now, of course, I exaggerate to a certain degree. I was never a roaring bigot, I did not go in for homosexual baiting, at least not face-to-face, and I never could stomach the relish with which soldiers would describe how they had stomped some faggot in a bar. I had, in short, the equivalent of a “gentleman’s anti-Semitism.”
    The only thing remarkable about all this is that I was hardly living in a small town. New York, whatever its pleasures and discontents, is not the most uncivilized milieu, and while one would go too far to