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First Edition. 8°. 30 pages. Original wrappers. Two stunning views on the causes of homosexuality (Incest and Castration of the Father). At the end of this publication, Legman reflects in stunning manner on accusations made about him: "I have been accused - by ex-hustlers, authors of homosexual fiction, and similar unbiassed observers - of shouting, in "Love & Death", 'The homos are coming!' (What I said - page 91 - naming no persons, was: 'the air is filled with shouting."The women are coming ! Kill all the women!" ' but let us let this particular projection of guilt pass). As I have tried to show more explicitly above, the 'homos' are not coming. They are going. Kinsey and his Hollerith-machine prophecies to the contrary, there is no future for homosexuality." [Source: page 31 of the pamphlet "On the cause of Homosexuality"]. Gershon Legman (November 2, 1917 February 23, 1999) was an American cultural critic and folklorist, best known for his books The Rationale of the Dirty Joke (1968) and The Horn Book: Studies in Erotic Folklore and Bibliography (1964). Legman was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, to Emil and Julia Friedman Legman, both of Hungarian-Jewish descent; his father was a railroad clerk and butcher. After a failed stab at rabbinical school Legman attended and graduated from Scranton's Central High School, where Jane Jacobs and Cy Endfield were classmates. He enrolled in the University of Michigan for one semester in the fall of 1935, but left without sitting for his exams. He then settled in New York City where for a number of years he was a part-time freelance assistant to the physician and sexological researcher Robert Latou Dickinson at the New York Academy of Medicine while simultaneously working in the bookshop of Jacob Brussel, where a brisk business was done in publishing and selling contraband erotica; while spending long hours at the New York Public Library acquiring an autodidactic education. In the late 1940s he became the editor of the little magazine Neurotica. Throughout his career Legman was an independent scholar without institutional affiliation, except for one year during 1964 1965 when he was a writer in residence at the University of California, San Diego, in the first year of the new campus' undergraduate programs. He pioneered the serious academic study of erotic and taboo materials in folklore. He also was a talented raconteur and could spin out tales non-stop for hours. As a young man he acquired a number of interests including sexuality, erotic folklore, also origami for which he was a pivotal figure in founding the modern international movement. In 1940, at age 23, Legman wrote Oragenitalism, Part I: Cunnilinctus under the pen name Roger-Maxe de la Glannège. Nearly all copies were seized by the police and destroyed in a raid on Jacob Brussel's shop. For a period of time, Legman was a bibliographic researcher and book scout for the Kinsey Institute. In 1949, he published Love and Death, an attack on sexual censorship, arguing that American culture was permissive of graphic violence in proportion to, and as a consequence of, its repression of the erotic. Legman published and shipped the treatise himself, although he ran afoul of the United States Post Office Department authorities, who stopped his deliveries due to the supposed "indecent, vulgar, and obscene" content. The book also included a chapter that attacked contemporary pre-Code comic books as harmful to children for their celebration of violence, foreshadowing the later crusade against the comic book industry dominated by Fredric Wertham. Love and Death was an outgrowth of the little magazine Neurotica, edited by Jay Landesman and published in nine issues between 1948 and 1952. Legman was a regular contributor and eventually took over from Landesman as editor. Other contributors included John Clellon Holmes, Larry Rivers, Carl Solomon, Judith Malina, Allen Ginsberg, Marshall McLuhan, and Kenneth Patchen, which gave it influence di.
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