21 Variations on a Theme.

NY: Greenberg (1953). First edition. 436 pp. Very small mark to front cover, else fine in bright dust jacket which has a few short tears and light overall edgewear. Bookseller Burton Weiss wrote: First edition of what is probably the first anthology of gay short stories to be published in the United States. The twenty-one contributors include Sherwood Anderson, Paul Bowles, John Horne Burns, Henry James, Christopher Isherwood, D.H. Lawrence, Charles Jackson, Denton Welch, William Carlos Williams. Two stories, by Guy de Maupassant and Paul Verlaine, were newly translated by the editor himself, with Verlaine’s “Charles Husson” not having previously been published in English. “Donald Webster Cory” is the pseudonym of the sociologist Edward Sagarin (1913-86), derived, by reversal, from “Corydon,” a shepherd boy in much ancient Greek homoerotic poetry and the eponymous protagonist of André Gide’s influential book of dialogues. Sagarin, as “Cory,” was a gay activist in the early 1950’s. His best-known work, THE HOMOSEXUAL IN AMERICA: A SUBJECTIVE APPROACH (1951), was the first widely-read book in the U.S. to demonstrate the legal, social and economic discrimination leveled against an “amazingly large” segment of the American population and to put forward a strong defense of homosexual rights. It viewed gay people as “the unrecognized minority.” Although it was published pseudonymously, Sagarin wrote the book “as a homosexual,” as he did THE HOMOSEXUAL AND HIS SOCIETY: A VIEW FROM WITHIN (with John P. LeRoy, 1963). Some years later, Sagarin rejected much of this early work, decided that homosexuality was a disease like alcoholism, and published anti-gay articles in sociology journals under his real name. Nevertheless, THE HOMOSEXUAL IN AMERICA remains an immensely important book in the history of the gay rights movement, and 21 VARIATIONS ON A THEME remains a pioneering anthology. SIGNED by Sagarin as Donald Webster Cory on the front free endpaper. Young 811*.