PROJECT LAMBDA

The next time someone scoffs at Freud's linkage of homosexuality with paranoia, hand them a copy of this shrill little fantasy: first-novelist Welles imagines a U.S. version of the Holocaust, with homosexuals instead of Jews. At first, the persecution goes on only in the Marine Corps, where a macho Colonel authorizes his sergeant to weed out perverts and quietly murder them. But soon the Colonel's approach gives big ideas to an ambitious senator (who, among other grossnesses, urinates on his in-laws' graves) and his foul assistant (a repressed homosexual heavy into masochistic masturbation). They begin by waging a PR campaign against gays and collecting secret files on all homosexuals; and, in no time, gays are being secretly rounded up, loaded into railroad cars, and sent to camps to be castrated, used as guinea pigs, or bulldozed into mass graves. And the federal government goes along? Yes indeedy: Congress passes the Deviate Rehabilitation Act, and the President suspends the constitutional rights of gays. But, thanks to a brave gay travel agent (who joins up with FAG, Free America for Gays) and his journalist friend, the concentration-camp story becomes fully public, and moral outrage saves the day. Moral outrage, however, cannot save this amateur novel from its hysterical excesses, cardboard characters (including a couple who are the Ozzie & Harriet of gay fiction), and transparent plotting. Weak propaganda and worse fiction.