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Dear Editor
My first reply to James Taylor and Alec McGuire's letters about ‘A homosexual turns to women’ wasn't solemn and serious. This one is.
First, let us remember the death while seeking immortality of Maui, the hero of Maori legend, who fished out of the ocean the Land of the Long White Cloud, today's New Zealand. He was to achieve eternal life by creeping into the vagina, up through the womb, and out of the mouth of his ancestress, Hine-Nui-Te-Po, Daughter of the Night. She had a body like a man's and a mouth and vagina lined with teeth like a barracuda's, but as hard as volcanic glass. Unluckily, when he was up to his waist inside her, while all onlookers kept silent, a little fantail bird could hold back its laughter no longer. The old chieftainess awoke, closed her dreadful vagina on him, crushed him in its teeth, and Maui perished.
Second, a psychotherapy patient in whose world women were more than ordinarily fearsome, much attracted to the girl next door, but alarmed by her overtly seductive moves, produced Hine-Nui-Te-Po's ghost in a nightmare. His hand was terrifyingly trapped fast in the mouth of the nasty old mother of the girl next door, and he couldn't get it out. The inside of her mouth felt spiky all over like a cat's, and her tongue was rough and barbed.
The present letter is in response now to the latest correspondence which included a judiciously even-handed contribution from the Editor herself.
Anybody who isn't overheated about homosexuality, reading my paper calmly, would see that it is not about homosexuality as such. It is a case report about a young man seeking to shift from homo- to hetero-sexuality, and in anguish and confusion over the female genitalia. The remarkable and rare feature that prompted publishing it was his fascinating though tortured expression of phantasies about women that operate silently, undetected, but powerfully throughout humanity's affairs.
In the second sentence of my paper, I made it explicit that my patient's case