514. The Crime of the Century

                        BROWDERBOOKS

                             Wild New York

Work is now underway for a new edition of Fascinating New Yorkers: Power Freaks, Mobsters, Liberated Women, Creators, Queers and Crazies.  Why another edition?

Wait a minute, someone might say.  Wasn't that book published by a small press, Black Rose Writing?

Yes, it was.  But the publisher chose not to renew my contract and stopped selling the two books of mine in his catalog.  Amazon now reports Fascinating New Yorkers as out of print, with limited availability.

Maybe the book didn't get good reviews?  (hee hee)

On the contrary, you jerk, it got good reviews.  So I decided to self-publish a new edition with a front cover you won't easily forget.

Otherwise it's the same?

Not quite.  There's a new chapter on the writer Norman Mailer, plus a few small updates elsewhere in the text.

So when will it come out?

Can't say exactly.  Later this year.

Meanwhile everyone is supposed wait with baited breath until it shows up?

Yes, you cynic.  With baited breath.  (What a cliché!)

I can hardly wait.

Get lost, vermin.  I will gladly wait, to make sure it is done right.  Meanwhile let's have a look at the crime of the century, vintage 1906.

               The Crime of the Century

On the evening of June 25, 1906, a fashionable audience was assembled on the rooftop of Madison Square Garden, a vast Beaux-Arts structure at 26^th Street and Madison Avenue, for the premiere of the frothy musical comedy Mamzelle Champagne. At 10:55 p.m., while the performance was nearing its conclusion, a burly redheaded gentleman of fifty with an abundant red mustache entered alone and sat at the table customarily reserved for him, five rows from the stage.  Resting his chin in his right hand, he seemed lost in thought, perhaps eyeing the young female performers onstage, as was his custom, since he was a connoisseur of teenage girls. 

Some ten minutes later a handsome younger man left his own table, walked about nervously while muttering to himself, then approached the older man’s table. As a performer onstage began the song “I Could Love a Million Girls,” the younger man took out a revolver from beneath his coat and fired three shots at point-blank range into the older man, one bullet hitting his left eye and killing him, while the other two grazed his shoulder. The victim’s body fell to the floor, and the table overturned with a clatter.  The murderer then left holding his weapon aloft to indicate that he was done shooting.

A stunned silence gripped performers and audience alike. Spectators thought at first that this was part of the performance or another of the party tricks common in fashionable circles at the time. But then, grasping what had happened, people screamed, leaped to their feet, and began a panicky flight toward the exits. At the theater manager’s insistence, the orchestra made a feeble attempt to go on playing, but the performers were frozen in horror and the panic continued. Someone put a tablecloth over the body, and when blood soaked through it, added a second one as well.

The following morning the murder rated a triple headline in the newspapers, for the victim was the most famous architect of the day, and the murderer was a well-known man-about-town.  The cause of the murder?  A young woman of exceptional beauty who had been involved with both men, though not simultaneously.  What happened on the night of June 25, 1906, would haunt her for the rest of her long, long life.  

It was the crime of the century, witnessed by scores of people, and would even inspire a movie, for which the young woman, by then no longer young, was hired as an adviser.  And the murderer?  He got three trials and after a rather comfy stint in prison was finally set free.  Being rich, he had good lawyers.

Who were these people, and what became of the murderer and the young woman?  See my next post one week hence to learn more about the crime of the century.

©  2021  Clifford Browder

513. When we should lie.

                   BROWDERBOOKS

                              Wild New York

My historical novel Forbidden Brownstones has a cover that I like, but some say that even fiction should have a subtitle on the cover, so as to let buyers know the genre at a glance.

Recommended by Sublime Book Review with a five-star rating. Available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and WiDo Publishing.

But I'm now inclined to add a subtitle on the cover of future works.  For my unpublished collection of short stories I have done exactly that:

                      Babylon: Stories of Old New York

Will this help sell it?  Who knows?  It hasn't even got a publisher yet.

                    When We Should Lie

This is a postscript to last week's post on man/boy love.  In his unpublished memoir my former pen pal Joe tells how, when he was working as a counselor in a boys' camp in North Carolina, one of the boys -- we'll call him Jim -- told him an interesting story.  A man moved into his neighborhood who started having consensual sex with the local underage boys.  Word got around; the boys flocked.  Jim himself had sex with the man, as did his younger brother.  But one day the police came calling: word had reached them too, and they wanted Jim to testify against the man, so this predator could be locked up.  Jim didn't want to, but under great pressure he agreed.  There was no mention of his younger brother, so only Jim was involved.  

        When the day came, Jim went to court with his father.  There he saw the man, now in custody, and realized that the whole case against him depended on Jim's testimony.  But Jim reflected: he liked the man, liked the sex, and didn't think the man had harmed, or would harm, anyone.  So when he took the stand, with all eyes on him, he testified that yes, he knew the man, but they had never had sex.  Pandemonium erupted in the courtroom.  The prosecutor and a social worker upbraided him, while the judge pounded his gavel for order.  The session was suspended, so the social worker could talk to Jim in private, with only his father present.  

        In another room the social worker, a woman, again described the man as a monster and said it was Jim's duty to testify against him so he could be locked up. "Lady," said Jim, "right now I'm more scared of you than I am of him!"  Her jaw dropped, and Jim's father intervened: "If you don't mind, I'm taking my son home."  And so he did.

        For the next few days Jim's father kept a close eye on him, lest he see the man again.  But the man, now at liberty, soon moved away.  End of story.

        This anecdote taught me something useful.  We are all told that it's wrong to lie; one should always tell the truth.  But it isn't that simple.  It isn't enough to just tell the truth.  You must tell the truth for the right reasons.  Jim lied in his testimony -- indeed, he committed perjury -- but to have told the truth would have gone counter to his own perceptions of the situation and betrayed a man who he felt had done him no harm.  Few teenagers would have had the courage to do this, least of all in court; I applaud him.  

        Could this rule be abused?  Of course.  The cases where it applies are special and rare.  But I hold to my conclusion: It isn't enough just to tell the truth.  You must tell the truth for the right reasons.

©  2021  Clifford Browder

512. Hot Topic: Man/Boy Love, the Great Taboo

 

                    BROWDERBOOKS

                                  WILD NEW YORK

So much to report.  A week ago I donated over a hundred books, but in the process discovered some that had inscriptions, and these, gifts from me and others to my partner Bob, go into his collection to be given to the gay history archive at the Gay Community Center on West 13th Street, once it reopens.  I also found Bob's 1960 Rutgers/Newark yearbook, with photos of him as a graduating senior, and notes, some brief and some lengthy, from his classmates -- a thick book also destined for the archive.

Also, my next-door neighbor Jennah came to interview me on the subject of gay sexuality, part of a project she is doing as a "sexuality coach." The interview will honor Gay Pride Month.  She just put her mobile device down between us and let me rattle on.  She also asked for photos of us, and I later turned up a bunch of them of them that she is now adding to the interview.  One point that she considered essential: gay and hetero sexuality aren't separate, unrelated phenomenon.  On the contrary, they are simply the extremes of a continuum ranging from gay and mostly gay through a series of gradations to mostly straight and straight.  One conclusion: we're all in this together.

Related to all this is my reprint here of my most popular and controversial post.  

Hot Topic: Man/Boy Love, the Great Taboo

d 

Tuesday, June 28, 2016

239. Man/Boy Love: The Great Taboo

[This post is a reblog of post #43, the most visited of all the posts in this blog, originally published on January 20, 2013.  The comments that followed are included.  It does not appear in my book No Place for Normal: New York, because Mill City Press feared legal complications -- a concern that I think exaggerated, since I do not promote (or condemn) these relationships, but above all want to understand them.  My friend Joe is now out of prison and doing well; he is on good terms with Allen, though they are now only friends.]

         I myself have never experienced man/boy love, neither as the younger partner nor the older one, or felt any urge to do so.  When, long ago, I would at times  encounter a gay teenager who was obviously eager to connect, he was always too immature to interest me.  So my attitude toward such relationships was vague, casual, and rather orthodox: if the boy was under the age of consent and therefore "jail bait," such a relationship was dangerous and best avoided.  Yet man/boy love has been documented and even illustrated in many cultures, so graphically, in fact, that I wouldn't dare show some scenes from Pompeii, or certain Japanese and Chinese works, lest my blog be labeled a porn site.  And in classical myth Zeus became so enamored of the beautiful young Trojan boy Ganymede that he whisked him off to Olympus to be the cupbearer of the gods.  (How his wife Hera felt about this is not recorded.)  But for me such love was even more remote than Olympus, so I didn’t think much about it.

        What changed?  In July 2000, having heard of his case on Grandpa Al Lewis’s WBAI program (see post #19), I wrote to an inmate in North Carolina named Joe and initiated a pen pal correspondence that continued for years.  Joe, I learned, was serving 25 years in prison on 25 counts each of indecent liberties with a child and crime against nature, and could hope to be released sometime in 2014.  “Crime against nature” – the very term angered me.  Against what nature, whose nature, etc.?  But be that as it may, Joe at my request gave me a streamlined account of his consensual three-year relationship with a young teenager named Allen (a fictional name) and how it led to his arrest. 

Shah Abbas and a wine boy.  Shah Abbas ruled Persia
1587-1629.  

         Fascinated by Joe’s story, I urged him to write his memoir, telling in detail the entire story from beginning to end. Though he had never written anything before, with my help he set out and over many months, sending me periodic installments, told his story in three sections: My Life before Allen, My Life with Allen, Locked Up.  Because of his remarkable memory for detail and his skill in description, it reads like a novel: a gripping and very moving novel.  Hopefully, someday he will self-publish it, so as to give his version of the story, totally at odds with the statements of the prosecutor at his sentencing hearing.  (With great effort I obtained the official court record of the proceedings, so I know exactly what misstatements and falsehoods were uttered.)  Clearly, this three-year man/boy relationship was doing no harm to anyone until other parties interfered, and the heavy-handed criminal justice system brought trouble to all concerned.

Zeus embracing Ganymede, an engraving by the Italian artist Cherubino Alberti 
(1553-1615).

(Some versions describe what Ganymede is holding in his right hand as a purse, suggesting prostitution, but Ganymede didn't need money; closer inspection reveals it to be the male genitals!)

        Joe’s story caused me to reconsider my attitude toward man/boy relationships and the notion of the pedophile and pedophilia, terms that are used – and misused – much too freely.  Webster’s New Collegiate defines pedophilia as “sexual perversion in which children are the preferred sexual object.”  In this context I take “children” to mean young persons who have not yet reached puberty.  In the scandals regarding priests in the Catholic Church, the perpetrators were invariably referred to as pedophiles, though most of the cases involved teenagers.  We lack a term for sexual attraction to adolescents.  The word  “ephebophilia” exists but has not passed into the general language – hence the misuse of “pedophile” and “pedophilia.”  Joe was 26 and Allen was 13 when they met, but at 13 Allen was tall, rather broad-shouldered, and well past puberty, so for me this story does not involve pedophilia. 

Man/boy love in ancient Greece.  An Attic vase of the 5th Century BCE, now in the Louvre.  Ah, those Greeks!  In pre-Christian times they got away with a lot, incorporating ephebophilia into their societies, on condition that the partners in time marry and beget offspring, so as to assure the future of the city state.

         My interest in Joe’s story led me to two books treating the subject of man/boy relationships, one studying the problem in Denmark and the other in Holland, but both now available in English.  The Danish one, originally published in 1986, offers interviews with a defense attorney, a judge, admitted pedophiles, and a number of boys involved in consensual relationships.  One boy, who says he isn’t totally gay, asserts that it would be boring to be purely heterosexual. 

 

        A boy of ten (the youngest of those interviewed), when asked how old a person should be before having sex, replies, “Zero years”; his mother, aware of the relationship and her son’s love for his older friend, refuses to interfere, and regrets that the relationship has to be hidden from the outside world.  Another boy describes himself as bisexual, deriving great pleasure from sex with girls, though he says his best experiences were with his stepfather, when he could just surrender and let the stepfather take the lead.  Finally, a boy of 16, now interested in girls, says of the older friend whom he started having sex with at age 13, “He understands me better than my own mother”; he expects that, even without sex, they will remain friends indefinitely.  The aim of the study, the authors say, is to induce parents, teachers, and the various authorities to listen to what the boys say, and to understand their joy in the relationships and their need of an older friend. Just as the boys reach 15 or 16, their older friends lose interest in them sexually, and the boys usually begin having sex with girls.  Significantly, the English translation’s title is Crime Without Victims.

          First published in 1981, Theo Sandfort’s Dutch study was based on a government-funded report examining the stories of twenty-five boys currently involved in a consensual man/boy relationship, all but one of whom considered the relationship a decidedly positive experience.  When, before the AIDS epidemic appeared, a limited English edition reached these enlightened shores, it was reviewed by a pediatric psychiatrist in Contemporary Psychology (vol. 30, no. 1, 1985), who dismissed it as the rationalizing of a criminal activity, tainted both because it avoided the usual labels of "victims" and "perpetrators," and because it was sponsored in part by an organized group of pedophiles (which was news to the Dutch government!).  Circulating here at the same time was the accusation (never substantiated) that a tidal wave of "kiddie porn" was flowing across the Atlantic from Amsterdam; those permissive Dutch were trying to corrupt our youth and undermine the moral fabric of the nation!  There were other negative reviews of Sandfort’s work as well, all but dooming the boys and their partners to fire and brimstone, and Sandfort, the voyeuristic author, to a new persona as a pillar of salt.  Obviously, even with an influx of porn, the relatively tolerant attitude toward sex that prevails in secular Holland has not corrupted our fair land.  

         And what of the 25 boys themselves, age 10 to 16, of whom 11 were clearly beyond puberty?  When interviewed, they usually said that they met their older partner through family or friends; certainly they were not stalked.  And after the first encounter, which rarely involved sex, it was the boys who sought to renew contact and develop a friendship.  The ensuing friendship did involve pleasurable sex, but even more important were shared activities like swimming, movies, or visits to an amusement park.  At their partner’s home the boys were more relaxed and enjoyed more freedom than at their own home, even when the boys had good relations with their parents.  Trust and loyalty developed, and the ability to talk freely about anything: as an American teenager in a similar relationship once said to Oprah, "I can tell him anything and not feel judged!"  While the parents usually knew about these friendships, they didn’t know about the sex, which they would think “really bad” or “not nice” or “dirty” – attitudes that the boys considered old-fashioned and stupid.  A common thread in these stories was the boys’ determination to live their own lives, regardless of the opinions of others.  The study concluded that, for boys in pedophile relationships, the present laws in Holland posed far more of a threat than a protection, and urged the passage of more enlightened legislation.

         In the light of such studies, which reinforce the lessons of Joe’s story, I revised my attitude toward consensual man/boy relationships.  Of course child molestation exists: three friends of mine were molested as children and bear the resulting emotional scars to this day, but these were nonconsensual encounters.  I now view consensual man/boy relationships as legitimate and constructive, if the boy is past puberty and able to give knowing consent.  This does not mean that I go along wholeheartedly with the arguments of the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA),

which beats the drums for complete tolerance of these friendships, regardless of the age of the boy.  Certainly I agree with their plea for greater tolerance and understanding, and their wish to free all men imprisoned for having had consensual sexual relationships with minors.  But they want no age of consent at all, which at this point I find questionable; arbitrary as it is, the age of consent -- 15 or 16 in most states, but 17 in New York -- should be lowered but not abolished.  Yet even here I confess that NAMBLA's arguments against any age of consent at all are powerful, since such stipulations are not only arbitrary but subject to prosecutorial abuse.          NAMBLA's is a lonely path, shunned and even condemned by mainstream gay organizations, who don’t want their campaign for gay rights to be contaminated with anything that might be construed as child molestation.  Pedophiles are only a tiny minority of the gay population and suffer prejudice and misunderstanding accordingly.  I am not of them, but I can sympathize.  Which puts me in a strange middle place, tolerant, yet tolerant with a few reservations.  But since when was life not complicated?

Source note:  The two books mentioned earlier are: 

Crime Without Victims, ed. the "Trobriands" collective of authors, trans. E. Brongersma, Amsterdam: Global Academic Publishers, 1993.

Theo Sandfort, Boys on Their Contacts with Men, Elmhurst, NY: Global Academic Publishers, 1987.

[Wanting feedback, and permission to use a photo on their website, I queried NAMBLA by e-mail. Their response, and subsequent comments in my blog, follow.  Apologies for any cramped print, over which I have no control.]

Hello, Mr. Browder,

Thanks for your message, and for your interest in our organization.   It has taken me too long to respond, and I must apologize.... [Their editorial staff] asked me -- to ask you -- that you wouldn't misrepresent us (as others have done, too often).

Once I read your blog, my doubts were gone.  You are a shrewd and generous commentator on our society and its foibles.  Thanks for writing on this subject!  And, feel free to use anything on our website as you see fit.

Sincerely,
Arnold Schoen

©  2013  Clifford Browder

511. Cancer: My Adventure with Alternative Medicine

                  BROWDERBOOKS

                                Wild New York

US Review of Books gave a good review of my latest historical novel, Forbidden Brownstones, and has offered me (for a price) silver stickers saying RECOMMENDED.  And why do I purchase them?  Because at book fairs I have seen how anything recommending a book -- a bright cover, a quote from a good review, a bright gold or silver seal promoting it -- nudges a potential buyer toward a sale.  They are tempted to buy, but need a little encouragement to take a chance on an author and a book they never heard of.  So a silver sticker saying RECOMMENDED -- even if from an outfit unknown to them -- provides that extra nudge.  Gimmicky?  Perhaps.  But that's how book fairs work.

US Review of Books RECOMMENDED Rating

 

                 Cancer: My Adventure with   

                  Alternative Medicine

         Cancer: a word that terrifies.  A scourge, a killer.  When the figures are in, in the U.S. alone some 608,570 mortalities are expected in 2021.  Scary. #Cancer

         For me, it all started with my annual physical back in January 1994.  When my doctor reviewed the results, she reported:  “You’re a bit anemic.  If you were a menstruating woman, I wouldn’t be concerned.  But for a man, it’s suspicious.  I’ll refer you to a gastroenterologist for a colonoscopy.”

         I didn’t know what a colonoscopy was, and I couldn’t even pronounce “gastroenterologist,” but it seemed that I was bleeding internally.  Having no symptoms, I I doubted if anything was amiss.

         I soon saw a gastroenterologist, Dr. Malinovsky, a genial older man who gave me instructions for the colonoscopy.  Primarily, I had to fast, drink some foul-tasting liquid called MoviPrep to clear out my bowels, and then, the following morning, show up at my medical center at Third Avenue and 96^th Street at an ungodly hour.  

         So on April 5, 1994, I showed up, undressed from the waist down, lay flat on my belly on an examination table, got sedated, and let the good doctor rape me gently with a finger-thick, lithe black snake of a tube that he poked into my rectum.  On a table next to me, right at eye level, was a screen that showed what was happening in color.  It beat any TV that I had ever seen, flashing red, orange, red, as white dots of popcorn flitted across.  

         “The colon wall,” said the doctor.  “Now we’ll make this turn.”

         His assistant plied my belly; cramps.  I hardly noticed, riveted by the screen’s polychrome display: green splotches, egg yolk, orange peels, then ever receding grottoes, tunnels, and reefs where light had never been.  “Another turn,” said the doctor.  More massaging, cramps.  On the screen, crypts of cantaloupe, brown lichens, candied yam.  

         “There,” said the doctor quietly, “is what we’re looking for.”

         Nested in a niche, blobs of an aborted mushroom, a wrinkled, hunched pink worm.

         “Biopsy,” says the doctor.  On the screen, tweezers appeared, tweaked it.  A red kiss, then another.  “A polyp or a cancer,” said the doctor.  “Probably a cancer.”

         Under sedation, I took this gently, philosophically, almost as if he were speaking of someone else.  I felt distantly vulnerable, important. 

         One last look at the screen: sleeping, coiled pink muscle of eel.  My enemy, my threat.  Almost an embryo, mine, weirdly beautiful.

        Cancer: the dread of the word.  Not some infection from outside, but my own body in rebellion, its cells in disorder, engendering a small lethal worm of a tumor that could kill me.  

         Surgery was ordered, as soon as possible.  Another baffling word came up: metastasis, meaning the spread of cancer from its original site.  I did some research. Survival rate of colon surgery before metastasis: 90 percent.  After metastasis:10.  

         I saw the surgeon, a man with a friendly, reassuring smile.  “A common surgery; I do two or three a week.  We’ve got lots more colon than we need; you can spare some, not to worry.  Unless, of course, the lymph nodes are involved.”  He scheduled it for May 3, 1994.

        The results of the biopsy came through: yes, malignancy, requiring immediate action; the date of the surgery was advanced to April 19.  Also, there was a lovely photograph in color showing the bulbous, pink tumor nesting in my gut.  

         Surgery would remove the tumor, but unless I did something, the cancer would return.  I consulted a holistic MD, who took one look at the photograph and said emphatically, “Get that thing out of you as soon as you can!”  For my follow-up treatment after surgery, he recommended an alternative cancer treatment: antioxidants -- vitamins and two supplements that I had never heard of: Quercetin and Co Q-10.

          At noon on April 19 I checked into Beth Israel Hospital on the Lower East Side.  Soon I was in my room, donning a hospital monkey gown and awaiting the residents, the nurses, the anesthesiologist, and whomever else might have reason to see me.  The following morning I was taken down for surgery.  In the room adjoining the room of the actual operation, I chatted amiably with one of the staff, a motherly black woman of about forty who told me she was trying to stop smoking; I encouraged her and wished her well.  Then, nothing; the anesthesia had done its job.  Soon enough I was back in my room.

         For early word of the surgery results I queried the hospital residents on their daily morning round.  Sure enough, one had witnessed the surgery.  “A tumor as big as a golf ball," he said.  "Probably in there a good ten years.  But the liver looked fine.”  Later I would learn that his comment on the liver was encouraging, since that was where colon cancer usually spread next.  

         In time, liberated from a catheter and intravenous feeding, followed by the joys of hospital food, I went home.  Visiting nurses came daily to change the dressing on my wound.  One of them told me that even after a surgery wound has closed, the body continues healing within, though the patient is completely unaware of it.  I found this wonderfully reassuring.

         The wound closed; the surgeon’s job was done.  In a last session he explained my situation.  Of 25 lymph nodes removed with the tumor and examined, one had cancer.  Metastasis; they had operated just in time.  Cancer, he said, is like a fire in a house.  At first it is small, confined to one room; if, outside the room, you put your hand to the wall, you would feel no heat.  Then the fire spreads throughout the room; if you put your hand to the wall, you would for sure feel heat.  This is where I was.  Then the fire burns through the wall and spreads to the whole house: metastasis: only 10 percent survive.

         Chemotherapy was recommended.  The surgeon himself was neutral; some of his patients did chemo, some did not.  He suggested that I talk to the oncologist and hear what he had to say, then decide.  So I did.

Chemotherapy

         The oncologist proved to be a nice little man with a mustache -- less a threat than the look of your favorite uncle.  In a soft voice he explained that, in my case, the chances of recurrence were 40 percent; chemo could reduce it to 20.  I would come once a week for several weeks and let them drip chemicals into my veins.  I said I would ponder the matter and let him know.

This ... ?

... or this?

         Ponder I did not, for I had already made up my mind.  I was doing volunteer work for the Whole Foods Project, a small nonprofit advocating a nutritional approach to AIDS and cancer.  There I could take cooking lessons and absorb a different, unorthodox approach to healing.  Would I rather lie passively and let them drip alien substances into me, or take an active role in my healing, learning to cook and eat vegan?  Chemo, like radiation, was the best that mainstream medicine could offer, but it involved unpleasant side effects, some of them horrendous, and would treat the symptom only, not the cause of the cancer.  For me, an easy choice: I chose an alternative cancer treatment and went  vegan.  When the oncologist phoned, I told him I would not do chemo.

         So I took cooking classes and learned to eat vegan: lots of fruits and veggies, lots of beans and whole grains, less salt, no sugar, no meat or dairy.  I discovered the wonders of barley pilaf, apple and sweet potato roast, sea vegetables, leeks, and millet and tempeh loaf -- all delicious.  It was easy, it was fun.  Then suddenly, one day, there were severe cramps in my abdomen.  Lying down didn’t help, nor did standing up and pacing in the apartment.  I was desperate; it was hell.  Then, just as suddenly, the cramps stopped, stopped cold.  I contacted my surgeon.  My body, he explained, was adjusting to the surgery.  

         There would be cramps again, twice; both times they stopped as suddenly as they began.  After that, no more cramps.  I went out birdwatching again, and in June I marched joyously with the Whole Foods Project in the madness of the annual Gay Pride Parade.  In the following years periodic colonoscopies revealed either nothing or a small polyp easily removed.  I had healed.

No, I'm not in this one.  But you get the idea.
Diana 

 

        My cancer never returned, so my cancer story has a happy ending; many do not.  Lacking professional credentials, and knowing how people cling to their habits, I was not one to preach alternative cancer procedures to others.  But on two occasions I did, for they involved close friends whose fate greatly concerned me.  Both listened, neither was persuaded.  They lived orthodox, and orthodox they died.  It hurt.

        Alternative treatments for cancer are controversial, to say the least, and medical orthodoxy takes a dim view of them, stressing that they may not be harmful in themselves, but become harmful if they displace standard treatments.  I only know that orthodox surgery saved my life, and holistic medicine and a vegan diet prevented recurrence.  

         I still have the report of my final diagnosis, and the color photographs of the tumor that tried to kill me.  The tumor: weirdly beautiful, I thought at the time.  Today, obscene.

©  2021  Clifford Browder