Books in Brief: I Ain’t Marchin’ Anymore!

I Ain’t Marchin’ Anymore! by Dotson Rader. (McKay, $3.95). Rader, ex-Columbia SDSer and rioter, apparently intended this as the spiritual autobiography of a young revolutionary. It reads more like a psychiatric case study. Rader can’t quite level with himself. He would have us believe his lust for revolution grows out of disgust with social injustice; actually, it seems more the direct result of sexual hangups. He claims to want to make it with girls, but is underneath obviously driven by masochistic homosexual yearnings. After scoring with a sweet young thing, for instance, he confesses to a “desire for violence and humiliation. Like with some bull faggot truck driver on the docks. Or a mounted trooper on the street.” His fascination with Negroes, especially of the “bull faggot” variety, springs from the same polluted source as does his whole love of campus disorders: “The experience of violence, at least for me . . . creates sexual hunger.” After being beaten by cops, he feels “horny as hell.” Rader is an unpleasant young man, a candidate for the couch, and his book is valuable only because of what it tries not to tell us about him and perhaps about most campus rebels. j. r. coyne jr.