Lipton’s Journal/February 7, 1955/545

I just realized that the reason I never could accept the Soviet Union even in the height of my Wallace days[1] is that I could never believe instinctively that a good society could have sex repression. There was a time when I could have explained away 25,000,000 slave laborers I had such contempt for people, but I could never explain away difficult divorce laws. And in a way I was right. Today I would say that the slave laborers while more monstrous are less basic than the bad sex laws.



note

  1. In 1948, Mailer campaigned for Henry A. Wallace, the left-leaning candidate of the Progressive Party, who ran against Republican Thomas E. Dewey, and Harry S. Truman, the incumbent and winner.