We received this letter from Felice, after he reviewed our materials:
Dear Paul Cohen
I am sorry you are so offended by a book that has saved millions of lives and as of this date has been translated into sixteen languages including Russian, Japanese, Slovenian and Hebrew. It is in virtually every library in scores of nations and I couldn’t be prouder of that fact.
Yes, the book appears “pornographic,” i.e. like people having sex, because the authors and the editors and the publisher listened to health and psycho logy professionals from all over the world. We all wanted to make certain that young men who were having this kind of sex did it right, not unhealthily and not dangerously. I note that you never point out our various warning sections in the book on “Dangerous Sex” on “Alcoholism” on “Addiction” and various other health and life threatening issues.
Why not? They’re not hot button issues lke “pornography.” They’re only health and life-saving.
Yes, boys — including probably your own if you have any — are having sex, and they need to see what it looks like. They will anyway. They are having sex whether they SAY they are or not; with other boys and young men, as well as with girls and young women and older women, and with themselves. To deny this is simple fantasy. It’s a fact. And yes they are, even if they don’t turn out gay later on. I’ve been an athlete and an honoured scholar and I’ve slept with as many
“straight” men as with “gay” ones over the years.
Some of that book was being written on a laptop computer in a hallway, while my partner of sixteen years lay dying in an I.C. Unit of a hospital of a sexually transmitted disease he never knew he acquired until many years later. That’s what’s in store for a large percentage of boys and young men and men who DO NOT know what they are doing sexually, because they have not read “pornography” like this book to save their lives. My co-author, Dr. Silverstein had to cut short our trip to Japan because his partner of many years was dying of that same disease. We were there because the Japanese Government denied there were ANY cases of HIV in the nation, Our task, as eminent foreigners, to change the minds of everyone there. We did, through the Tokyo Asahi Times and Television, stations, through public meetings and magazines. They now have one of the best HIV organizations in the world.
Neither Dr. Slverstein nor myself needed this book for our careers. He was already a well, known psychologist with a dozen books to his name. I was one of the first nominees of the prestigious PEN/Hemingway award for fiction in 1975 . If you look me up on Google.com you will see over 46,000 entries to my name and Wikipedia.com entries in several languages. I’ve received scores of literary awards and honors. I have 10 dense pages written about me and my work tin Contemporary Authors, the encyclopaedia of literary America. Yet it is this book that seems more and more my legacy to the future. Since it has helped ensure that there are enough people around for there to BE a future.
Open your mind and look beyond your shock and prejudice, Mr. Cohen.
I will be interested to see if you post this letter in full on your web site.
Felice Picano
Paul’s reply:
Mr. Picano,
You have spent your energies replying to a phantom. Personal feelings are not the basis of my arguments against the presence of your book in the Helena Public Library. Personal feelings are the basis of your argument, however, so you project those onto me to reject what I have written, but I will show you are wrong. I have spoken dispassionate truth, without rancor, whereas you present an emotionally charged and grossly distorted picture founded on lies that have led you and many others to disastrous conclusions.
Numbers (accurate or not) do not matter; neither do your many accomplishments (real or not) in this world. There have been great liars and knaves who have been very successful in their endeavors in this world, some much more so than you, while the greatest of men to ever live, the Son of God, Who was much more than a mere man, died at the hands of His own people and abandoned by His friends. What the world thinks of what you do while you live is not the measuring stick that matters. Germany went gaga over Hitler for a time, too.
Hitler taught the same technique that you and other homosexual propagandists use. If you repeat the same lie long enough, people will believe it, no matter how absurd or blatantly wrong. Homo-sex is, by nature, repulsive to a healthy person, and is declared by God to be so, an abomination that sows death among those who practice and sanction it. Your assumptive position that it is a healthy and natural thing to do is a very great and presumptuous lie.
The title of your book, declaring there is “joy” in homosexuality, is a perfect example of the audacity of your incessant propaganda campaign to establish homosexuality as a healthy and acceptable practice. Your position relegates anyone who says otherwise to the status of a repressive, fascist bigot. You heap lie upon lie upon lie.
But should anyone dare to wade into the filth of your book, he will see mounds of evidence that being homosexual is anything but joyful. One scene you describe as familiar to many homosexuals is where a man wakes up after a wild night of drinking and carousing in a strange bed with a strange naked man nibbling his nipple. You call this amusing. Anyone with a modicum of conscience and self esteem would be thoroughly ashamed and disgusted at finding themselves in such a place. Laughing off such destructive hedonistic behaviors demonstrates how you are totally sold out to degeneracy.
You, sir, are a murderer. You are a murderer of consciences. You and Mr. Silverstein have both killed your own consciences, and now you seek to kill as many others as possible, so that you might surround yourself with multitudes to justify your disgusting immorality. You willingly reduce human beings, made in the image of God, to the lowest common denominator of doing whatever vile things your perverted minds can imagine. Anyone who says otherwise, in your worldview, can go to hell. Your attitude is “to hell with anyone that to any degree stands in the way of my doing whatever pleases me, especially God and His Laws.” Little do you and your followers realize that how you treat God is precisely what happens to you. You reap as you have sown.
You write about all the awful things that happen as a result of following your homosexual deathstyle: the inclination to suicide, alcohol addition, drug addiction, depression, physical injury, and terrible diseases. You consign those who would listen to you to such fates by justifying a victim mentality that all these things are basically the fault of others, those who are malicious or unenlightened. You blame anyone but yourselves for choosing to live selfishly and practice sin.
Your book reminds me of those fake doctors on TV pharmaceutical ads, wherein are depicted idyllic scenes of happiness while they tout their awful drugs and finally list the potential side effects of taking them. In your version, the commercial concludes:
“Having gay sex with multiple partners increases the chances of getting anal cancer sevenfold, while physical damage to the rectum and anus can manifest as generalized ano-rectal trauma, hemorrhoids, anal fissures, and rectal prolapse; there is greater risk of contracting a wide range of sexually transmitted diseases whose effects range from miserable to deadly; you may end up addicted to alcohol and/or dangerous drugs, with a greater desire to kill yourself and generally wishing you had never been born.”
But do whatever you want, who cares about consequences? You describe every vile practice and aberrant thought as perfectly legitimate, while “shame” is the dirtiest of words, never to be tolerated for a moment, so evil and repulsive a notion it is to your deathstyle. Every shameful thing is kosher to you, leaving no room for a conscience of wrongdoing that is God-given and keeps people from destroying themselves in sin.
You boast about how great a service your book has provided. Does a homosexual really need a book encouraging him to do whatever pleases him, providing fodder to provoke every evil imagination (incest with his father, for example), to tell him to use condoms for his mock intercourse? Who has not heard that already? And why do you not consider the fact that you cannot have what you call “sex” (it is a perversion of God’s creation) without an artificial barrier, an indication of its unnaturalness?
You fault me for not crediting you for saving people’s lives. If you would repent of your sins and teach other people likewise, as we are telling you, you would then truly save lives. You may preserve the physical lives of some with your advice, but you destroy them in all the other ways I have mentioned (besides others I have not). To use an analogy, you might save some drug addicts’ lives by getting them to use clean needles, but they are still drug addicts. They need to get off the drugs altogether; otherwise they are still killing themselves, only more slowly. The same thing goes for homosexual activities. God has not declared it an abomination without good reason. All sin brings death. You are promoting and encouraging people to live in “healthy” death, an oxymoron and lie.
If you really wanted to help people, you would steer them away from dangerous practices from which no good comes. You talk about yours and Mr. Silverstein’s homosexual partners dying from disease, for example. Had they not engaged in the perverse sex that you promote, they would not have died. It is that simple. You were not lovers of their souls; you were enablers of their self-murder.
Your delusional and disgusting self adulation has made you delirious. Your claim of millions of lives having been saved as a result of the information in your book from chapters like “Dangerous Sex” is certifiable lunacy. If there are homosexual men that are driven by mental sickness (encouraged by you) to solicit sex from dangerous straight men that are prone to physically attack them, then telling them to not solicit is no solution at all for their underlying problem. One way or another, homosexuality is a death wish; such solicitations serve only as external indicators of its unnaturalness and the destructive pressures it creates in the lives of those who practice it.
You brought up your advice on alcoholism as another of the great public services of your book. Why is alcoholism higher among homosexuals, particularly teenagers? Because it (homosexuality) is perversity, and, while they are still young enough to have a conscience about doing wrong, the easiest way for teenagers to quiet it down and choke it out is with mind numbing inebriation. Yes, you are also a killer of children. You have much blood on your hands.
God says to men, “Do not have sex with a man as you would a woman. It is abomination.” You say of yourselves and your writing, “Gay people everywhere loved the book because of its permissive tone about sex…wanting to have sex with another man was more than okay; it was wonderful.”
Either God is a liar or you men are liars, and we know by great, widespread, and diverse experience that you are the liars.
Not all boys are having sex as you characterize; not at all. Nor are they consigned to that fate. It suits your purposes to declare and teach that, so all would succumb and descend to the hellish world of sin-depravity that you occupy, demanding everyone else join you. You judge all to be as perverse as you, using yourself as a standard and surmising that most are like, or desire to be like, you, Silverstein, and your dead buddies.
We are here to declare otherwise, with truth and power on our side. There is a right, clean, wholesome, non-hypocritical, life-giving way, commanded by God and supplied by His Spirit through Jesus Christ. Christ did not die for our sins in vain, as you propose. He is perfectly willing and able to give every soul a right mind, heart, and spirit to confess and forsake sin and to live above depraved animalistic impulses and natures. He has done that for us; we are living proof against the lies of your book. And we are by no means the only ones. Read Our Testimonies.
Published, with pleasure.
Paul Cohen
Victor’s reply:
Felice,
You can be assured that we will publish in full the reply you sent to Paul Cohen concerning your book, The Joy of Gay Sex.
I see that you are very proud of the popularity of your book, and of your other publications, awards, and fame. You also claim to have saved millions of lives through your work. And we do not doubt you recruited the services of “professionals,” those established and respected in the world’s society.
In Noah’s day, which you would consider myth, but which is historical fact, there were also many writers and readers of the kind of vile trash you have published. These would also have claimed virtue in their work, perhaps even claiming, as you do, that they greatly benefited mankind, saving lives. And God destroyed them all, except for eight persons, who believed and honored Him.
In Lot’s day, there were many in Sodom, Gomorrah, and surrounding towns who would have red The Joy of Gay Sex, and would have been encouraged in a lifestyle or practice, which God called abomination. These people were also brazenly proud of their contributions to mankind, and of the “freedom” of thought, speech, and action with which they endowed their fellows. As today and throughout all of man’s history, emancipation from, rather than through, God’s counsel and dictates was what it was all about in those times. God came and destroyed them all, except for those who did not participate. Those saved scarcely made it; they had to be forced out, so entangled and permeated were they in the decadent society of that day, even though God was fed up to the full with it. God was so merciful as to save those who had but a modicum of decency. Those given over to conduct contrary to His will had no remaining redemption value.
When the Israelites were sent into Canaan, God commanded them to destroy everything in their sight pertaining to false religion, a primary component of which was sexual debauchery. They were warned that the gods and corrupt ways of the heathen would snare them. Silverstein’s forefathers failed and consequently suffered much loss, defeat, and misery for millennia to come. To this day, as a Jew, he has continued in his decadence, famous among corrupt, self-destructive men but ignominious to God and to those who know better than he. Instead of being a light to the Gentiles, he and many other Jews partnered with Gentiles to serve in their demise.
It was not enough that Silverstein’s “partner” should perish of the consequence of breaking God’s Law, which is called “sin.” It was not enough that your “partner” died the same way. Two worldly-wise and educated men did not get the message. So they formed yet another partnership to help drag countless others into destruction with their partners and themselves. You did not get what your God-ordered circumstances were there to tell you.
To you those are not facts, but they are facts nonetheless. You do not believe in a holy God, as declared in creation and Scripture. You do not believe His perfect wisdom, Law, and will are only for mankind’s good. Therefore, you have served not to save millions but to destroy many. And so what if you did teach people to avoid the consequences of their actions for a time? For what? To defile themselves before God and man? Is that something to be proud of?
Here is the crux of your motive for writing your book:
You had no intention or desire whatsoever for your fellow man’s wellbeing. Your one aim was to make yourself more comfortable in your conscience by bringing everyone possible down to join you in your depravity.
But for the presence and influence of God’s Law, mankind would no longer be here. We would have annihilated ourselves long ago, and are at this time still insisting on doing so, and getting closer, thanks to perversity such as yours. Why else do you think your book is translated into so many languages and enjoys popularity in so many libraries?
We, as men of God, are obviously not impressed. Furthermore, we declare to you that what you are proud of stinks in the dimension that counts most, that being the spiritual, God’s Kingdom, which is now in the process of being established on earth. That which is contrary to this establishment in progress will be swept away by fire. Instead of pride and gloating and boasting about vileness, you will hang your head in utter shame, having lost everything you have prized, including your soul.
Do we condemn you? We certainly condemn what you promote – bestiality, deception and rebellion against parents, man lying with man and woman with woman, and all perversity of every kind that ultimately destroys. We make no apology for hating what the Bible clearly teaches that God hates, because He has squarely identified us with Him through the Lord Jesus Christ, Whose Person you revile in all your ways.
Believe me, you will find all this published on our site. So perverse you are that you are proud of your work and think we are shamed or perhaps even impressed because of your claims, fame, and fortune?
It’s finished, Felice. You are done. God is finished winking. We have spoken by the Lord Jesus Christ. God damn your books, awards, enterprises, and all things pertaining to ill gain and ungodly conduct for both you and your “partners.”