Confessions and Comics

"I Had to Prove My Manhood --and My Wife Had to Pay the Price!" "My Minister Taught Me All About Love, But He Wouldn't Let Me Be a Real Woman!" "How I Spent My Summer Vacation--and Nearly Died Three Months Later!" "Mama Made Me Do It, But She Wouldn't Tell Me Why!"

The titles are titillating--and similar to those on the cover of any pulp magazine. But True To Life is published by Emory University, and it is meant to teach, not tease. Noting that most of the women who went to Emory's birth-control clinic in Atlanta were avid readers of confessions, the clinic's family planners decided to write some of their own. Their stories, like those in True Confession, are about torrid love affairs, but the message is different. In True To Life, women learn not to be victims of circumstance, or of men, but instead to start taking control of their own lives, new feminist fashion. ("For once, I hadn't just floated along in the dream, saying yes to everything.") The heroines learn about contraception, usually the hard way. ("The doctor told me I had been very lucky--so many women die from illegal abortions.")

So far there has been only one issue, which is now in its third printing (making a circulation of 38,000 copies in all). Distributed in birth-control clinics, hospitals and schools, True To Life is free of charge. Interviews with readers, however, show that nearly all of them think the magazine would be worth paying for.

A similar attempt to inform young readers painlessly is being made at Syracuse University. There the messages are about sex and drugs, and the medium is brightly colored comic books that parents probably will not read, and just as well too. In Ten Heavy Facts About Sex, Psychologist Sol Gordon is overwhelmingly permissive. "Masturbation is a normal expression of sex. Enjoy it." If a person wants to be homosexual or bisexual, that's his business. Pornography is harmless. Gordon's only caveats are against sex that is "exploitive" or unprotected by contraception. Like the sex comic, Who Will Drug You? A Survivor's Handbook avoids moralizing. But it must be doubly instructive for youngsters to learn graphically the various symptoms of overdose victims who are having convulsions or just staggering, "confused and slow." And to learn that holding a joint of grass can get you 50 years in Texas.

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