Page "Gershon Legman" Paragraph 14

According to George Chauncey's book Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940, Legman was a homosexual and is credited with having invented the vibrating dildo when he was only twenty.

However, Mikita Brottman holds that he was exclusively heterosexual, accounting for both the abandonment of his proposed volume on fellatio as well as, possibly and in some measure, for his contempt for Alfred Kinsey.

He was married for many years to Beverley Keith ( died of lung cancer, 1966 ), married briefly to Christine Conrad, a possibly bigamous relationship, ended either by annulment or divorce, then to Judith Evans.

Autobiographical asides in his works note multiple heterosexual relationships, including at least two engagements.

In Rationale of the Dirty Joke, he consistently speaks of homosexuality as a " perversion ," and Frank Rector claims that homosexuality was in Legman's mind connected not with a democratic gay liberation movement, but with the Nazi Ernst Rohm.

His obituary in the London Independent lists three marriages, two sons and two daughters.

Brottman lists a daughter, Ariëla Legman ( b. 1957 ), by an unidentified Dutch woman, as well as Legman's children by Judith: David Guy Legman ( 1968 ), Rafael ( 1971 ) and Sara Felicity ( 1973 ), and identifies Louise " Beka " Doherty as the great love of Legman's life.