Sex is dirty and women are clean. That seems to be part of it. Sex is a private male thing, and women are (a) likely to disapprove and (b) a challenge and a threat and (c) strange unknowable beings. I can’t understand all the rest of it.
Not that they want to straighten out. To get away from the gay scene. Not that at all. Paul insisted he could only have a long-term relationship with someone like Gregory. That he could live permanently or nearly so with Greg, while he would never consider sharing a roof with a woman. (Greg is somewhat less committed to this view, or seemed so to me.) The consensus: Being exclusively gay is a hangup and being exclusively straight is a hangup, and they would like to be able to function both ways.
Really function, as they can function physically with women already. But be as easy with women as they are with each other, which will take some doing, but which they seem to feel is important to them, sufficiently important to make them not merely willing but even anxious to waste their time with me.
And so, with me posing no threat, with me quite silent and motionless, they make love in my presence.
A project of theirs, suggested by Paul who has done some extensive if dilettantish reading in psychology and conditioned-reflex therapy. The idea being one that seems sensible enough to me, and that is, come to think of it, not that wildly different from my own sexual self-improvement project. To wit: by having me frequently present, and by on the one hand learning to relax conversationally with me, and to be naked both physically and emotionally in front of me, and on the other hand by so structuring things as to develop an association of my passive and unobtrusive presence and the whole idea of sexual excitement, they will gradually break down the barrier which keeps the two concepts of women and sexual intimacy (not activity so much as intimacy) mutually exclusive.
So I sit silently watching them stroke and kiss each other, and they pause occasionally to kiss me and perhaps touch my breasts and genitals. Their touches and kisses are essentially passionless. Exploratory, tentative, almost cartographic. They acquaint themselves with my geography without any need to make arduous trips over this terra incognita. And we chat while they do this, and then they kiss and pet and suck each other, and the game goes on in this fashion until it comes to a logical conclusion.
Hard to say whether I add to or detract from their passion for each other. We have not quite discussed this and I myself am less than certain. I do not seem to inhibit them, but then I’ve no way of knowing what they are like when I am not around. I have seen them twice, and they do seem more at ease with me now than when we first met, but that is inevitable in all such artificial relationships, is it not? I have noticed it myself. It is easier to take off clothes in front of those who have already seen you naked. Psychic clothes or cotton ones.
My own reaction to them?
Harder to pin down.
Obviously they interest me. Perhaps they do something more than interest me, as I find myself examining my feelings, not only as I type these pages but in other moments as well. As if there is a message written in their flesh that it would profit me to decode.
Do they excite me?
In a way of course they do. They are both extremely attractive men and it is exciting to watch two men together. A sort of excitement I had not previously had. The mainstream of pornography does not focus on male homosexual relations. (Inasmuch as mainstreams are inclined to focus. A chaotic metaphor, that.) The porno movies on Forty-Second Street show women tangled up with each other, but never men. When there is a group scene, two men and a woman or several men and several women, the men seem to me to go to great lengths to avoid touching one another. For the benefit of the males in the audience, no doubt; it is presumed that their own inhibitions in this regard would render such scenes a turn-off. Perhaps, too, the actors aren’t into that sort of thing. Or perhaps they are, and go at each other hammer and tongues when the shooting finishes for the day.
No, it’s not just the actors. All the dirty novels I’ve read are in the same category. Always some lesbian scenes, and never any faggotry. Except for the occasional scene in which some hapless queen makes a play for our hero, and our hero lays him out with a haymaker to the jaw. To prove, beyond doubt, that he (and the writer, and the identifying reader in the bargain, no doubt) is heterosexual as a John Fucking Wayne movie.
Of course they have faggot pornography. Books and pictures and movies and everything. They advertise tons of this stuff in Screw. But it’s kept to itself, a gay ghetto. Bill tells me that the Times Square porn shops keep the gay stuff separated, give it one wall or bin to itself.
Strange.
How did I get off on this tangent?
Paul and Gregory.
I don’t know. I guess I enjoy it. I don’t come or anything. I don’t get hot exactly.
I don’t know.
Maybe it’s the comforting feeling that they’re as mixed up as I am, and that I’m having some sort of therapeutic function in my relationship with them. The reverse of my role in what I have going with Bill.
I suppose this might be worth puzzling out, if anything’s worth puzzling out, but now doesn’t seem to be the time for it. I’m not getting anywhere, not typing anything that hasn’t occurred to me before, not coming up with anything I haven’t been able to get together in more eloquent form in my private musings. I feel very inarticulate at the moment, and less given to profound introspection than normally.
I think I’ll wash my hair.
25 April — Sunday
It’s raining.
I could open the window and let the rain water my plant, but I think the rainwater in this city is even worse than the tapwater. It gets filtered by all that pollution overhead and comes down positively black. If people — in New York washed their hair with rainwater, it would fall out.
26 April — Monday
Had dinner with Mr. Karlman tonight. As an American lieutenant said recently in quite another context, it was no big deal. He dropped me at the subway and I took a cab back here.
We didn’t talk about anything important. Had the feeling he wanted to talk about something more personal, but he never made any move in that direction.
I wonder what I would do if he made a pass at me. The funny thing is that I have gradually come to the point, almost without realizing it, where I could sleep with him without any real trouble.
At least I think I could.
It doesn’t mean that much to me. I don’t know that I could enjoy it, but I could go through with it and feel generally good about it, and good about doing something nice for him. As I do sort of like him as a person.
Reasons against sleeping with him:
(1) How he might take it. How he’d want to be closer with me, might think he’s in love with me, might worry that I would be in love with him, all of that. Or that he would dislike me for taking it casually, or that I in turn would be crushed (though I don’t think so) if he took it casually. If we could both just do it with no strong feelings on either side, just something nice to do for two people who sort of like each other, it would be fine. But how could that happen or how could one be sure it could happen?
(2) Jennifer could sleep with him but could Arlene? I am Arlene with him and Jennifer with others, and Arlene is still a virgin, still a prude, still all these things.
Sudden question: Is it Arlene or Jennifer who writes this diary? Arlene the obvious answer, but I am not entirely certain as I think about it. Could be that it varies, that sometimes Jennifer and sometimes Arlene sits at this typewriter. At the moment I am Arlene, I would say, but how can Arlene conceive of balling Mr. K.? For that matter, why would Jennifer be inclined to offer any objections?