THE FIRST TIME HE wore his Boy Scout uniform a nattily dressed Negro man stopped him on the street and asked him if he wanted to make a dollar. “Doing what?” he said. “Let me jerk you off.” “No, sir,” he said and hurried away. When he was ten, Fritzie, an older boy with high color and wet lips, began hanging around the neighborhood. He and his friends tolerated Fritzie because Fritzie talked about philosophy and played the harmonica. Fritzie was said to be epileptic although no one had seen him have a fit. One day when he and Fritzie were lying on the grass in a park Fritzie suggested playing with his genitals through his pants. Fritzie said he would like it. He let Fritzie do it but felt no sensation. Fritzie said this was odd and when a boy and girl sat down near them gave it up. He and his friends often expressed the wish that a particular one of themselves were a girl. “Boy, would I fuck you!” they’d say, and the boy who the others wished was a girl would shrug. When he was eleven he and his closest city friend considered serial, mutual anal intercourse or intercourse by insertion of the penis, lubricated, between the legs beneath the anus, but they decided that what they really wanted was a girl and they would wait. In high school near the end of sophomore year Mr. Kendall, a teacher of Greek who had been crippled by polio and used a cane, chose him for Kendall’s Kinder, a small group of students who frequented Mr. Kendall’s bachelor quarters, where they smoked, gossiped, drank, and listened to Mr. Kendall’s observations on life. New members often had not drunk before or had been developing a taste for drinks like Tom Collinses and port wine; Mr. Kendall said that if he did nothing else for his boys he taught them to drink scotch. In the spring of his junior year Mr. Kendall and Mr. Whelan, a teacher of French, invited four members of the group to a weekend in an isolated cabin owned by Mr. Whelan. On Saturday night everyone got drunk, or seemed to, and at midnight Mr. Kendall began shouting, “Who wants to get fucked?” No one wanted to, as far as he knew. He slept in the front seat of Mr. Kendall’s car, another boy slept in the back, and they all returned to the city early next morning. In the army he met the first acknowledged homosexual he liked, a tall boy with bright eyes who wanted to be called by his last name, Pearl. Pearl stooped to be shorter and claimed that his only argument with the army was that it had developed his leg muscles. He was not put off by Pearl, because Pearl seemed to be imitating a homosexual, whereas Pearl’s friend Harry, who asked to be called Harriet, seemed to be the real thing. Pearl was full of theories and stories about male homosexuals: the real ones wanted to be women; they desired only men who desired women and thus were destined for frustration; there existed a prize of a million dollars, established anonymously by a homosexual, awaiting the first man to have a baby. Pearl and Harry invited him to visit the house of a civilian homosexual they knew in the town near camp. He accepted and after dinner went to bed with Pearl in a room snugly shuttered and completely dark. He was made to come three times; there had been much shifting around in bed, and afterward he suspected that the host, an ugly man, had changed places with Pearl midway. Next morning Harry brought Pearl a cherry in a glass. The experience had been no more pleasurable to him than masturbation, and he did not sleep with Pearl again. Pearl accepted this, but Harry for weeks afterward pleaded with him to go to bed. The first person he knew with a hyphenated name, a young attractive bachelor, took him up as a confidant and reported regularly on progress in finding a suitable girl friend. He was unhappily married at the time and envied the bachelor’s single life until one day the bachelor said, “I haven’t had sex in two years, not since I broke up with a dancer friend.” “What happened to her?” he asked the bachelor. “Him,” the bachelor said, and he realized that sexual confessions contain propositions. The second man he knew with a hyphenated name, who affected intricate designs in facial hair, who was both boyish and avuncular, and who was liked by everyone for a while, prevented a colleague from getting an influential job by telling the employer that the colleague was homosexual. The colleague over drinks at a bar one evening said to him, “He didn’t even ask me if I was,” and then after a pause, “You know what’s the matter with him? He wants to be a good guy but just can’t.” He is contemptuous of lesbians because they seem angry and not able to do much about it. He thinks male homosexuals are unlucky and damaged. As sex becomes less important to him so will sexual differences: people will seem to be peering through sexual masks they can’t remove.