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clients fall in love with them, they did nothing to encourage this. If you mooned over them they became bored and soon began to avoid you. Beyond keeping their hair carefully combed, they showed few signs of vanity. They didn’t seem able to picture themselves as objects of desire. Their attitude was an almost indifferent “take me or leave me.” Their chief reason for coming to the bars was of course to get money, but they also came because this was a club where they could meet other boys and gossip and play cards. Often, if you wanted one of them to join you at your table, he would tell you to wait until he had finished his game.
    Christopher’s relations with many of the boys soon became easy and intimate. Perhaps they recognized and were drawn to the boyishness in him. He felt a marvelous freedom in their company. He, who had hinted and stammered in English, could now ask straight out in German for what he wanted. His limited knowledge of the language forced him to be blunt and he wasn’t embarrassed to utter the foreign sex words, since they had no associations with his life in England.
    And what did he want? Hirschfeld had rightly called him infantile. He wanted to go back into the world of his adolescent sexuality and reexperience it, without the inhibitions which had spoiled his pleasure then. At school, the boys Christopher had desired had been as scared as himself of admitting to their desires. But now the innocent lust which had fired all that ass grabbing, arm twisting, sparring and wrestling half naked in the changing room could come out stark naked into the open without shame and be gratified in full. What excited Christopher most, a struggle which turned gradually into a sex act, seemed perfectly natural to these German boys; indeed, it excited them too. Maybe because it was something you couldn’t do with a girl, or anyhow not on terms of physical equality; something which appealed to them as an expression of aggression-attraction between a pair of males. Maybe, also, such mildly sadistic play was a characteristic of German sensuality; many of them liked to be beaten, not too hard, with a belt strap. Of course it would never have occurred to any of them to worry about the psychological significance of their tastes.
    This rough athletic sexmaking was excellent isometric exercise. It strengthened Christopher’s muscles more than all his years of joyless compulsory games at school. He felt grateful to his partners for his new strength. There was much love in his contact with their sturdy bodies; love which made no demands beyond the pleasure of the moment.
    Christopher was delighted with his way of life and with himself for living it—so much so that he became bumptious, and actually wrote to a woman he knew in England, telling her: “I am doing what Henry James would have done, if he had had the guts.” The woman foolishly reported this statement to Christopher’s former literary mentor, an Irish authoress who had been a friend of his father, Frank, and whom Frank had nicknamed Venus. (See Kathleen and Frank. ) Venus, a devout Jamesian, was not amused. She replied loftily: “Christopher has become either a silly young ass or a dirty young dog, and I am interested in neither animal.”
    Christopher wasn’t angry with Venus—she soon forgave him—and he wasn’t in the least abashed by her rebuke. But, before long, he began to feel that he had done enough exploring of his rediscovered adolescence. What he wanted now was a more serious relationship, expressed by a different kind of lovemaking.
    Since he no longer needed his former sex partners, he could afford to regard them objectively and to moralize over them. Wasn’t it basically wrong to hire other human beings to have sex with you? Weren’t you exploiting them, degrading them? Christopher had found it charming to watch Francis bargaining with the natives of the jungle. Francis himself