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He must be done to on the highest level, an ultimate worship, with a sort of … death love … like Tristan and Isolde?”
    “Snuff fuck.”
    “Bound and crying out and looking around for help that will not come and he has never been more beautiful. He’s too splendid to live, almost. It’s like that exposé on talk radio, did you see that? Where the black voice said, ‘I want to kill a pretty white boy.’ It’s all so … Oh, wait till Sunday.”
    As we walked to the door, Fleabiscuit came running out from under the couch, began to frolic, suddenly realized that he was About to Be Left Alone in Bud’s Sadistic Grip, wurfed, and raced into the bedroom to hide.
    “Thank you for listening to me,” Peter said. Then, impulsively, he gave me our first hug.
    “Now, that’s gay life,” I told him as I opened the door. “Someone is willing to hear what you need to say.”
    *   *   *
    I T IS WORTH REMARKING on Lars Erich’s unique sophistication of looks, because we have been graduated from a time when everyone in gay was either a type or invisible. Nowadays, most guys are not types; and the whole typing system has grown so complex it’s meaningless.
    It was so simple before, in the early days of Stonewall. Fantasy cartoonists proclaimed the styles: on the one hand Tom of Finland’s dangerous giants, and on the other Toby’s plunderable goslings. I kept wondering whether these artists were tapping into something universal or were outlining a vision dear only to themselves. But the porn stars were not kids: hairy-chested Richard Locke, one of the first gays to take a tattoo (a butterfly on the right thigh); an eerily handsome galoot named Paul something who Colted under the billing of Ledermeister; and an angel-faced hoodlum named Jimmy Hughes who won The Advocate ’s Groovy Guy contest and was almost immediately after convicted of multiple counts of sexual assault upon women he supposedly abducted from supermarket parking lots.
    So you could not be a kid, it seemed. You could not even be you. You had to be big, rough-hewn, surprising. Bright and funny—the essence of urban gay—was unhot. But what was hot? Abducting women from supermarket parking lots?
    “I hate this,” Dennis Savage would wail, coming back from the gym in his early days there. “It is so sheerly punishment.” Still, his mesomorph structure took on the extra flash easily, and he so enjoyed the results that he upped his program. Then, too, the gym—Profile for Men, just down Second Avenue from our building—was notoriously cruisy. Orgies were known to break out in the steam room.
    One day, as a shirtless Dennis Savage flexed and paraded around in his apartment with a sinful grin, I asked, “Are gays having so much sex simply because it’s pleasurable? Or is it part of a psychological transaction?”
    “You have to teach a guy to like himself,” said Carlo, coming out of the kitchen munching an apple.
    “How do you do that?”
    Carlo thought it over while examining Dennis Savage’s waist-to-shouders ratio. “You will show him solutions to his problems,” Carlo began. “Always side with him against the world.… Now you want to work the delts extra-heavy, my friend. Give yourself the wing look. Extra wide at the top is best. And not so much arms now.”
    “But they notice those first,” Dennis Savage protested, moving to the mirror to see for himself what Stonewall had made of Jane Austen’s Eligible Young Man: the hunk.
    “Main thing they see is the shape of the torso,” said Carlo, coming up behind Dennis Savage to demonstrate like an academic at a chart, pointing, underlining, savoring. “You want this long V above all. Big chest for those fine buttons to ride on. They will not just be there—they will stand out.”
    From across the room, I said, “To just be there is not permitted in gay life.”
    “You will keep on heavy in the legs,” Carlo went on. “Big thighs are a lovely sight to see.”
    “They only show