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off" his panting assistant so as to be the one to service the Puerto Rican check-out boy during the city-wide black-out, the first friendly one that occurred on a winter's night in the mid-sixties. In our cold grey city Puerto Ricans were the summer, the color; white boys from the Midwest who'd first jerked off at age thirteen while looking at bare-chested

    Indians in Westerns on TV movies now could hold in their arms a three-dimensional tropical Indian from the Bronx who melted into smiles and shouted a muted "Ay!" when pinched.
    The Stonewall was black and Puerto Rican. Into that hot house drifted a cool white camellia, a lovely pale white face belonging to a lean young man in black tie, Chesterfield, grey gloves, even shiny opera pumps, someone who pulled me wordlessly into his arms and waltzed me through that sweating throng as though the nineteenth century had just hurried through the room and recognized itself in a mirror.
    He stared at me unsmilingly and unscrolled a long tongue into my mouth like the angel's words in a medieval Annunciation. I invited him home and found him to be complicated in ways that bored me. I learned he belonged to a group of elegant fags who attended the opera in black tie on Mondays, the "social" night, who dated interlocking sets of debs but fucked each other after hurrying the girls home, who belonged to the Racquet Club, who went fox-hunting together at My Lady's Manor in Monkton, Maryland, who crewed together in the Bermuda Cup. They called themselves the "White Russians," but all seemed to be named Reginald or Colin. They could sing satirical songs about life at Yale while nimbly accompanying themselves at the piano. They were active in an amateur Gilbert and Sullivan club that staged an operetta every spring, all proceeds going to a good Protestant cause such as senility or alcoholism. Two White Russians, in love with each other, had just married a pair of deaf sisters, extremely rich; they'd had the cheek to celebrate a double wedding. They camped it up wickedly with other White Russians on their yacht whenever Antonia and Olympia turned their backs.
    My own White Russian was named Richard Smith, had big blue eyes that lingered a full musical beat behind the conversation, a compact, lean blond's body, no longer boyish and somehow indecent, scalded hairless, it seemed. He had an ironically social regard at odds with the endless clean tongue he would suddenly unroll into my mouth, as though his tongue had a will of its own. He'd be chatting away about his upcoming membership in the Century Club when suddenly, between sips of gin, I'd find his tongue lodged between my open jaws. The cool impertinence in his eyes, especiaDy when they were seen up close, was nearly lunatic. He was fascinated by me, perhaps because I was indifferent to him, or probably because he was intrigued by my lack of social ambition. I didn't want to marry a rich woman who would know nothing of my "pranks on the side" (his phrase). The deb parties I'd attended as a teenager in the 1950s

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    had seemed to me dien manifestations of an enviable but unobtainable world; in New York in the 1960s they seemed preposterously irrelevant. Even the White Russians, apparendy, treated tliem as nostalgic kitsch. In a provincial town such as Cincinnati or Baltimore, society was small, its rules coherent, its power undeniable, and the annihilating word hip had not yet been pronounced. In New York, however, that three-letter word so intimidated and intoxicated everyone under thirt)' that it had dismantled the old social machinery; the only people who still picked their way through the debris were the dowdy and the dull—and the duplicitous White Russians, who saw the situation as just another occasion for displaying their theatrical powers of mockery and dissimulation. These powers, of course, were about to be rendered meaningless by gay liberation, which represented as much a loss in aesthetic