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squeezed up to him in the same seat. He was the rather taciturn gang leader who, having heated me to fever pitch, would then turn away abruptly and kiss another girl, abandoning me to his “men,” and we would drop in a heap to the carpeted floor between the rows of seats. The narrative continues: perfectly respectable men could leave their seats and their suspi- cious wives to cross the auditorium in the dark and prostrate themselves on top of me. Sometimes I would have the lights turn back on during all this cavorting; or I would go to the bathroom and have a succession of com- ings and goings between there and the audit- orium. I think sometimes I would have the
    police intervening. Another take: the man- ager would ask me to come to his office, then would call for all the boys, too. Another ver- sion: I would follow the group who had ad- opted me in the line all the way to a stretch of wasteland. And there, behind a picket fence, they would strip me naked and paw me. It was a compact group forming a circle around me, like a second fence screening me from view. One by one, the boys broke away from the circle to press themselves against me. In another version, I was nestled deep in a seat in a nightclub with a man on either side of me. While I busied myself with one of them and we kissed each other hungrily, the other stroked my body. Then I would turn around and kiss the second one, but the first would not let me go, or he would give up his place to a third man and so on; I kept swinging from left to right. I’m not sure that when I first started succumbing to these fantasies, I had ever done any petting or even
    kissed a single boy on the mouth. I was a late starter. When I came out of school, I would quite often meet up with a group of friends in the bedroom that I shared with my broth- er, but it was usually to have fights with them. At that sort of age, girls’ bodies are more mature than boys’; I was quite well built and I would sometimes win.

    If I am going back as far as my fantasy life during my childhood and adolescence, I should point out the initial disparity between fantasy and my actual behavior, especially, as I recall, at puberty. I had started reading a Hemingway novel ( The Sun Also Rises, per- haps), and I was sufficiently disturbed by the description of one of the female characters, who was attributed several lovers, to stop reading the book. And I never went back to it. A conversation with my mother also gave
    me a shock. I don’t remember how we got on to the subject, I can just see her setting the table in the kitchen as she confided in me that she had had seven lovers in her life. “Seven,” she said, looking at me, “it’s not all that many,” but there was a shy questioning in her eyes. I scowled. It was the first time I had heard anyone say out loud that a woman could know more than one man. She became a bit defensive. A long time later, when I looked back on that rare moment of intim- acy, I regretted my attitude. What was seven compared to a score that was still open?
    When I was better informed about what sexual acts might entail, I integrated them into my imaginings, but coitus achieved did not preclude passing from one partner to an- other. One of the most detailed scenarios that illustrates this point of view was the fol- lowing: I am the guest of a vulgar, fat man—pretending to be an uncle—at a busi- ness meal in a private salon in a restaurant.
    There are twenty or thirty men sitting down to eat, and my first contribution is to do the rounds, sucking each of them off under the table. I can picture their faces above me, sur- rendering saggily, as each of them success- ively, and briefly, lays out of the conversa- tion. Then I get up onto the table and they amuse themselves finding interesting substi- tutes for me to take, cigars, sausages; someone eats a sausage from between my thighs. As the meal goes on, I am conscien- tiously fucked, some leading me off to a sofa, others