I don’t think I’ve ever met a woman who didn’t like to be with homosexual men. There are some like that dreadful Anita Bryant, I suppose. But her objecting to gay men was more of a desperate attempt to direct some publicity her way. Show business people always need that attention any way they can get it.
I’m sure everyone at the table last night has slept with men. Me, Graham, Hugo, Steve certainly, Toca Sacar obviously, and I don’t think the Comte was there just because he needed a square meal. And I think women understand being attracted to men. The same things we like about men, homosexuals do too. It’s not hard to figure out. Beautiful eyes, strong profile, a solid jaw, a solid chest, a nice butt, long legs with strong thighs, and beautiful feet and hands in my case. I can’t imagine making love to a man that doesn’t have longish fingers and you can really see the bones in his hands. Every once in a while I see a handsome man with little flipper hands and I think, “How could those hands take possession of someone else’s body?”
I think that most women fall in love with a man’s physicality. Quite the reverse of what is commonly held. That explains, too, why homosexuals, in a womanlike way, tend to only think of men’s beauty, not their personality. The big difference between women loving men and men loving men is probably the penis. That’s probably going too far. I think a lot of women sleep with men because they feel sorry for them. Marilyn Monroe did. Even married both Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller because they wanted to marry her. Her biography was interesting. She kept a certain distance from her own image. She was a lot like a gay man. When she was interested in someone she had no compunction about sleeping with him. She went beyond the idea that she should be married for security and for her reputation. Icons don’t need a good reputation.
She said, “I never seemed to get pregnant and be married to someone I wanted to stay married to at the same time.” Aside from that fact that she would have been a perfectly terrible mother. She was perfectly happy having affairs with both of those husbands. They were the ones who wanted to nail that icon down. And I don’t think Marilyn cared very much about whether her partner had a large penis or not.
I would love to read a personal diary by her about the men she slept with. I’ll bet President Kennedy either had a small penis or had premature ejaculations or something. That bad back meant something. He never wanted to sleep with the same woman more than a couple of times. With the exception of Jackie. Who had to be paid to stay married to him. Really. Once you stop believing all that “moon, June, spoon” stuff you can start getting really mean. As I sat there last night I thought that every single person at the table had almost certainly had a man’s penis in their mouth. And it didn’t bother me a bit. But I’d much rather have the penis in me than in my mouth. I wonder if penis-sucking has something to do with breast feeding? Men like it because it feels reassuring and secure, as it was with their mother. And women, who always seem to resent their mothers, don’t have that feeling. We were all too happy to stop breast feeding. Someone should do a study on this.
And I think affection is what it’s all about with women and sex. Sally Lamont told me once when I asked her if size mattered to her, “It doesn’t matter when you’re in love with a man, but once your relationship starts falling apart, size can matter because that’s all he’s doing for you.” No one ever discusses vagina size, but there has to be some connection there. If your vagina is really large you may need a really large penis in there. I don’t know. My own orgasms don’t seem to have a lot to do with “in there.” But much more to do with the front and center. They’ve done a lot of research about this, but I’ve never read it. Maybe it’s time. Maybe there’s a book here about how women feel about sleeping with men. I don’t want to write it, but I’d love doing the interviews.
Men seem to get a lot more hung up on parts of the body as being sexual stimulants than women do. I’ve never heard of a woman foot-fetishist. Men love tits, they love asses, and when they’re gay they love penises. I think that makes it hard to concentrate on the person walking around wearing the penis. They seem to be chasing sex parts more than the men. Well, that’s not true. They chase a handsome guy and then seem to get fixed on part of him instead. That’s probably not true either.
Gay men seem to fall into two categories. Those who just want to chase other men, like Toca and the Comte. Or those who seem to want to have a love partner, like Hugo. I don’t have a take on Steve. Maybe Steve is someone Hugo could corral. Men like that are worth loving, but hard to hang onto.
Is Graham like that? No, I don’t think so. Graham is a law unto himself. Whatever happened between us and however it sorts itself down the road, we have meshed. We are like one organism, and if we ever get torn apart it’s going to leave us both raw and bleeding. And whatever happens to me, I am so glad that this thing with Graham has happened to me; otherwise, I wouldn’t feel that I had really lived.
Now I must think about what I will do when Freddy arrives. I’ll put him in the blue bedroom. When mother arrives, I’ll put her in there and put Freddy in the pink one with Theo. It’s a good thing that I put Hugo way upstairs in the tower bedroom to begin with so I don’t have to move him around. The Festival is opening with The Trojan Women this weekend. Graham and I are only here for the month of August so we’ll have to come back down to see the last play. I’ll just leave Hugo in the house by himself for that week. He’ll be okay.
Now I’m going to make a quick run to Charlestour for some bread. Madame Cerise isn’t really holding up her end at the bakery here. The boulangerie over there in Charlestour is so much better. I’ll get some croissants, too, while I’m at it. They’ll stay fresh if I put them in the breadbox. I hear Theo waking up from his nap. I’ll take him with me.
The great thing about having a tight relationship with someone is that you see people you could sleep with but you don’t follow up on it because you would never want to hurt the person you’re with. Once you’re ready to sacrifice some sex to be considerate of the one you love, you’ve got a relationship as far as I’m concerned.
And then you don’t have to be slipping around behind someone’s back, and you don’t have to lie, and you never have to feel guilty. These are all pluses.