On Sexuality and Power

In Armistead Maupin’s novel The Night Listener, Gabriel is embarrassed about the age disparity between himself and his partner, Jess. Fifteen years is “not that big a difference,” Gabriel says and, anyway, because they came out at roughly the same time they are “the same gay age.” This idea offers to release them from the taint of age hierarchy and narcissism: “This meant we’d reached the same level in our personal growth … which was far more pertinent to our compatibility than our chronological difference.”¹ Gabriel calls it “my marriage” (4).

However, hierarchy has not in fact been irrelevant; it has informed their sexual practice. Gabriel remarks that it was a big turn-on when Jess would gaze up at him “with slavish devotion. Or he’d work my nipples like a ravenous baby, murmuring, ‘Sir, yessir, yessir,’ until I came with a fury” (50). Actually Gabriel is too nice and cuddly for too much of that; an earlier relationship foundered because he was unable to play “The Great Dark Man” (80). Now Jess has left Gabriel, partly because he is not going to die soon of AIDS after all, partly because he has been getting into a rough, more manly, leather scene—shaving off his “baby-chick hair,” growing a beard. Gabriel feels “old and disconnected” (51). Suddenly he sees Jess as “closer to middle age than to the soft-featured boy I’d fallen in love with” (211). A pattern emerges: previously Gabriel had a relationship with Wayne, who was at least ten years younger: “the grownup boy who had brought me childhood again.” Gabriel confesses to “youthful longing”: his ultimate pain is that he’ll “never be strong enough, never be handsome enough, never be young enough, to really be a man among men” (132).

The age hierarchy of Gabriel and Jess correlates with class hierarchy, for Gabriel was already a celebrated gay broadcaster. Here too Gabriel has indulged in an element of disavowal. “Until now our friends had been largely mutual; we had cultivated them together as couples often do,” he says; “Jess, after all, had been my satellite for ten years without complaint” (51). The unremarked discrepancy between “mutual” and “satellite” marks Gabriel’s reluctance to acknowledge that his “marriage” has been founded in inequality.

This scenario is close to Maupin’s own experience, as may be seen in a television interview in which he and Terry Anderson present themselves as the ideal couple, devoted to coping with Terry’s anticipated death from AIDS.² Will and Jamie constitute a comparably symmetrical couple in Maupin’s story, “Coming Home”: they say the same things, laugh the same way, sound the same on the phone, speak of themselves as married. The age disparity is put at just five years, and Jamie has an independent occupation (coppersmith), whereas Jess manages Gabriel’s affairs.³ (Will and Jamie stories are claimed in The Night Listener as disguised autobiographical writing by Gabriel; 18). If, in retrospect at least, these versions of himself and his partners appear a tad manipulative and self-deceiving, in the novel Maupin confronts this thought, allowing us to see that the relationship had not really been equal and, indeed, had been experienced as lopsided and limiting by Terry/Jamie/Jess.

Gabriel’s other main relationship in The Night Listener provokes another anxiety about age hierarchy. Pete, a thirteen-year-old who has been intensively abused and has AIDS, strikes up a phone dialogue, founded in his admiration for Gabriel’s broadcasts. “‘I guess he sort of has a thing about me,’” Gabriel admits (39). Gabriel becomes equally involved; they get to use the terms “Son” and “Dad” (uppercase). Other people are suspicious, especially his reactionary father: “‘Well … you’re a middle-aged man, and he’s … well, people could get the wrong idea, that’s all.’” This facilitates Gabriel’s spirited defense: “‘The boy needs love. You don’t have to be straight to do that’” (70–71; Maupin’s pauses). Surely this is right, but its location in The Night Listener suggests Maupin’s determination to establish that, even if he has to concede that his partnerships have been organized around hierarchies of age and class, this doesn’t make him a pedophile. Yet he is prepared to acknowledge “a distinct resemblance” in his way of relating to Jess (lover) and Pete (quasi son; 182). As it transpires, he is protected by another doubt, as to whether there could actually be such a boy; perhaps he is an invention—the novel doesn’t resolve this. These are awkward topics—the age of consent in several European countries is fourteen. The Night Listener discloses two embarrassments around age hierarchy: that it is immature and can’t last, and that it is ultimately pedophilic. Gabriel, left alone at the end, questions the assumption that one must get a long-term relationship to lead a dignified and contented life. Perhaps the kind of partnership he can envisage will necessarily be immature; he might live better by himself.

I distinguished gender difference and gender complementarity in chapter 2. The former is founded in (relative) difference of gender; the latter is founded in similarity of gender, but characterized by difference within that. The gender complementarity model is founded in similarity of gender, but characterized by difference within that. In chapter 3, on fantasy, I showed how the two models may be substituted and conflated. Age constitutes one of the key hierarchies in the sex/gender system as it is lived in our societies. It is an inevitable factor in the first power structure that all of us experience: a child with adult caregivers. Without it the infant cannot survive and grow as a human creature. Age difference affords a hierarchy that may be used protectively. We should expect it to figure intensely in our psychic lives, and not to be confined to particular circumstances, such as same-sex communities or the coming-out process. The power distribution in the age/youth binary structure may seem less obvious than the others: notoriously, an older man can make a fool of himself over a young man, or a young woman. Notwithstanding, class for class and race for race, older people control far more wealth and institutional power than younger people. It is because this pattern may be disrupted in our societies by a premium upon youthful beauty that it gets so much attention.

Eve Sedgwick observes, shrewdly, that Wilde, who acquired after the trials the representative role of aesthetical, dandified, and effeminate queer, seems not to have thought of himself or his partners as inverted in gender:

Wilde’s own eros was most closely tuned to the note of the pederastic love in process of being superseded—and, we may as well therefore say, radically misrepresented—by the homo/hetero imposition…. his desires seem to have been structured intensely by the crossing of definitional lines—of age, milieu, initiatedness, and physique, most notably.⁴

What is surprising here is Sedgwick’s rather sudden assertion that such “pederastic love [was] in process of being superseded.” David Halperin not only takes this alleged supersession for granted, he sees little reason to regret it:

Although love, emotional intimacy, and tenderness are not necessarily absent from the [age-structured] relationship, the distribution of erotic passion and sexual pleasure is assumed to be more or less lopsided, with the older, “active” partner being the subject of desire and the recipient of the greater share of pleasure from a younger partner who figures as a sexual object, feels no comparable desire, and derives no comparable pleasure from the contact (unless he is an invert or pathic …). The junior partner’s reward must therefore be measured out in currencies other than pleasure, such as praise, assistance, gifts, or money.⁵

This sounds to me at each point unnecessarily disapproving: in the marginalizing of intimacy in such a liaison, in the discrediting of the boy’s desire, and in the assumption that genuine sexual pleasure is independent of factors such as praise and assistance. Halperin’s emphases place him firmly within the dominant ideology, which prizes (purportedly) egalitarian relations. If, however, as I have suggested, age-disparate relationships are about loving versions of oneself—who one is, who one was, who one would like to be—they surely afford far-reaching potential for rewarding, interpersonal development.

Given their debt to Foucault, it is possible that Sedgwick and Halperin have been encouraged by a certain strand in his work to expect that models of sexuality will define, and be defined by, an epoch, characterized by distinct modes of thought, with change occurring through a sequence of large-scale epistemological shifts. Cultural materialists, drawing upon Raymond Williams, are more likely to stress uneven development, setting subordinate, residual, and emergent formations alongside dominant ones. These concepts allow that diverse models may be in play at any given time; we may identify one as dominant and another as subordinate or emergent.⁶

Age hierarchy must be profoundly embarrassing if even queer theorists want to distance themselves from it. Indeed, in today’s metropolitan sex/gender system, it is freighted with implications of immaturity, narcissism, effeminacy, pedophilia, exploitation, and humiliation. These disturbing factors are founded in relations between age and youth in society at large, where younger people are more often credited with sexual attractiveness, whereas older people often have more economic, political, and social resources. Age hierarchy therefore invites stigmatization as merely instrumental on both sides, in contrast to the reciprocity attributed to age-matched relations. The disrespect accorded age-disparate relations is evident, Simon LeVay and Elisabeth Nonas remark, in the freedom other gay men feel to court the younger partner, while age-matched couples are accorded respectful space, and a hint of the sanctity of marriage.⁷

Indeed, such is the dominance of the egalitarian model that age disparity may actually appear more defensible when it is instrumental. By this I mean that it is more acceptable (slightly) for a youngster to allow it to be supposed that he is using an older man to find his way around the scene, or because he gets taken to the opera, than it is for him to declare that he is attracted and devoted to an older person. Correspondingly, it may be more suitable for the older man to be perceived as exploitative—on to a good thing—than for him to appear to take the boy seriously as a partner. It can work, Edmund White’s narrator avers in The Married Man, if you get the chemistry right. Austin, unfortunately, “was incapable of picking out the talented tenth, the blessed exception, that nearly unique boy who admired experience and accomplishment more than an uncreased face and a tympanum-tight tummy. Nor could he spot that one guy in a hundred who was age-blind and didn’t judge another man as a commodity.”⁸

This chapter dwells upon the impediments in age difference; my habitual mode is critical, and inclined to discover difficulties. Notwithstanding, we have many invocations of the joys of age-disparate liaisons. Some of the deceptively diffident poems of Gregory Woods celebrate such liaisons, appealing sometimes to the gay tradition—Orpheus, Alexander, Whitman, Wilde, Rimbaud, Henry James. This untitled, twelve-line poem finds the poet on the island of Sirmio (I deduce), where the ancient Roman lyricist had a villa:

Under where Catullus

toyed with reality

in his cushioned saloons

a decorum of very

reasonable cabins

oversees the bathers.

But we beyond the rocks,

a slippery broker

of boyhood and I

with water up trunks down

to our knees, negotiate

the space between our ages.⁹

Catullus’s ancient, luxurious villa was above; the modern, decent cabins are below, as if policing the beach scene. But the poet and his boy have located a third place, beyond the rocks. The imagery has a financial edge; perhaps money is being discussed. Yet the scenario is not primarily about money; the boy is slippery because of his wet skin, not dishonesty, and their trunks are down, not their futures. It is age disparity and sexual attraction that are being negotiated, as they once were by Catullus and his boys. One way or another, we will find a space.

I discussed Paul Monette’s novel Halfway Home in chapter 5. Tom, the narrator, forges a great relationship with his nephew, Daniel, a classic desire-to-be: “I noticed how he set his pace to mine as we walked across to the store. I would have done anything for him just then, for he made me feel like I was a fellow to be emulated, as he studied his way to becoming a man” (139). Monette makes the boy as young as he can, given the kind of sensitivity and awareness that he wants him to have, and thus unavailable for sexual advances (he is seven). Nonetheless, Tom is fearful that he will be perceived as corrupting Daniel. He comes upon him doing a jigsaw puzzle he has found in the house: the picture is of Michelangelo’s statue of David. Tom is terrified that Daniel’s parents might enter and suppose that it was his idea. (Indeed, Susan is very suspicious and aggressive.) “Instantly I knew, sitting like a giant beside this little boy, what I was really afraid of. That Daniel would turn out gay, and they would blame me and curse my infected ghost.” And this was “the old self-hatred”: “Because what I really meant was that I didn’t want him to be gay, to run that gauntlet of misery and solitude. Where the hell was all my pride that had marched in a hundred parades?”¹⁰ Meanwhile Tom, against his expectations, reorients his own age allegiance. He falls in love with Gray, the older man who has been quietly protecting him. “His being fifty had no downside; he was simply a full-grown man. And lying there lazily under the comforter, I took the most wanton joy in being the younger one” (156).

In Jack Dickson’s Glasgow thriller, Oddfellows, Joe (aged thirty-one) is in turn the younger and the older partner. He feels indebted to Billy, who gave him a job and a place to live when he was thrown out of the army. Billy is a club owner, engaged in endless negotiations with other entrepreneurs, and with the police (over drugs and murder). He demands brutal sexual episodes, but this power play suits Joe, whose fantasy investments center upon being humiliated and beaten in the army. He is less happy when Billy behaves as if he owns him. He gives him an expensive watch, and insists that he give up work, and hence his financial independence; “The gold strap on his wrist suddenly felt very tight.”¹¹ Billy orders Joe around and strikes him in public. Even more distressing is a growing awareness that Billy is violently abusing youngsters. Joe leaves, but Billy doesn’t like being thwarted and the outcome is violent.

Joe is specially sensitive to the treatment of boys because of his strong feeling for his nephew, Sean, who is fifteen—even as Joe was drawn to Sean’s father (now dead). It becomes clear that Sean is gay and devoted to Joe, while Joe finds himself moved sexually by Sean’s boyish body. Eventually, in the final episode of the book, they declare their love. However, they cannot pursue the relationship, Joe insists. They are too close; Sean has to sort things out for himself; he needs another kid to explore himself with; Joe would be holding him back. The combination of brother, father, and lover all rolled into one is “An ideal, a fantasy … not made for the real world, a world in which Sean had to learn to function” (301; Dickson’s pause).

Joe tells himself that Sean deserves the truth, but he lies when he tells him that he doesn’t want to be the boy’s lover: “‘Ah’ll be here fur ye, but ah’ll no’ be part o’ yer life … ah don’t want tae be.’ Amongst all the lies he’d ever told himself, that was the hardest” (Dickson’s pause). We understand that Joe is disguising his feelings and putting Sean off for his own good. “From somewhere deep inside Joe found the strength to say what he knew he had to” (302). Why does he have to? Because of normative assumptions about youth, maturity, and their proper development; whether these matters might be different for gay boys is not considered. Joe accedes to conventional notions of equality and manhood. He is going to move in with Andy, who is of a similar age and background: “‘maybe mates ur the maist important thing. Maybe ah’ll love him as a mate, maybe as somewan ah want tae spend the resta ma life wi’ ’” (302). Also, Joe confirms his rejection of Sean by an appeal to manliness: he asks him whether he is a wee boy with a crush on his uncle, or a man? “As one pair of blue eyes stared deep into another, silent agreement passed between two men. Men. Not a kid and a man” (302–303). Despite this sudden maturation, Sean remains off limits for sexual love.

With Sean as well as with Billy, Joe has to reject the hierarchical option—the one because it is too close, the other because it betrays any possibility of closeness—despite passionate involvement. Or perhaps because of it. There is, after all, a tradition of gay renunciation. In The Well of Loneliness (1928), Stephen introduces Mary to lesbian experience and subculture, but finally pushes her out into marriage. In Mary Renault’s The Charioteer (1953), Laurie has to reject the innocent Andrew in order to allow him the opportunity to grow out of his queerness.

The dangers of age-disparate liaisons are stressed again in Simon Lovat’s psychological thriller, Disorder and Chaos. Here gays generally have a hard time, except the couple, Derek and Bob. They wear each other’s clothes, or identical denim outfits; Keith calls them “The Bookends.” He “notices how similar they look now. Twin haircuts, twin mustaches, twin forced jollity in their glinting eyes. Or is it simply that he’s forgotten how much they operate as a two-cylinder machine, now that he sees so much less of them?”¹² “‘We don’t take the clone thing seriously,’ says Bob” (25). The Bookends admonish Keith about his liking for youngsters: “‘These age gaps are a disaster area…. What you need is someone who has finished growing up. Someone who threw away their L plates years ago’” (15; my elision). Keith does come to accept that his liaisons follow a doomed pattern, as his dependence upon Nick, a disturbed, devious, and dishonest sixteen-year-old, degenerates. Buying clothes, for instance: “‘I’m not a doll, or a kid,’ Nick had said, flying into an instant rage. ‘It’d make me feel under control, under your thumb’” (133). Keith’s infatuation leads him to prison. Upon release, he appears to forsake any sex life, as he generates a new obsession, with the infant whom he believes to be his son (he has donated sperm to a lesbian couple). He decides to abduct the boy; he will be very gentle with him, “take care of him, spoil him, love him” (225). As in the treatments of Monette and Maupin, there is an ominous though unspecified overlap between sexual and filial emotions.

Meanwhile Lenny, who is married, has been suppressing his gayness. He is helped along by an experienced man, though he remains cowed by his senior partner in dentistry. He uses contact advertisements; most of the replies are from married men, and Lenny is inclined to reject them; but he too is married, so what can he expect? Like Owen in The Lost Language of Cranes, he sensibly looks for someone like himself. Lenny is suddenly freed from conventional obligations by the strange behavior of his daughter, Monica. She proves highly tolerant of his gayness, but this is perhaps part of her general weirdness. She is into black magic and, it transpires, has a fatal fixation upon serial killer Myra Hindley. Lenny’s concluding reflections apparently point the moral: “subterfuge, half-truths, and lies” create “disorder and chaos” (249)—referring to the title of the book. On this criterion, only Derek and Bob match up. It’s a dangerous world, Lovat seems to be saying, and other kinds of liaison are asking for trouble.

The social system wants its young people socialized, so that they can contribute to the workforce and the rearing of the next generation. For the most part, though, it does not want them socialized into gay subculture. Even for the ancient Greeks, Foucault points out, this was a tricky matter. “Because if there were no problem, they would speak of this kind of love in the same terms as love between men and women. The problem was that they couldn’t accept that a young boy who was supposed to become a free citizen could be dominated and used as an object for someone’s pleasure.”¹³ The interface between these two desiderata, which are often located in the same individuals and institutions, is probably more heavily policed since gay liberation than it was before.

A gay man may justify to himself and others his sexual attentions to boys by dwelling upon the emotional and practical support he is providing. David Leeming in his biography of James Baldwin writes of him as obliged by a “puritanical streak” to “deny the merely carnal” by placing himself as “a father figure, financial sponsor, and teacher for a much younger individual.” So with a North African “street boy” Baldwin insisted almost immediately on “formalizing the relationship on somewhat paternalistic grounds, by meeting the boy’s family.”¹⁴ Compare The Swimming-Pool Library, where Charles maintains a paternalist idea of his role as colonial administrator. Will is less convinced: “I wanted to save Arthur. At least, I think that’s what I wanted to do to him. It was a strange conviction I had, that I could somehow make these boys’ lives better, as by a kind of patronage—especially as it never worked out that way.”¹⁵ Keith in Lovat’s Disorder and Chaos tells himself that he is helping Nick to get himself together. “He knows it’s a delusion but it holds up, providing he does not scrutinize it too much.”¹⁶

Uncles and nephews, I notice, are a recurring feature. Here the man has mentoring status already, perhaps along with some incestuous thrill. They occur in Halfway Home, Oddfellows, and Wasted by Aiden Shaw; Edmund in The Farewell Symphony gets to look after his attractive nephew, though he’s not gay. In Larry Kramer’s Faggots, Richard has an anxiety attack when he is accosted in a club by his nephew, Wyatt. They compare sizes—Wyatt is well-endowed—they hasten “to join each other in family togetherness.” Wyatt should be “‘overcome with Jewish guilt,’” Richard objects. But Wyatt thinks Richard “‘really should get some help.’”¹⁷ Again: when Luke leaves home and comes to London to be gay, he naturally calls on his gay uncle Martin—so This Island’s Mine by Philip Osment. However, in this virtuous Gay Sweatshop theater company play there is no embarrassing familial romance: it is assumed that uncle and nephew will each find a partner of his own age.¹⁸

A gay man may be confident enough to combine his official and his subcultural mentoring. George in Christopher Isherwood’s novel A Single Man is coming to terms with the death of his partner, Jim, in a traffic accident. The emphasis is on their equal partnership, but we may deduce that Jim was the younger, as Isherwood’s lovers always were (“he treats his exclusive interest in very young men as entirely natural,” Paul Robinson remarks).¹⁹ Now George is feeling old. In Tennyson’s poem “Tithonus,” which he expounds to his students, he is both Eos, the lover of boys, and Tithonus, the repulsively aging former boy.

Nonetheless, George is looking around for a new partner. Kenny, one of his students, seems to have conceived a special interest in him. In a bar George experiences with Kenny something like a Platonic dialogue, a “symbolic encounter”; Kenny appears “beautiful. Radiant with rapport.”²⁰ Kenny likes authority; he thinks respect and friendship are most likely between males of different ages; it pleases him to call George “Sir” (133). They swim in the ocean and the rapport becomes physical. Moving indoors, to George’s home, calls forth a return of responsibility: he refuses Kenny’s invitation to shower together. However, the conversation becomes

positively flirty, on both sides. Kenny’s blanket, under the relaxing influence of the talk and beer, has slipped, baring an arm and a shoulder and turning itself into a classical Greek garment, the chlamys worn by a young disciple—the favourite, surely—of some philosopher. At this moment he is utterly, dangerously charming. (143)

Inveighing against a society which prefers “flirtation instead of fucking,” George finds himself uttering a sexual proposition. Kenny “grins, dazzlingly,” but George passes out (150). We will never know what the enigmatic Kenny might have done.

The Platonic dialogues which George invokes are a characteristic focus for the official and sexual roles of the mentor. Socrates’ strategy is to tease the boy with talk of love, while maintaining the idea that the teacher is on a higher plane, above physical expression. Even if the boy is keen, as Alcibiades is in the Symposium, it may be beneath the Socratic teacher’s dignity to respond. Plato has been a conduit for same-sex passion and, simultaneously, a way of disavowing any such concern. Platonic ideas of intense friendship were made available in the Renaissance by Marsilio Ficino, revived in the eighteenth century by Johann Winckelmann, and deployed in the formative stages of modern gay self-construction by Walter Pater. These are the terms for Wilde’s famous speech from the dock on the love that dare not speak its name: it is David and Jonathan, Plato, Michelangelo, and Shakespeare; “It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect…. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection.”²¹ Unfortunately for Wilde, this exalted vision seemed not to embrace the casual sexual and financial liaisons of which he was accused.

In Death in Venice, Aschenbach’s growing infatuation with Tadzio is accompanied by quotations from the Phaedrus, which keep floating into Aschenbach’s head. As Jonathan Dollimore shows, Mann is on Freudian territory: the ambivalent innocence of the Socratic dialogue is exposed as sublimation.²² At a key moment in Mary Renault’s novel The Charioteer, Laurie approaches and then evades self-disclosure when he shows the innocent Andrew his copy of Plato’s Phaedrus. “‘I haven’t read this one,’” Andrew says. “‘I thought it was the Phaedo for a minute, we did that at school.’” The Phaedo was a safe text, the Phaedrus not. “‘What’s it about?’” Andrew asks, allowing Laurie a second chance to reveal or conceal himself: “‘Well, primarily, it’s about the laws of rhetoric.’”²³ There were acceptable and unacceptable Platonic texts, and acceptable and unacceptable ways of addressing them.

A striking deployment of the ambiguity of Plato is effected by Allan Bloom, whose best-selling book The Closing of the American Mind chimed in with a reactionary turn in literary and cultural education in the United States in the late 1980s. Bloom’s distinctive pitch is a yearning for a relationship between the teacher and student such as he believes Socrates shared with the young male aristocrats of Athens. Since the 1960s, he believes, sexual relations have been routinized and corrupted by Freudianism, the decline of the leisure class, and the women’s and gay liberation movements. Socrates had the right idea: “The longing for his conversations with which he infected his companions, and which was intensified after his death and has endured throughout the centuries, proved him to have been both the neediest and most grasping of lovers, and the richest and most giving of beloveds.”²⁴ Such relationships work best, in Bloom’s account, with upper-class students—“they have money and hence leisure and can appreciate the beautiful and useless” (279).

Surprisingly (it is the surprising part of the book), Bloom allows the sexual teasing to become manifest. The survival of Socratic relations is most likely with students who

have not settled the sexual problem, who are still young, even look young for their age…. A youngster whose sexual longings consciously or unconsciously inform his studies has a very different set of experiences from one in whom such motives are not active. A trip to Florence or to Athens is one thing for a young man who hopes to meet his Beatrice on the Ponte Santa Trinità or his Socrates in the Agora, and quite another for one who goes without such aching need. (134; my elision)

In other words, the unformed young man is likely to fall either for a nice young lady from Smith, or for his male professor in the classroom. Bloom again courts sexual interpretation when he writes that his students “wanted to find out what happened to Glaucon during his wonderful night with Socrates” (332). Perhaps we should go back to sublimation, a “naive and good-natured” freshman suggests; “I was charmed by the lad’s candor but could not regard him as a serious candidate for culture” (234). Bloom cannot get sexuality properly into, or out of, his classes.

Further light is thrown upon Bloom’s stance in the novel which his old friend Saul Bellow based on his life and ideas, Ravelstein. The narrator is a journalist, straight; he has known Abe for a good while and Abe wants him to write his biography. The novel recalls meetings at which they discuss this, Abe’s death from AIDS-related illness, and the narrator’s own sickness and difficulty in writing. In the course of these lucubrations the narrator has in effect written the biography.

Abe “was considered, to use a term from the past, an invert. Not a ‘gay.’ He despised campy homosexuality and took a very low view of ‘gay pride.’”²⁵ His apartment scarcely hints at his sexual preference: “One had no reason, in any respect, to suspect him of irregularities of the commoner sort—the outlandish seductive behaviors of old-fashioned gay men. He couldn’t bear the fluttering of effeminate men” (99). He is upset when a nurse may be overheard saying that it’s time for his AZT. Nonetheless, “He was doomed to die because of his irregular sexual ways,” the narrator declares. “About these he was entirely frank with me, with all his close friends” (160). Not much of the sexuality gets into the novel, though; “There were times when I simply didn’t know what to make of his confidences,” the narrator confesses (160).

Like Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind, Abe depends heavily on Aristophanes’ speech in Plato’s Symposium, about how each of us pines for his or her other half, to restore an original complete whole (24). Whether Abe’s maneuverings sometimes led to a sexual liaison is not indicated. His sexual feelings have increased, he tells the narrator, and “‘some of these kids have a singular sympathy with you’” (143). The stronger impression, in Bellow’s novel, is that Abe has romantic-paternal relations with his students while cultivating less exalted sexual relations in other quarters. When he needs a check made out to cash so that his companion will not know of it, the narrator supposes that this is a payoff for some sexual indiscretion (143).

There is a further force in Abe’s life, one not avowed in The Closing of the American Mind: Nikki, his “companion” (5). “He would sometimes lower his voice in speaking of Nikki, to say that there was no intimacy between them. ‘More father and son’” (69); presumably this was not so initially. Nikki is from Singapore, in his early thirties and “boyish still” (5). The narrator is notably ill at ease around him.

Nobody questioned the strength of Nikki’s attachment to Abe. Nikki was perfectly direct—direct, by nature, a handsome, smooth-skinned, black-haired, Oriental, graceful, boyish man. He had an exotic conception of himself. I don’t mean that he put on airs. He was never anything but natural. This protégé of Abe’s, I thought—or used to think—was somewhat spoiled. I was wrong, there, too. Brought up like a prince, yes. Even before the famous book that sold a million copies was written, Nikki was better dressed than the Prince of Wales. (68)

Nikki was attached, direct, and natural; but he did like to spend money. A suspicion is floated, that he is on the scrounge and Abe is something of a dupe. The narrator carefully distances himself from Abe’s high opinion of Nikki’s talents: “in Nikki, Abe saw a brilliant young man who had every right to assert himself.” As well as clothes, Nikki gets a BMW car: “‘He feels he should have something outstanding and entirely his own,’” Abe explains; “‘It’s only natural’” (71, 74).

The gay reader need not share the narrator’s prejudice against Nikki. The narrator’s wife is also much younger—one of Abe’s former students, in fact—but her credentials and her motives are not interrogated, and nor are the narrator’s. Nikki returns from Geneva when Abe is ill, and abandons his studies to look after him. His devotion when Abe is in hospital is exemplary. We might recognize here a successful mentoring partnership, beyond the artificial teasing with the students.

Of course, this is a notable example of the conflation of roles: Nikki’s position is as much to do with his race as his age. “He had his own kind of princely Asiatic mildness, but if you were to offend him Nikki would tear your head off,” the narrator remarks (145). Damn’d inscrutable, these orientals; never know where you are with them. There is an arrogance and condescension in the attitude of the older men:

Nikki was training in a Swiss hotel school. I can’t say more than that because I’m not the ideal person to recall the minute particulars but Nikki was an accredited maître d.’ He was ready to go into fits of laughter when he modeled the cutaway coat of his trade for Abe and me, and put on his professional dignities. (18–19)

Nikki is expected to mock his own ambitions for the amusement of his backers; I suppose the cutaway coat allowed him to display his bottom. I don’t know whether to be angry at this debasing of Nikki, or to rejoice in his resourcefulness. Yet perhaps his display is no more demeaning than Bloom cavorting intellectually for his upper-class students, who know that their father and the military-industrial complex are paying for all this.

Eve Sedgwick studied with Bloom, though there is no indication that he gave special attention even to such an exceptional woman. What Bloom has produced, Sedgwick says, is “an ingenuously faithful and candid representation of … the stimulation and glamorization of the energies of male-male desire” in teaching the humanities. It is an eloquent analysis of “the prestige, magnetism, vulnerability, self-alienation, co-optability, and perhaps ultimately the potential for a certain defiance that adhere in the canonical culture of the closet.”²⁶ That is well put. However, we don’t need to assume that the erotics of teaching can thrive only in the closet. The fully-out teacher is relegitimated with the fully-out student; everyone knows the score. Now the teacher may exchange glances with a grown-up boy or girl, without fearing or hoping that they are going to be seduced in ignorance, or against their will.

An air of desperation often lurks around mentoring in modern times, starting with Wilde and Bosie. Disappointment may be avoided at the price of death. Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice is retraced in Gilbert Adair’s novel Love and Death on Long Island (filmed by Richard Kwietniowski in 1997): the established author Giles De’Ath, a reclusive widower, becomes obsessed with a young actor in a trashy film. He tells his agent he is developing a new theme: the discovery of beauty where no one ever thought of looking for it. He dies. Lecturer Ivo is, in effect, killed twice when his affair with a student collapses in Barbara Vine’s psychosexual thriller No Night Is Too Long (adapted for BBC television with a screenplay by Kevin Elyot in 2002). In Isherwood’s A Single Man, mortality disrupts a potential relationship before its enigmatic promise can be explored. Patricia Duncker in Hallucinating Foucault makes the charismatic great author die before the continuance of his liaison with a student can be tested.²⁷ Edmund White in The Married Man shows Austin’s care for Julien, who is half his age, cut off by AIDS. The love affair between Tonio, a dancer, and Jack, a therapist, is tormented and energized by Tonio’s impending death in the film Alive and Kicking (Jim Sharman, 1996; screenplay by Martin Sherman).

The strong presence of the coming-out story in gay fiction is very understandable: gay people are born into largely hostile social contexts, and finding their way to an alternative home base is rarely easy. Guides and initiators tend to be important. However, the structure of narcissistic complementarity especially invites a crossover between desire-for and desire-to-be. The boy’s desire-for the man may well be involved with a desire-to-be the man, leading him to wish to graduate out of boyhood. Eric in Baldwin’s Another Country is disconcerted when Yves says he wants to make his future in New York. “‘I can find my way. Do you really think that I want to be protected by you for ever? … it cannot go on for ever, I also am a man … my youth. It cannot last forever.’” Eric “knew what Yves meant and he knew that what Yves said was true.”²⁸ In many coming-out stories age hierarchy is presented as a tactical convenience. A satisfactory outcome usually implies the boy’s release from such artificial supports, and his readiness for rewarding sexual relations on the egalitarian model. The mentor must, by definition, be cast off. One classic instance is Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956): David finds himself at the expense of Giovanni’s life. Another is Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell.

In Kenneth Martin’s 1950s novel Aubade, Paul, who has just finished high school, is pleased when he is taken up by Gary, who is a graduate from medical school, securely middle class, with a car. Paul’s desire-for Gary is tied up with desire-to-be him: “He’s exactly the way I’d like to be when I’m his age, thought Paul.”²⁹ Nonetheless, when Gary declares his love and tries to kiss him Paul flees in terror. Eventually Paul acknowledges his own passion, but the summer is over and the guide must be discarded. Paul puts it all down to experience: “‘It was part of growing up, wasn’t it?’” (155). Gary has a definition of the homosexual which excludes Paul and himself:

“Do you know what homosexuality is? It’s wanting to fiddle with every little boy you see. It’s standing on the pier waiting for the next boatload of sailors to come in. It’s giving women an inferiority complex. It’s standing taking peeks in a man’s toilet. I’m not like that, Paul. I love you, I love you.” (128)

So no nasty queers need apply. The typical coming-out novel is strewn with repudiations not only of the mentor but of other “bad” types whom the boy brushes with but fortunately evades—effeminate bitchy queens, fearful closet types, disgusting (tearoom) cottagers, often any organized gay scene at all. The emergence of Laurie in Renault’s The Charioteer depends on such exclusions. I showed in chapter 4 how Philip in The Lost Language of Cranes rejects the closeted secrecy of his father, the old-style Wildean mannerisms of Derek and Geoffrey, pornographic movies, cruising, and bars with back rooms. Eventually he settles down with Brad, an old school friend who is of the same age, class, race, and educational background.

Such repudiations are sanctioned as necessary to the process of self-discovery, as the young man sheds the accretions of an oppressed history and steps out into the bright sunshine of an accomplished gay freedom. Charles, a minor character in Timothy Ireland’s novel Who Lies Inside, wears makeup and dresses flamboyantly in the local pub; he gets beaten up. This enables the emergent young Martin to feel revulsion and pity: “He always gave me the creeps somehow,” says our young hero.³⁰ Charles fails Martin when he turns to him for help. Eventually Martin finds love with Richard, an attractive boy from his own class at school whom he has been enticing and rejecting since the start. Martin is still anxious about being “homosexual,” but Richard (who has himself benefited from experience with an older man) reassures him that there is no need for labels, since they are all persons.

In Coming Out, an East German film directed by Heiner Carow (1988), Philipp, a schoolteacher, allows himself to be drawn into a relationship with Tanja, a colleague, and marries her when she becomes pregnant. However, he is in denial about an earlier queer episode, and has found his way to a gay bar (he was just wanting to buy cigarettes, he says). Pretending that he is unattached, Philipp allows a romantic gay boy, Matthias, to fall in love with him. Tanja and Matthias find out about each other and Philipp loses both of them. He is left to cruise an alienated scene. Asked by his mother why he must be this way, Philipp declares that it is nature, and he would be wrong to pretend and lie to himself. This thought is tardy, however, the harm to Matthias is already done. The film tends to suggest that gays must be lonely and unhappy, but it shows also that people should take more care with each other.

The selfishness of the neophyte is sharply analyzed again in Guy Willard’s novel Mirrors of Narcissus (discussed also in chapter 3). Guy has been dismissive of middle-aged men who pursue boys, but eventually he responds when propositioned by a well-preserved professor, Harry Golden:

He was old enough to be my father, yet I found him strangely attractive. Occasionally, when I thought about him, my feelings for him were distinctly sexual—perhaps inevitable, given his intelligence and strong character. I’d always been drawn to dominant types. Though he was past his prime as far as looks were concerned, his personality almost made physical attractiveness seem unimportant. And there was the seductive thought of his power—he was a full professor while I was just a freshman boy.³¹

The disparity in their ages has advantages, Guy finds. It frees him from competitive impulses and shame, and from “the need to adopt a tough, masculine facade. Instinctively I knew he wouldn’t see my desire as a sign of weakness” (160). In a typical conflation of roles, Guy reads his submission as feminine: “Within the protective clasp of his big strong arms, pressed chest-to-chest in an intimate hug, I felt the stirrings of a tender submission. The secret little girl inside of me came alive and blossomed, gloriously” (162). He feels “exalted,” but Golden is now redundant; he appears “helpless and weak” without his glasses, and has no further part in Guy’s story (164). Thus fortified, Guy feels able to embrace his homosexuality, to abandon his girlfriend, and to force his attentions upon his friend.

While the situations of lesbians are quite distinct—for instance, there seems to be less of a premium on youth—the thrills and spills of the coming-out process may be similar. In Jill Posener’s classic Gay Sweatshop play, Any Woman Can, predatory and stereotyped older lesbians are the problem for the bright and determined Ginny, rather than straight society. Rising from the ashes of her former selves, she discards the nervous and the exploitative and, through her own dramatic coming out, becomes an effective model for other women.³² Jeanette, in Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, is supported by several women in her contorted Christian community and responds with affection and respect. However, Miss Jewsbury, who has seduced her, is rejected. “I don’t know why I didn’t thank her, or even say goodbye.”³³

If boys ultimately have time on their side, men generally have control of representation. From Shakespeare’s Sonnets through J. R. Ackerley’s We Think the World of You (1960) to The Swimming-Pool Library, we get the story predominantly from the viewpoint of the older man. This replicates the situation of the male suitor and the idealized female object of his attentions, in the classic heterosexual love lyric from Dante and Petrarch through to the present. A prime reason why we don’t get the boy’s story is that by the time he is in a position to write it, certainly publish it, he has become a man. The story he then writes, even if it is presented as if through the eyes of the youngster, is likely to manifest the viewpoint of experience.

Even in fiction written ostensibly out of the perceptions of the younger person, we may in fact be getting an adult’s fantasy. In P-P Hartnett’s I Want to Fuck You, Handa San (PE teacher) and Takeo (schoolboy, thirteen) are drawn sexually to each other. In one chapter Handa San’s thoughts are indicated:

Handa San wasn’t the only teacher in the school who didn’t want to think of himself as a paedophile or ephebophile. He hoped the shivering attention he paid Takeo was just a phase he was going through. After all, he consoled himself, he didn’t actually want to fuck the boy, get the boy on his knees or anything like that. He liked his students, was genuinely interested in their variety of character and outlook.³⁴

That is a plausible representation of Handa San’s thought. Compare this passage, from a chapter focusing on young Takeo:

Takeo dragged shirt and vest over his ears together and folded them as a complex on the back of his homework chair. These warm clothes gave off a fragrance many would buy if bottled. Over that same chair Takeo layered his socks, smoothed flat into two-dimensional neatness. Finally, he undid the belt of his trousers, wriggling out of them with extravagant movements of hips and behind. He slithered out of his pants exposing his total, subtle naked body to the paired full length mirrors on the inside of the wardrobe door. (54–55)

The first sentence there could be Takeo’s account of himself; so could the third. But the sentence in between—“These warm clothes gave off a fragrance many would buy if bottled”—is the perception of experience, not innocence. The narrator invites a voyeuristic interest in how Takeo takes off his trousers; it is not only the mirrors that have Takeo under surveillance. In short, the narrator is close to Handa San.

The anonymously published novel The Scarlet Pansy offers other examples. Again, it may appear at first sight that the viewpoint of the novice is represented, but actually the appeal is to the experienced reader. The young protagonist is revolted by the approaches of older homosexual men: “Randall turned this episode over in his mind. Was he always to be pursued by some man? Then the only hope of escape was the cultivation of the utmost reserve.” The narrator seems to have entered Randall’s viewpoint. However, the passage continues: “Quite unconsciously he was laying the foundation for one of the greatest charms of any person. He suppressed himself; a faint smile took the place of laughter, and thus he forever escaped that prevalent bane, the society grin.”³⁵ The author has the experienced view, and invites the reader to share it.

The appropriative power of these narrators mimics the personal advantage of the experienced man. If the boy’s desire-for the man is destabilized by his desire-to-be the man, the feeling of the man for the boy may be complicated by a desire-to-be him. We may suspect, indeed, that interest in coming-out stories has less to do with succoring oppressed youth and asserting gay rights, than with the fantasies of older writers and readers, who may be moved by an unstable conflation of desire-for and desire-to-be such a boy. Edmund White has recognized this. In the preface to A Boy’s Own Story, he positions his present, writing self against his younger self: “If I’d hated myself as a boy and adolescent, I now felt an affection for the miserable kid I’d once been, a retrospective kindliness one might call ‘the pederasty of autobiography.’”³⁶ Again, in the novel, White’s narrator finds he has come to like the fifteen-year-old he once was, “even desire him”; it is a “retrospection three parts sentimental and one part erotic” (158).

In The Folding Star, Alan Hollinghurst makes a narrative virtue out of the young man’s silence and distance. Edward, aged thirty-two, experiences a sexual infatuation with a mysterious youngster whom he is supposed to be teaching—Luc, age seventeen. He spies upon Luc and his young friends; he systematically steals his underwear. “‘He thinks of me as a friend,’” Edward avers. “‘How on earth would you know what he thinks. You haven’t got a clue what goes on inside his head,’” Luc’s young friend Sibylle retorts (370). The reader is no better informed; Luc’s behavior is surprising at every turn, and not fully explained even at the end of the book. The folding star of the title evokes Milton’s “Lycidas”: “‘It’s when you know you’ve got to put the sheep all safely in the fold’” (247). However (as in The Swimming-Pool Library), this pastoral impulse is accompanied, for Edward, by sexual pursuit: he is the wolf as much as the shepherd.

The local saint is Narcissus, though Edward says he doesn’t “‘ believe in the narcissist theory of gay attraction; I’ve always loved it with people who are different from me’” (156). However, as I argued in chapter 2, in narcissistic desire a man loves not so much himself as an idealized displacement of himself—what he is, what he was, what he would like to be, someone who was once part of himself. Edward acknowledges such an impulse when he wonders whether in placing no-longer-fashionable poems before Luc he is betraying an “impulse to keep him back with me in a shared childhood” (115). His determination to script Luc as having gay interests positions Luc as replicating Edward’s own youthful sex life.

The central theme appears to be the fatal power of sexual fascination. As Edward’s quest for the boy moves to a conclusion, so does the story of Paul, the museum curator. He recalls how as a boy during the German Occupation he had a liaison with a young man, not realizing that he was in the fascist militia. Thinking of Jewish children hidden away during the war years, Paul ruminates: “‘Personally I wouldn’t want to place so much trust in a frightened or bereaved teenager—but what could they do when it was their only chance?’” (386). Again: a youngster “‘picks up an older person’s life and then—he is distracted, self-absorbed, over-zealous, or perhaps quite unreflecting, he’s no idea what he’s doing—lets it drop’” (414). Perilous creatures, these boys.

I choose to close this chapter with positive views of its themes. In A Fairly Honourable Defeat, published in 1970, Iris Murdoch explores some of the pitfalls that beset age hierarchy. Rupert and Hilda are married.³⁷ Simon, Rupert’s young brother, after sowing some wild oats, has settled into coupledom with Axel, Rupert’s old friend. Simon is twenty-nine, Axel forty-two. In an initial, notably complacent conversation, Hilda displays casual liberal prejudices. Perhaps Simon is not really homosexual, queers are always a bit sly, they don’t like being reminded of normal relationships or happy marriages, queer friendships are so unstable, Simon is so much younger. Rupert disputes such generalizations. Axel bullies Simon, Hilda thinks; “‘Some people like to be bullied,’” Rupert responds; the novel is a study in the abuse of and retrieval of dominance and subordination. “‘Thank heavens our relationship is democratic,’” Hilda declares—complacently, as it transpires (15–18).

Simon does look queer, he cheerfully acknowledges (198); he is in charge of interior decoration at their flat. It is out of character, friends agree, for him not to like opera because he’s such a feminine person, as may be observed in his decor. Rupert and Hilda’s son, Peter, jeers at Simon for being more female than Shakespeare’s fairies. (Peter is very insecure.)

Axel is straight-acting to the point of total inscrutability, even to Simon in their early meetings. He complains at Simon’s aftershave lotion—“‘Try to remember you’re male, not female, will you?’” Axel won’t have any “camp” (in quotation marks) or risqué jokes (36). When they first drew together, Axel hesitated because he believed himself to be naturally monogamous, whereas Simon “was by nature frivolous, inconstant, evasive, impulsive, irrational, shallow” (202). Actually, Simon is seeking someone to give his heart to; “Yet he enjoyed some of his adventures and liked the jokey parochial atmosphere of the gay bars which he had been used to frequent” (37). Sometimes Simon himself fears he may be too trivial a person for Axel. His declarative outbursts only provoke Axel to withdraw. For Simon, “There was at every moment total vulnerability. There was a dangerous thrilling trembling inner circuit of the soul” (39). He suggests that they are like Apollo and Marsyas.

In fact Axel is chronically jealous and insecure; it is surprising that Simon doesn’t quite realize this, and lose respect for him. He won’t let Simon learn to drive, tries to stop him drinking and becoming exuberant at parties. He accuses Simon of being irrational, but enjoys putting him through the drama of accusation, reproach, and separation. Then he commands him to be independent. “‘You mustn’t let me influence you so much, dear boy’” (87).

Enter Julius, another old friend of Rupert. He worked on biological warfare for the United States, but gave it up because he became bored. (Eventually it emerges that he was in Belsen; he considers himself an instrument of justice.) He denies that goodness is important: “‘we know what moves people, dear Rupert. Fears, passions of all kinds. The desire for power, for instance. Few questions are more important than: who is the boss?’” “‘Though of course some people prefer to be bossed!’” “‘Yes, yes. It’s all a question of choosing one’s technique’” (225).

Julius is a dedicated controller: he experiments with people and it gives him the pleasure of confirming his amoral principles. The other disturber of the peace is Morgan, Hilda’s sister, who is even more dangerous because out of control. Julius makes a wager with Morgan that he can get Simon away from Axel. The “fairly honourable defeat” of the title is Julius’s failure to part Axel and Simon while managing to maneuver Rupert and Morgan into an affair, with purloined letters and Iago-like insinuations.

Julius traps Simon into moments of complicity and small lapses in total candor; he plays on Simon’s fear that Axel will see him through Julius’s eyes: “Axel would suddenly see how flimsy Simon was, how unsophisticated, how lacking in cleverness and wit, how hopelessly ignorant about important things such as Mozart and truth functions and the balance of payments” (77). Julius, alternately flirting and commanding, exploits Simon’s tendency to be dominated—effortlessly because, unlike Axel, he has little at stake. Simon is frightened by his attraction to Julius. “But then, thought Simon, I have never really been able to distinguish between fear and sexual desire” (160).

“You choose at present to give in. But every time you give in you notice it. Later perhaps you will make Axel’s life a misery. Then gradually the balance will tilt. You will get tired of being Axel’s lapdog. You are not at all monogamous really, my dear Simon. You miss your adventures, you know you do. And you will find out one day that you want to play Axel to some little Simon. The passage of time brings about these shifts automatically, especially in relationships of your kind.” (269–70)

These are perhaps characteristic pitfalls of age hierarchy. However, the narration suggests that they need not be fatal.

Simon eventually tells Axel all about Julius. Axel confesses that he was miserable when he thought he would have to end their affair; he admits that his reserve has kept Simon insecure, that he is guilty of a failure of love and trust. Simon appreciates that Axel does love and need him. “‘A little bullying between lovers needn’t matter. But I’ve always withheld a bit of myself,’” Axel admits (434). The important distinction, in Murdoch’s view, is between fumbling good will and the destructiveness of Julius and Morgan. The pattern remains, but it is interpreted with trust. At the end Simon seems justified in feeling “the warm anticipation of a new happiness” (437).

Murdoch’s account is surprisingly modern; clones, AIDS, queer, and lifestyle lie between us and A Fairly Honourable Defeat, but she comes through with a valuable analysis. Perhaps this is because she is not troubled by the age-disparate liaison as such: she takes its potential for granted, and is thus free to pursue wider and deeper psychological and ethical dimensions. Compare other mid-century fictions—Stephen Spender’s The Temple, Angus Wilson’s Hemlock and After, Barbara Pym’s A Glass of Blessings, the film Victim (Basil Dearden, 1961). In We Think the World of You, Ackerley’s protagonist does his best to keep things going with his boyfriend, but finds he gets on better with the dog.

The most striking affirmation of age-disparity occurs in Neil Bartlett’s Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall. Bartlett doesn’t shrink from awkward aspects of the theme. He invites readers to occupy the position of the man, and to share in the constitution of the ideal boy. Perhaps the narrator’s description is wrong for some readers: “do go back, and amend my description of Boy so that he is, is some way, if you see what I mean, your type. Make him fit the bill; imagine for him the attributes that you require.”³⁸ At the same time, the image will derive from and belong to the subculture. Boy is destined to discover himself in a historic gay identity, self-consciously bestowed by Madame, who owns The Bar, and her clientele. He needs “application, study, repetition, diligent imitation and sincere admiration of his peers” (33). He is the figure we (men) all hold in our imaginations. He is in a line with Chance Wayne played by Paul Newman, Alec Scudder in Maurice, Boy Barrett in Victim, Bosie Douglas—drawn purposefully by Bartlett from several generations. The idea of Boy is a ratification of gay history, and hence of gay existence.

There is no question that Boy, in assuming this identity, is doing what he wants to do, though he is only nineteen (at the time of publication the gay age of consent was twenty-one in England). He is already exhausted with questing for The Bar; already imagining sexual practices that men might pursue together. He only ever goes home with older men. “One thing Boy never said, the line of [Paul] Newman’s he would never have used, was don’t call me Boy. He loved to be called Boy” (13). It is a position of honor, not of inferiority. He wants one thing more than to be one of the men in The Bar: “to be reassured that he might somehow remain a boy for ever” (38). (I discuss the gendering of Boy and The Bar in chapter 5.)

O is The Older Man—forty-five at least. No celibate, but very self-contained; “you never saw him following anyone, gazing after someone or persuading them to come home with him. Asked exactly how O took people home, you’d have to say that O just summoned his men to him somehow” (68). O’s stance toward Boy is protective (hence the title of the novel), but sex between them is violent—though Boy does bruise easily. “I should say here that Boy never once wanted O to stop, and that he was used to sometimes being frightened by what O wanted to do, and by what he made Boy himself feel that he wanted to do, things he hadn’t ever known that he wanted to do” (141–42). As in other novels we have considered, and especially in Paul Russell’s Boys of Life (discussed in chapter 7) and Duncker’s Hallucinating Foucault, innovative and fierce power play in bed is prized by the boy as evidence of the man’s general commitment to life and particular appreciation of the boy.

What follows this intense courtship is less remarkable. Boy and O affirm their relationship in a version of the conventional marriage ceremony. Some of The Bar people are offended by this; it is the one point in the novel at which there is any subcultural dissent. Boy and O form “The model couple in the model flat, Boy at home all day with the appliances and O out to work” (225). For Murdoch, the key question is about how men adapt their fantasy desires and personae to the business of getting along together. This is admitted in Ready to Catch Him: “what really matters is what happens when two people try to hold things together” (309). Boy “spends the evening or night with a younger man sometimes now, a man younger than himself, a boy really” (309). We are not told quite how this is managed. Is Boy’s desire-to-be O translating into a desire-for a boy of his own? Will O meet a new Boy? Are the differences between O and Boy fading away, leaving an egalitarian couple?

Reviewing Ready to Catch Him, Adam Mars-Jones criticized its endorsement of The Bar and its insistence on the special, poetic quality of gay sex; they correlate, Mars-Jones says, with a separatist as opposed to an assimilationist aesthetic. He contests the idea that “it is by exhaustively exploring their fantasies that gay people best prepare themselves to take their place in the world.”³⁹ This is surely somewhat abrupt; it is hard to imagine a commentator writing in the Independent that black people should not investigate and value their histories. Bartlett has justified the introspective stance of the novel as an attempt to consolidate gay subculture in a context where AIDS was taking the lives of friends and legitimating homophobic assaults. “You couldn’t walk down the street or open a newspaper without flinching, because there would be some new graffito about AIDS—on the wall or as a headline in the best selling newspaper.”⁴⁰ This is not all, however. Although we prefer to regard our fantasies as private, the public iconography of art, advertising, and pornography demonstrates conclusively that they are acquired through a collaborative process. The Bar is a metaphor for the communal mechanisms through which we negotiate desire-for and desire-to-be. “I apologize,” says the narrator, “if this description of Boy sounds to you like some fantasy and not a real person” (15). Bartlett’s aesthetic is all about peak experiences, moments at which fantasy miraculously catches up with actuality. Boy is indeed a fantasy, a luminous evocation of all the boys who have been loved since Antinous enchanted the Emperor Hadrian in A.D. 120.