NICHOLAS STRUWE

a Novel

This book appears to have two "heroes." In reality, they are one in the same adolescent.

Like the painter who was asked, "Where is the tree you did this picture. of?" and who, without turning, indicated an oak which stood behind him, we have sought to condense into a single volume a certain poetic realism: the adolescence of the homophile. To this end, we have taken the liberty of folding lineal time in two like a slip of paper and of superimposing the edge above upon the one beneath, yielding, at two different ages, the two appearances of the same youth. Nicholas Struwe is Jean Lorenz at the age of seventeen. Similarly, Lorenz is Struwe when he was 14-15.

We have given an ancestry, a religion, differing social conditions to the pair in order to illustrate that, despite these separations, they had between them a Common Ground of sufficient importance, and that this Common Ground-l mean to say homosexuality-superceded for them Country, Religion, Society.

This work derives not to shock or offend, but to inform and to urge acceptance of the homosexual nature not as a "vice" or "depravation," but as one of the rares manieres permitted the man of percept and concept.

Here is an extract from the novel of Lucien Farre:

Lucien Farre

... If the presence of Struwe was for me that of God Himself, the very atmosphere of the pool bent to the spell of his singular bewitchment.

By common accord and for imprecise reasons, we had determined to change locations; after having examined the Lutetia pool, that at the gateway to Ordeans, the one on Rue Pontoise and several others, we settled upon Ledru-Rollin.

Not that it was any cleaner than the others, to the contrary. That it was nearest explained nothing. Perhaps because it seemed the warmest of them, that the design was vaguely Romanesque, the springboards better; perhaps because the dressing-rooms were hidden away, or the disposition of the showerbaths agreeable. Be that as it may, we recognized it as ours.

I do not know if Struwe received the same impressions as I, and at that period I did not dare ask him.

Swimming had become for me a sacred phenomenon, infinitely more important than Communion, and I underwent an extraordinary exaltation at swimming in the same water with my comrade.

If I were forced to put into words the impalpable web of my sentiments they would be, I believe, the following thoughts, unconscious, fluid . . . which determined the nature and intensity of my emotion: "We take leave of our ordinary clothing... such as the priest dons his sacramental robe . . we don our nudity. The waters unite us . . . and in the same function ... we undergo Communion."

Thus I washed along in ardor, driven not by the desire to cleanse and shine myself, but because it was the only means at my disposal to love Struwe.

The more about him, the more I felt the curious sensation of being near something inaccessible, that all my efforts were to be in vain; that never would that toward which I strained be achieved. And to rotate these thoughts, like some rock of Sisyphus, plunged me into a most complete discouragement. Then, I imagined that I was for him only one thing, a toy, a plaything, something with

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