get to know her partners. She spends all of her slight accountant's income setting up housekeeping anew with the latest mate. The monotonous outcome: a few days of passion followed by weeks of disillusionment and a painful and sometimes expensive separation. But her faith remains unshakeable in the "next one." Altogether, the shortcomings seem seldom so much in her lovers as in her impractical idealization. I doubt if she has ever seen a lover as a human being.
But a few words on the unsingle homosexual. Countless homosexuals are heterosexually married, some being only partly gay, others for disguise.
There are also those who are married homosexually and consider this the goal of homosexuality. Many of these set-ups are mere pseudo-heterosexuality, with a "husband" and a "wife," rather than the desirable partnership of sexual equals, which is not my concern in this article. If a young man considers himself a girl, there's no harm in his trying to be a good wife to some big bruiser-but it isn't real homosexuality.
There are three main categories of single homosexuals: those who are single by choice and consider it an advantage; those who are single because their love instincts are dried up; and those who are still hunting. Some of the latter find their mate, and that's good, but I think socially-useful homosexuals are mostly in the first group: the men or women committed to something higher than their own physical desires, using homosexuality as fuel rather than as an end in itself. If they live with another person, it is likely for friendship or convenience. not mateship. One needn't reject his impulses by denying himself sex, love or affinity, but he always tries to check those impulses, never letting
them dominate him or defer his ambition.
Ken Miles is a difficult but common type. Raised in a rough, bordertown background, straining to conform to super-masculine standards, he tortured himself with the unfaced sex problem till he was almost unable to face any problem. Yet he doggedly lifted himself by his bootstraps, searching his soul, analyzing and correcting his mannerisms and habits, trying, almost successfully, to press himself into the "average man" mold. Personable, but too self-occupied to "mix" well. he has submitted to his homosexual urges. with an analyst's promptings-but only as a stopgap. He is sure his homosexuality merely dams the flow of his natural heterosexual impulse. By freeing this urge now, he hopes to ultimately free the other. He has written a lengthy autobiographical sketch which I hope can soon see publication. He lives in a small room. frequently drops in on gay friends nearby, and spends hours wishing his father had saved him from this frustration by being more chummy, and trying to figure a scheme whereby boys who face this lonely problem could get a sympathetic ear in time...
Certainly one of the roughest aspects of the single homosexual is the case of the youths who don't know the answers and are afraid to ask the questions. But any older man who tries to lend a hand is liable to the charge of "corrupting" them...
I don't know if Manvers Parmain is single by choice. There's a lot that's not easily known about him, though the outer details are known to half of Chicago. A fantastic person, he wears the word. "character." like a title of nobility. He lives in the grand manner on a modest income in a quaint house that is like an amazingly overstuffed Victorian museum. He rises late and
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