Those who have no inkling of the "elective affinities" binding the secret chords of the hearts of two human beings, have found utterly difficult to explain the magic of the spell cast by the boy Dahoum upon the man Lawrence. Here was a boy not exceptionally handsome, and, to all appearances, utterly uneducated, possessing no other charm but the charm of his adolescent years, and, yet, this boy was capable of inspiring such deeds as would change the whole history of mankind. Why? And how did it happen?

Alas! but I am afraid this question will remain forever unanswered for those who seek a rational explanation for that which is supremely irrational: the life of the heart. For, if the body feeds on food, and the mind lives on thoughts, the heart yearns only for love. "Love and be loved, to love is the essence of life." The song of the sirens, sung since the time of Ulysses, finds a reverberating echo in all human hearts at the springtime of any man's life. And thus, found an echo in Lawrence's heart, there in Asia Minor, sacred to the memory of the love of Achilles and Patroclus.

Be that as it may, Lawrence did fall in love with the boy Dahoum.

He fell in love and his true life began.

It began the moment he decided to raise a monument to this love that should remain unequaled in the annals of history.

The boy Dahoum was a member of a downtrodden, oppressed race. But that race had had a glorious history in the past. Spain had never known any greater moment of her history than under the Arab's domination. All that was needed was to give back to the men of this race the consciousness of their great dignity, a sense of their valor, a taste of new accomplishments, and new triumphs, to see them throw

off the yoke of their servitude and become again the proud, fierce, arrogant, superb Arabs of that past when they rode astride the highways of the Mediterranean world.

And thus began "The Revolt in the Desert," so magnificently described by Lawrence himself, that revolt which was to bring about the inauguration of five or six new kingdoms in the Middle East, the rebirth of Arab. nationalism, the upward swing of downtrodden masses, and possibly, the whole of mankind to the verge of a world war to be fought with atomic weapons...

"I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands and wrote my will across the sky in stars to earn you Freedom." Thus wrote T. E. Lawrence, and what he wrote is absolutely true, alas! only too true!

But then, who is to question the ways of Providence? If God, in His infinite Mercy, served Himself by the love of a man for an adolescent boy to change the course of history and bring new hope to millions of men, was that love to remain hidden forever? As a matter of fact I maintain that its secret would have made a mockery of Divine justice. It would have made a mockery of it, because men must know that it is not heterosexual love alone which can be capable of noble thoughts and heroic deeds, but homosexual love as well. And that if heterosexual love has had a monument raised with "The Divine Comedy," by Dante to his Beatrice, homosexual love has also its monument raised in the "Sonnets" of Shakespeare to his boy, W. H.; and that, if countless men have done heroic deeds inspired by the love of a woman, no man did greater heroic deeds than T. E. Lawrence, or, which is even more important, deeds which in the end have so altered the face of the world and the history of mankind as the Arab revolt has done.

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