look for opportunities to break out of their roles for a day or a night or for partners with whom they can at least temporarily reverse their roles. Or, aside from their purely personal dissatisfactions or their damaged egos, they may find that their relationship falls far short of being a successful counterpart of their parents' marriages or those of their heterosexual friends. In this case it may be that the word "marriage" has simply led them to establish impossible goals. In one certain respect, if no other, they are foredoomed to failure. No Jack, no No Jack, no matter how effeminate he may be, will ever become a mother, and no Joan, no matter how butch, will ever become a father, and yet children are the usual, if not always the inevitable, result of marriage in the real sense. Granted there are childless heterosexual marriages, but there's also an extremely high divorce rate among them. I do not wish to seem to imply that I believe homosexuals delude themselves into thinking they are going to produce children. I am only pointing out one certain way in which they are never, no matter how hard they try, going to succeed in imitating a heterosexual marriage.

I am well aware that there are cases in which two homosexuals have lived long and happily together just because their natures permitted them to be utterly content with a pseudomale-female relationship. I believe this is the exception, however, and I further believe that thousands of short-lived homosexual relationships might have had better chances of survival had not their principals allowed themselves to be deluded by words, names, tags and labels into trying to do a job without the proper tools and equipment.

I had been thinking along these lines for a long time but my thoughts on this subject were crystallized re-

cently when I happened to have lunch with an old friend whom I had not seen for some time. After the usual introductory chit-chat I asked,

"How's your husband?" And then, as I sensed rather than saw a flicker of annoyance on his face I hastily added: "Or should I say the wife?"

"John's fine-or at least I take it that's who you mean.” And then, after a moment's pause, "I don't mean to seem stuffy, but those are two words we never use in our household. We've been together over ten years now, and there's no reason to think there won't be another ten, and I really think that's one of the reasons we've made a go of it so far. Oh, when we first started living together we did a certain amount of joking about being married the way everyone seems to do, and went along with the Mr. and Mrs. routine all our friends seemed to think was so witty. I was usually tagged with the 'Mrs.' label for no apparent reason except that I was a damned good cook and whenever friends came to dinner I did the cooking. I didn't mind at first, or I didn't think I did, but frankly, after the first hundred times of hearing someone say to John, 'If I had a wife who could cook like yours, etc.' I began to resent it. And then, for reasons which on the surface had nothing to do with the matter, we'd usually end up after the guests had gone home in some kind of quarrel. Fortunately, accidentally got around to discussing the matter and discovered that neither of us was really enjoying the gag.

we

"The way I feel about it is this: I'm a man. I do a man's work and have all a man's obligations to the world. I grew up on a ranch and I've lived as rugged a life as any man I know and could do so again if I had to. I don't pretend to be the most virile man alive, but I'm proud of what I am and I don't see any

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