Finistere by Fritz Peters, where a boy welcomes to his bed the teacher who has saved him from drowning (and the drowning is not only physical, for the teacher's affection is saving him from spiritual self-destruction also) as an impulsive gesture of appreciation. Indeed he is puzzled to find himself led by the teacher to a Paris orgy and exhibition, where sex is ugly, for he had only loveliness to communicate in his intercourse with the teacher.
Jean-Paul Sartre has analyzed in great detail the sexual experience of Jean Genet, in the book Saint Genet Comedien et Martyr. Finding himself in a milieu where he had no other way to communicate, Genet surrendered to passivity. According to Sartre, sex for Genet was a sort of liturgical drama. Between his tenth and fifteenth years he discovered the delight of surrender, as a means of speaking of his love to the older, tougher boys in the reformatory whom he so greatly adored. They teased him, insulted him, tortured him, raped him, spat in his face, and he had no defense, save one: "to love his enemies," to "do good unto those who spitefully used him." He chose to give love to those cruel boys who crushed him without mercy. He adored them, submitted servilely to their desires. Unloved, he could give love. Already at the age of ten he had found his first pleasure in pederasty. But this first love he discovered in himself was a love which he expected to be returned. He dreamt of surrendering his anus to a lover who would reward him with affection. But now his pleasure was more intense than he had then dreamt possible, as he was raped by these delinquents, a grasp of iron rendering him whore to serve the pleasure of the other inmates as they wished. He found the most intense pleasure in denying himself pleasure in order to give himself. He thought of his own penis only as the "handle" which the other would seize to keep
him under control, or as the "trigger" to his lover's "cannon." The only pleasure he knew and wanted, was the pleasure of the other which took place inside him and died in the night of his guts. His pleasure was in suffering, in giving his love to the other, and thus through the sex act he spoke silently of humble self-giving.
And there are, of course, many cases of sexual revenge-of intense genital pleasure as a result of anger expressed through sex. In the Chinese boy brothels of Canton, some of which were still operating 15 years ago, boys were trained for a variety of functions -one of which was to provoke anger. Men who were so angry that they wished to beat someone up hired the services of these boys who were especially trained first to provoke anger and then to assauge it. These boy specialists would spit on their customers, taunt them, call them vile names until the customer was ready to murder them, all the time bringing the anger to focus on sex: "your penis is too small to hurt me," etc. Anger expressed by sex is common in reformatories, especially where younger white boys are victims of sexual attack by groups of Negro boys as in a case where the Negroes were always being unjustly punished by a brutal white work supervisor. "F-
is
always fun," one angry youngster exclaimed, "but its really hot when I close my eyes and imagine I'm fthat work captain."
And in Jean Genet, especially Pompes Funebres, we see perhaps the expression of emotions quite the opposite, although akin to the Sultan and Notaras. How do we understand the emotions that led the sixteen-year-old French boy, Riton, into submitting to a band of German soldiers? True he no doubt all the time had in mind the goal of tricking the Germans and getting them killed. But as he lies in bed with the officer, fascinated by the
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