goal for most people, but anyone aiming higher must allow neither sex nor entangling alliances to hold him back. Harris personally approached sex and friendship with casual openness and warmth, but like a man who eats with relish when hungry, and then gets up and goes about his business-his scientific work.

"But it's not good for man to be alone," I protested.

"Our society," he answered, "tries to enforce heterosexual monogamy with a little Bible-quoting, forgetting that Jesus chose to be alone, and St. Paul said all Christians, except the moral weaklings, ought to be single. People are put together with varying needs and capabilities. The Roman Church says serving the Church takes the whole man. Any man who is committed, to science, art, politics or what, can be tied to a marrige and do justice to that and his profession. 'No man can serve two masters,' the committed man lives among people, but can't allow any one to enslave him. Friendship and sex, for him, are peripheral needs."

I asked if he wasn't just rationalizing and sublimating his sexual frustration. "If I'm frustrated," he replied, "I don't see the evidence. I think that's nonsense, but it doesn't matter. The world needs scientists and it needs babymakers. But I haven't time for both jobs."

Few can live by his rule-but few have his committment. I've known more homosexuals whose lives were less ideal.

Johnny Geffels was another sort. He supervised a tenement in Lower East Side New York, living alone in filthy basement quarters among stacks of papers and magazines. Geffels looked like an "auntie" though barely thirty, but was quick to express his hatred of "queers." With sordid monotony, he made a nightly search of

public "cans" for the most impersonal form of sex contact. I shouldn't judge him unduly. He may have been living according to his nature and within his limits, and he was harmless. Should we look for causes in rejection -loss of self-respect? Did he despise himself too much for affinity with another human being? Who knows? Such explanations are to facile even though they hit the mark now and then...

Dirk Hutzieff's philosophy was a little like Harris Medwick's. Single by choice, he was hardly homosexual by choice he could barely stand a women in the room--he was too much the grand bitch himself. He was a dedicated artist but with little recognition for it. Ironically, two novels and his exquisite poetry, which he held in low regard, were quite successful. He had a large San Francisco apartment during the war and threw a party whenever he finished a painting-four or five times a year. Starting as prissily formal affairs, ending as brawls, they were often followed by his brief, garishly passionate romances, with the partner modeling for the next Blake-like painting. Dirk had elaborate, mystical "love force" theories. He was convinced that love, the fuel and inspiration for his art, must never stagnate into a permanent (smothering) relationship.

"The Eros-passion," he said, "is like a match's incandescence-it naturally consumes itself. Art seeks to crystalize, for all time, an image from the flaring passion which the artist must have glimpsed and then let go of before he can conceive and create. If he tries to wallow in the passion beyond his time, he is trapped and will never create. The artist deliberately has to snuff out passion at its zenith to get the most out of it artistically. Others have this problem too. The common herd thinks passion can be

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