Stark and ugly as the following vignette is, it is also, unfortunately, very real. Its tragedy is apparent from a two-fold angle which involves both the persons concerned, making each a victim. Reports as raw as this seldom come forth, exin rare cases of fiction such as the one below. But how many times would a complete knowledge of all the facts in a real murder of this sort reveal a story as tragic as this-lastingly tragic for the living, as well as finally tragic for the dead? You probably won't enjoy

22

а

...

day of

firsts

BY J. HOWARD SIMPSON

mattachine REVIEW

Usually Bill had been able to scare his customers into coughing up a ten dollar fee for "services rendered," but this time the customer had not been scared. In fact, the bastard had turned the tables and scared Bill. This was why he had

used the switch knife. He still retained a lucid picture of how the guy's body had looked, slashed and hacked, blood spurting, and that sickeningly agonized expression. God, how could he have done it? Usually he had only to look at the queer and demand his fee for letting him do it, and he got the money. But this guy had been big and well-built, in fact, rugged, not one of the slimy fairies that usually did it.

Of course the papers were playing it up big. The headlines had read, "16-YR.OLD YOUTH KILLS PERVERT TO PROTECT SELF." Bill thought how famous he would be at school. He had heard a lot of talk about queers from some of the other guys on the football team. In fact it had been a major pastime to brag about how much money you made at the Court house that week. That had been where he had killed the guy. Everyone on the team would think of Bill as being a kind of hero. In fact, the killing had brought so much publicity that there was talk of purging the University, even though it was some 40 miles away. Funny, Bill thought, I'd never guess the guy was a queer, much less an English professor at the University. He wondered how many more pansies were over there. Of course, he knew right away what the guy was after he had put his hand on it. The man hadn't done what most of the other pansies had. He had made Bill use his hand on him. This

was when Bill had first taken a good look at the guy's terrific body. The Court it house was old, and the men's room was located in the basement. It was cold, was dirty and the light was very dim. Bill had run his hand over the man's arms and chest, in fact over his whole body, and it was not til after this that the guy had gone to his knees and done it. When it was over, and Bill demanded money, the man called him a queer and told him to go to hell. This had teed Bill off, and that was when he killed him.

Yes sir, Bill thought, yesterday had been a day of firsts. He had really got hot over that guy's body. But of course that didn't make him queer. Anyone would get hot in that men's room, with the smell of urine and the way you could sit in the booths and see the men as they stood in front of the urinals. No wonder the queers got hopped up. Bill imagined how his own body must look, like a stud horse. He was big for his age, almost six feet tall and very tanned and muscular. But not as muscular as the guy he'd killed. He remembered his own hard young body reflected in a mirror, and his mind wandered back to the clear picture he retained of the man he'd killed. Slowly the memory became more vivid. Bill's mind was swirling as he turned off the light and got into bed. He could still feel the warmth of the man's half-naked body. Yes, sir, yesterday had been a day of firsts these were Bill's last thoughts, and then, his whole self throbbed until it fell into fitful sleep...

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