Beauty Queen

candles flickering, row on row, in their glass holders on the big metal racks.
    They headed for the side altar where the image of Saint Francis stood. They knelt down at the altar rail, side by side, and gazed up at it.
    In the flickering light from the banks of candles, the plaster image of II Poverello almost seemed to be alive. It was a fine old piece of Victorian sculpture, showing the saint with eyes rolled up in ecstasy, his hands spread to show the stigmata in them. He was surrounded by Franciscan brothers and by wild animals, who seemed to share in his rapture. Brother Sun stood behind his head. Sister Moon rested below his elbow. Doves and sparrows perched on his shoulders, gazing up at his thin radiant face. At his feet stood a wolf, with head lowered humbly toward the saint's feet, as if to lick the holy wounds.
    The two men knelt close together, arms touching, in total silence.
    This was something that they shared, a feeling that they had never been able to share with any other man. It was something quite remote from, and distinct from, all the unsmiling business in the bars, and the flamboyant exteriors of black leather G-strings with padding to make your basket bigger, and handcuffs jangling from your belt. When each of them discovered that the other shared his feeling for this, it was the thing that cemented their relationship. It was not something they paraded, even in the gay community. They both felt uncomfortable in the gay churches, because they knew they were not properly understood, that they were shunned and whispered about.
    Anyone who saw Armando behind the bar at the Eagle's Nest, mixing drinks with deft speed, laughing, joking playing the role of the handsome-gay-bartender-sex-object, would not recognize him now. Armando gazed silently up at St. Francis, his large hairy hands folded on the altar rail, in a manner as still as trance.
    Almost in a dream, Danny was recalling the guilty pleasure that he felt in parochial school in the Bronx when he read in the prayer books about the torments of the martyrs, and the joy with which they gave themselves up to the spears, and the hot coals, and the teeth and the claws of the wild beasts. He was enthralled by this fusion of pain with love. Once, when he was thirteen, in his innocence he tried to find words for confessing this guilty feeling but the priest simply didn't understand, and brushed his words aside. "It's not a sin, my son, to be edified by the stories of the holy martyrs," the priest had said.
    When he met Armando, six months ago, it took several weeks, and a number of rather ordinary lovemaking sessions, with rough games and other things, before they began to trust each other and to haltingly reveal their innermost desires and to move to satisfy each other truly.
    "The thing is," Armando had said, "I've been laughed at too many times. So ... you can understand why I never ran a personal ad in Trader Dick or anything . .
    After a few minutes, they both got up, dropped their money into the offering slot. Each of them slowly lit a candle, as if beginning a magic rite.
    Then they slipped out of the church and walked swiftly to Armando's apartment.
    There, they did not speak, in order to keep the trancelike mood that they had carried away from the church.
    Armando's little basement apartment was a homey clutter of cheap antiques, half-starved plants, battered old prints and oil paintings, worn Oriental rugs, books, souvenirs, afghans thrown over armchairs and sofa. Through the back, by the tiny bedroom, a door went out into a tiny back-court garden. Here, surrounded by a high palisade fence, there was one gingko tree, a lot of ivy and privet bushes and a few hanging plants. At a table and chairs under an awning, Armando could relax with friends on a warm evening.
    The bedroom was so small that there was room for little else but the king-size bed and mattress on the floor.
    Without speaking, they lit a couple of candles and undressed. Their bodies threw huge flickering shadows on the wall papered with stained old Chinese landscapes.
    Fifteen minutes later, they were well into what they had to do.
    Armando lay spread-eagled on the bed, held rigidly in position by four iron chains and manacles, which were bolted solidly to the corners of the bed. In the candlelight, his face and limbs glowed with sweat, and his burly barrel chest heaved up and down with uneven panting breaths. His eyes were fixed on the ceiling, unseeing yet seeing. Special