In One Person

had never heard the
top
or
bottom
words used in that way Larry (or any number of my gay friends and lovers) would later use them, but I knew I was a top before I’d ever had sex with anyone.
    That day I made my partial confession to Martha Hadley, when Mrs. Hadley’s obvious dominance made such a strong but bewildering impression on me, I absolutely knew that I ceaselessly desired fucking other boys and men, but always with my penis in their bottoms; I never desired the penis of another boy or man penetrating me. (In my mouth, yes—in my asshole, no.)
    Even as I desired Kittredge, I knew this much about myself: I wanted to fuck him, and to take his penis in my mouth, but I didn’t want him to fuck me. Knowing Kittredge, how utterly crazy I was, because if Kittredge were ever to entertain the possibility of a gay relationship, it was painfully clear to me what he would be. If Kittredge was gay, he sure looked like a top to me.
    I T’S REVEALING HOW I have skipped ahead to my junior year abroad in Vienna, choosing to begin that interlude in my future life by telling you about Larry. You might think I should have begun that Vienna interlude by telling you about my first actual girlfriend, Esmeralda Soler, because I met Esmeralda shortly after I arrived in Vienna (in September of 1963), and I’d been living with Esmeralda for several months before I became Larry’s writing student—and, not long after that, Larry’s lover.
    But I believe I know why I have waited to tell you about Esmeralda. It’s all too common for gay men of my generation to say how much easier it is today to “come out” as a teenager. What I want to tell you is: At that age, it’s never easy.
    In my case, I had felt ashamed of my sexual longings for other boys and men; I’d fought against those feelings. Perhaps you think I’ve overemphasized my attraction to Miss Frost and Mrs. Hadley in a desperate effort to be “normal”; maybe you have the idea that I was never really attracted to women. But I
was
—I
am
attracted to women. It was just that—at Favorite River Academy, especially, no doubt because it was an all-boys’ school—I had to suppress my attraction to other boys and men.
    After that summer in Europe with Tom, when I’d graduated from Favorite River, and later, when I was on my own—in college, in New York—I was finally able to acknowledge the homosexual side of myself. (Yes, I
will
say more about Tom; it’s just that Tom is so difficult.) And after Tom, I had
many
relationships with men. When I was nineteen and twenty —I turned twenty-one in March of ’63, shortly before I learned I’d been accepted to the Institute for European Studies in Vienna—I had already “come out.” When I went to Vienna, I’d been living in New York City as a young gay guy for two years.
    It
wasn’t
that I was no longer attracted to women; I
was
attracted to them. But to give in to my attractions to women struck me as a kind of going back to being the repressed gay boy I’d been. Not to mention the fact that, at the time, my gay friends and lovers
all
believed that anyone calling himself a bisexual man was really just a gay guy with one foot in the closet. (I suppose—when I was nineteen and twenty, and had only recently turned twenty-one—there was a part of me that believed this, too.)
    Yet I knew I was bisexual—as surely as I’d known I was attracted to Kittredge, and exactly how I was attracted to him. But in my late teens and early twenties, I was holding back on my attractions to women—as I’d once repressed my desires for other boys and men. Even at such a young age, I must have sensed that bisexual men were not trusted; perhaps we never will be, but we certainly weren’t trusted then.
    I was never ashamed of being attracted to women, but once I’d had gay lovers—and, in New York, I had an ever-increasing number of gay friends—I quickly learned that being attracted to women made me distrusted and suspected, or even feared, by other gay guys. So I held back, or I was quiet about it; I just
looked
at a lot of women. (That summer of ’61 in Europe—when I was traveling with Tom—poor Tom had caught me looking.)
    W E WERE A SMALL group: I mean the American students who’d been accepted to the Institut für Europäische Studien in Vienna for the academic year of 1963–64. We boarded one of the cruise ships in New York Harbor and made the trans-Atlantic crossing—as Tom and I had done, two summers before. I