Christopher and His Kind Read Free Page A

making love to her. But plenty of heterosexuals would admit to feeling that way sometimes. What mattered was that he was genuinely aroused. After their orgasm, he urged her to come to his room, where they could take all their clothes off and continue indefinitely. She wouldn’t do this because she was now sobering up and getting worried that they might be caught together. Next day, she said, “I could tell that you’ve had a lot of women through your hands.”
    What did all this prove? That he had gained enormously in self-confidence. That sex, as sex, was becoming more natural to him—in the sense that swimming is natural when you know how to swim and the situation demands it. This he owed to Bubi.
    He asked himself: Do I now want to go to bed with more women and girls? Of course not, as long as I can have boys. Why do I prefer boys? Because of their shape and their voices and their smell and the way they move. And boys can be romantic. I can put them into my myth and fall in love with them. Girls can be absolutely beautiful but never romantic. In fact, their utter lack of romance is what I find most likable about them. They’re so sensible.
    Couldn’t you get yourself excited by the shape of girls, too—if you worked hard at it? Perhaps. And couldn’t you invent another myth—to put girls into? Why the hell should I? Well, it would be a lot more convenient for you, if you did. Then you wouldn’t have all these problems. Society would accept you. You wouldn’t be out of step with nearly everybody else.
    It was at this point in his self-examination that Christopher would become suddenly, blindly furious. Damn Nearly Everybody. Girls are what the state and the church and the law and the press and the medical profession endorse, and command me to desire. My mother endorses them, too. She is silently brutishly willing me to get married and breed grandchildren for her. Her will is the will of Nearly Everybody, and in their will is my death. My will is to live according to my nature, and to find a place where I can be what I am … But I’ll admit this—even if my nature were like theirs, I should still have to fight them, in one way or another. If boys didn’t exist, I should have to invent them.
    Psychologists might find Christopher’s admission damaging to his case, and his violence highly suspicious. They might accuse him of repressed heterosexuality. Wystan sometimes half jokingly did this, telling Christopher that he was merely “a heter with good taste,” and expressing fears that he would sooner or later defect. Nearly fifty years have passed, since then; and Wystan’s fears have been proved groundless.
    *   *   *
    Wystan was now back in England. Soon he would start work as a schoolmaster. Bubi was somewhere in South America; he never wrote. Layard had left Berlin. On November 29, Christopher set out on his third visit to Germany that year. Only, this time, he wasn’t putting any limits on his stay. This might even become an immigration. When the German passport official asked him the purpose of his journey, he could have truthfully replied, “I’m looking for my homeland and I’ve come to find out if this is it.”
    *   *   *
    On the morning after his arrival, he went to call on Francis, who was now the only English-speaking person he knew in Berlin. Francis lived on a street called In den Zelten. It had a view across the Tiergarten park. As the huge house door boomed shut behind him, Christopher ran upstairs with his characteristic nervous haste to the second or third floor—I now forget which it was—and rang.
    The door of the apartment flew open and Francis appeared, tousled, furious, one hand clutching the folds of his crimson silk robe. Instantly he started screaming in German. Christopher understood the language better now; he knew that he was being told to go away and never