Mirrors of Narcissus Read Free

stepped in through the main entrance of the library. The floors were all carpeted, and there was a heavy hush throughout the building. On the first floor, the innumerable study carrels and tables were filled with students busily taking notes. This entire floor was set aside for the reference books, bound periodicals, and texts which the instructors had put on reserve for their students to use. The upper two floors contained open book stacks through which we were free to wander, browsing if we chose.
    I went up the stairs to the third floor.
    There were fewer people on the upper floors, as most of the space was taken up by seemingly endless rows of bookshelves. The hush up here was inviting. I always felt as if I were stepping into a secret wood.
    For me, reading had always been bound up with sexual discovery. I’d learned the facts of life through a sex education book for youths in my junior high school library. And when I made the wonderful discovery that there were books which dealt with homosexuality, some of them containing explicit descriptions of sex acts, I became an avid explorer of the public library stacks.
    It had started in the main library of my hometown, where I accidentally discovered Naked Lunch . I was initially attracted by its bizarre title. Its dust jacket informed me that it was an underground classic. When I opened it at random, I found myself reading a description of two young boys on a riverbank masturbating each other. With a sense of unreality, I read on, about two other young boys, naked, sucking each other off, then fucking each other in the ass. I couldn’t believe how explicit the prose was. It was the first time I’d read sex scenes which reproduced all those fantasies which I’d thought I was the only one in the world to have, the things I’d daydreamed about in the privacy of my own mind, feeling that if anyone else were to view them I’d be burned at the stake.
    Not having the courage to check it out and take it home, I’d devoured it in the library during a couple of days in the summer before my last year of high school. Because most of my reading pleasure was focused on the sex scenes in novels, the act of reading itself had acquired a sexual cast for me. Indeed it was a sexual act.
    Since coming to college and discovering the Spenser Library, I’d been on the lookout for any more books dealing with homosexuality. I seemed to have a built-in radar for zeroing in on them. Something in a title would alert me, and I would pull the book out and scan the dust jacket. If the blurbs contained words like “forbidden love,” “illicit passions,” “underground,” “secret,” “daring,” “previously banned,” “taboo subject,” or “unexpurgated,” I knew I was on the right track.
    There were so few other people using this section of the library that it felt like my own personal library. In the quiet, little-used stacks I could roam at my ease. In the evenings I would choose one of the many comfortable leather armchairs located in hidden nooks and crannies of the labyrinthine aisles. With a small table and reading lamp beside me, I devoured books whose titles— The Immoralist , Confessions of a Mask , Our Lady of the Flowers , The City and the Pillar , Cities of the Night –gave no idea of the inflammatory material contained within them. I would never have dared to check them out and read them back at the dorm, but it was enough for me to have this secret retreat.
    My excitement at reading these books was only eclipsed by the thought that I knew there were others in school besides me who liked them. Unlike the other libraries on campus, which had computerized their check-out systems, this library still used the old system. Anyone who wanted to borrow a book had to write his name and telephone number on an old-fashioned check-out card.
    Whenever I discovered a gay book, I always scanned the list of people who’d checked it out, hoping to find someone I knew. One of the names