And we’re talking about fragile masculinity here, which is sort of a minefield. Sometimes sex does make things weird later, even if a session goes well. I think our writer’s bigger concern is the social upheaval that could result from hooking up with a group of his friends. And it would be sort of no-brainer: “Of course you can do that thing to me that feels good.” Just a totally practical approach. And so, the account in Justin Spring’s Steward biography The Secret Historian went something like: He’d approach guys and suck them off and they’d love it. He was having gay sex in like the 20s, before World War II, McCarthyism, etc.-before anyone had a sense of it at all. His books were unlike those of his contemporaries in that their sex-positive depictions of gay sex did not come couched with some sort of moralistic consequences-they were depictions of pure pleasure. He wrote pulp erotica in the ’60s under the pseudonym Phil Andros. I think about Samuel Steward in instances like this. I think there will always be people whose preference for one side is so firm that they are effectively one or the other, but I think for many-as minds open, and taboos loosen-they’re going to find themselves in the gray area of the middle.
Rich: It seems like the days are numbered.
