Heights of Passion (Stories for Older Men & Younger Lovers #1)

Augie’s fixed idea of sex was to masturbate himself in Miles’s living room, fully dressed, with no one touching him. To top it off, Augie didn’t kiss, either.

The four youths insinuated themselves into different parts of the room and introduced themselves smoothly. Foreign accents and rhythms began to spark the conversations, and relaxed laughter, an unusual sound up to then, was heard. Augie sensed the change but was unable to pinpoint its cause. Miles noticed many calling cards emerge from pockets and exchange hands, many pens taking down numbers. The boys were a success, their full heads of hair riding high like colorful islands on a thinning gray sea.

As an editor who was gay, he had no trouble with the hetero-sex that filled the pages he read; on the contrary he felt especially qualified for his job because he was gay. He possessed all the male capacities to rape, plunder, and pillage; while at the same time he knew what it was like to be taken by a man, and to succumb to one, as so many fictional heroines were fond of doing. But this story was beyond his ken because he was invited to feel the moisture Derek elicited from Barbara’s sex, and to taste her secretions. When Seymour stopped being able to distance himself from the descriptive passages, nausea overtook him. Such was the power of Hardwick’s skewed prose.

As to your professional question about why men fall in love over the internet, I think that transference and counter-transference play a big part in online attraction. The feelings that arise are toward our imaginary visualization of whom the other person is and whom we’d like them to be. Sometimes these images are quite accurate and sometimes not. A lot depends on the ability of the “imaginer” to assess people quickly and accurately, and both must be as honest about themselves as possible.