There is always that question, which can only be answered by instinct, of what to do about strangers. Leading my life the way I did, it was strangers who by their very strangeness quickened my pulse and made me feel I was alive—that and the irrational sense of absolute security that came from the conspiracy of sex with men I had never seen before and might never see again. Yet those daring instincts were by no means infallible: their exhilaration was sharpened by the courted risk of rejection, misunderstanding, abuse.
