Friends, Protectors, Lovers

I have been reading the biography of Siegfried Sassoon for the simple reason that the book cover caught my eye--he was a very handsome young man--and his name is one you are always reading about in studies of the period of the First World War and after, mainly for his poetry that was precise in its depiction of the physical horrors of trench warfare, and for his eventual stance against the war.  A curious fellow torn between the life of a country gentleman who lived for fox hunting and cricket and a London man, a poet, aesthete, and friend to so many of the great names who made the cultural history of that period from Thomas Hardy to Lady Ottiline Morrell.  He was attracted to his own sex, but for the longest time too shy to act upon it.  When he finally had physical relations they were always with handsome, very young, and usually very needy guys.  Eventually he married but that was another matter altogether.  He brought to mind the sexual history of a dear old friend of mine whom I met in graduate school, who even at that time came across as a elderly, pompous scholar to those who had no real notion of him.  Which is not to say that the persona was untrue; there was just a delightful witty sentimental kid underneath.  When he finally revealed to me his sexual interest in males, he also disclosed that he limited himself to paid sex, arguing that he was so physically unattractive, so already as a youth creaky, pompous, and pathetically shy in matters sexual that a clear cut financial bargain before bed was clearly the best.  Over the years I knew him as a sexually active male, I often met the gentlemen whom he paid to consort with him.  A great number of them were handsome, very young, and obviously needy, most often college students, or in the first stages of their serious preparation for life.  It sort of sounded like Sassoon all over again.  I once was introduced to a stunningly handsome and clearly charming gentleman of maybe fifty who I was told thereafter had shared his charms for a fee over his beautiful years with Roy Cohn and Cardinal Spellman.  I know that it is impossible to discern the sexual proclivities of persons from social encounters, but offhand I would say that the majority of young men clustered around my friend were not probably seriously homosexual. And of course we all remember the long time relationship of the very straight Leonide Massine with Diaghilev.  These thoughts came to me this morning when reading in the Boston Globe the initiative to arrest johns rather than prostitutes with the headline saying something about "buying and selling lives."  I would be the first to attack the men who kidnap and drug young women and force them into prostitution, and seriously fault the men who buy the services of these girls.  But I think that it is possible to understand sexual intercourse as a service, and that those who engage in it can have a variety of motives, and many different ones honorable in different ways.  I remember the woman who had a small apartment in Athens, a woman somewhere in her thirties, she accepted male visitors, walk-ins to use the parlance of modern commerce, vetted by a fierce older woman at the appointment desk who would not hesitate to call the police if any guys were threatening, a career that ended when she became a somewhat stout forty five year old, at which time she took her lifetime earnings and opened a dress shop on the ground floor and continued to be a solid and respected part of that street's business community.