MEL-5015 Portrait of a Homosexual

Excerpt

It was 1939 and I was in Munich. The war clouds were gathering, but I continued to ignore letters from home urging me to return to England before the worst happened. I had been there for seven or eight months, on a some-what attenuated version of the Grand Tour. And somehow I did not want to leave the city, either to continue into Austria and Italy or return to London.

There were some good reasons, but chief among them were Karl and Anna, my friends in Munich. They were brother and sister and I spent all my days with them, and frequently my nights too. We would sometimes drink far into the night and then they would invite me to sleep on the sofa in the studio. They would come back in the morning and we would again start our discussions on literature and philosophy, listen to records of Sibelius, Debussy or Mahler, play chess and then start drinking wine again.

The special reason was the strange love I was beginning to have for Karl. It is difficult to say just when it started but I think it will be easier for anyone to see my point of view if I say that I had been in love with Anna from the very first day I saw her and that one day I noticed that Karl looked strikingly like her. At the time I thought no more about it, but sometime in the spring, I can’t recall the exact time or occasion, I found myself alone with Karl, Anna having gone to spend a few days with some friends at Cologne.

I was feeling lonely and missing her very much. We drank far into the night and as we got more and more exhausted we began to doze in the studio, Karl lying on a kind of studio-bed across the room.