OPH-149 The Homosexual Handbook
The Homosexual Handbook
OPH-149
Ophelia Press
Angelo d’Arcangelo
$2.25
INTRODUCTION
I’ve been planning this book for some years. Its conception was a curious one, rather a joke at the time, a kind of gallows quip to clear the air in an uncomfortable situation.
Picture, if you will, two young men…old friends, if an unsatisfactory love affair can make for friendship…in a room, engaged in the preliminaries of a matinee. One is ardent, pressing, charming, and the other sweet, easy and permissive. I am the beseecher, he is the besought, and up to this point nary a button has been tugged.
The room is a small one in that area of Chicago known as Hyde Park, a small building that in the mid-fifties was used for student housing. I remember it so well. Whitewashed, with casement windows thrown open to the summer air, very sparsely furnished and small, it held a good comfortable bed I’d grown to love, which seemed particularly inviting under the sun-dappled old crazy-quilt my young friend had brought with him from rural North Dakota. A sublime and reticent youth, he had gained his degree in English and was presently studying the ballet with great assiduity: an assiduity that most nearly matched my study of his derrière. We are circling around each other and the bed, breathing heavily, brushing languidly as we cross and re-cross the room, and just beginning those kisses that signal the breach in the wall of resistance.
Suddenly, a knock. A young woman enters, his friend and my acquaintance. (How I curse myself to this day for not having locked the door!) Being neither stupid nor prim, there is every reason to believe she sensed that high, unmistakable odor that permeates the atmosphere whenever two hot boys prepare for sucking and fucking. Fortunately, we avoided the pratfalls of chagrin and embarrassment. Young we were, but sophisticated…n’est’ ce pas?…citizen of the world, blasè and unfailingly charming. We chatted. She got around to asking me what I was doing, and I said, “Writing a book. I’m calling it How to be Happy Though Gay, a kind of homosexual’s handbook.” As I recall, we all laughed, sitting there on the bed.
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