JOURNAL EXCERPT: April 10, 1978 9:25 PM

I want to stick with the previous journal entry a little longer, so here's another excerpt...

"I'm going to call T-- long distance tonight and see how his long-distance-love-affair is going. He is hooked on a girl named L-- S--. She is a very prim and proper girl, who is destroying his life. T-- just can't handle the type of relationship they have. He loves her, she likes him. T-- is too intense for that sort of relationship. He's going crazy. I would too. When I was in San Antonio he wrote a note and I put on her car for him. And later on he gave her a single red rose. I wouldn't do that sort of shit. I guess I'm not romantic. And I thought I was. I think he ought to dump her. He says she's really messed up though (parent's influence and so on) and he wants to help her. I was the same way with L-- S-- [a different girl, same initials] and look what happened. Nothing. I didn't help her a bit. She's married now. I don't know about happily married. I hope so for her sake. I can't talk to T-- over ten minutes because buying the cassette deck lowered my funds terribly, and I have to save enough money to quit work and go back to school this fall semester."

MANHOOD REDO: I wonder how much this excerpt had to do with something that men are generally disallowed from talking about: how T--'s interest in and intimacy with L-- cut into his and my intimacy (even though he lived in San Antonio, we still talked on the phone regularly and I would visit; when he got involved with L--, all he did was obsess about her). That might partly explain why I thought he ought to dump her.

Hetero men generally are pretty limited in how they're allowed to express fondness for another man because it walks a little too closely to the gay side of the line. It's okay if you're drunk, like in the beer commercials where one guy says to another, "I looove you, man," or on the sports field where you can slap another guy on the butt, or in times of danger and courage.

And yet I formed my most intense bonds with guys before I did with women. T-- was one of them. I'll never forget acting silly with him when we were fifteen, dancing around the pool table in his parent's house in the middle of the night, singing along with George Harrison's "I Dig Love," or all the times we spent the night at each other's houses staying up and talking about anything and everything, what we called our "bullshit sessions." When he moved away from Texas to Virginia at the end of ninth grade I was crushed. We recorded cassette tapes and mailed them to each other instead of letters.

I was talking with Abby, my wife, just a couple days ago about first learning what I wanted in a relationship with a woman through my early relationships with guys like T-- and G--; I wanted someone I enjoyed being around, who enjoyed being around me; someone I wouldn't feel like I had to put on a masculine pose for. I wanted intimacy, honesty, sharing. As a hetero guy, I was never attracted to them the way I am Abby, but the deep fondness was always there and still is.