JOURNAL EXCERPT: April 5, 1978 7:15 pm

"Two interesting things today. First of all, perhaps most important, I drew and wrote today. I started the sixth strip of the ten I am going to send off. This particular strip involves Seth (a takeoff on T-- sort of), and his dog, Elephant as the previous five have. This is the initial strip where Elephant begins sleeping in the bathtub out in Seth's back yard. I also began a story today. I only wrote one page, but I felt good about what I wrote, which is very important. It's about a boy, Jack, who is a junior in high school and has dated very little. Mainly about his trouble in having relationships with girls, particularly with a girl he is infatuated with named Cynthia.

"Secondly, and perhaps more interesting, I received a letter from I-- today. I was surprised. The letter is nothing like I expected. She is exceptionally friendly in her letter. She says,

'I'm glad you enjoyed the other night. I did to. (too) I was really surprized (surprised) to hear from you so soon. I wasn't expecting it. Boy, that's really great drawing. I love to draw cartoons to. (too)'"

MANHOOD REDO: If it's not clear by now, I have never been a player; if my life depended on my ability to play women, I'd be in deep trouble. If traditional heterosexual masculinity is based on a man's skill at attracting and using women for sexual gratification, I'm one piss poor example of a traditional heterosexual male. So Jack in the story I was working on could undoubtedly be considered a stand-in for me. It might be easy to attribute this deficit to my looks; I'm not Tom Cruise or Heath Ledger or who ever else you want to fill in the blank kind of handsome. It's not that I'm unattractive, I just don't have those rugged chiseled looks associated with the Marlboro Man. How many of us men do?

I'm going to spin things in a different direction, though, and claim that this inability to be a player wasn't a matter of lacking skills or looks; instead, it was an active decision not to relate to women that way because I knew I wanted something different - someone I could hang out with and not get tired of it, someone I could be silly with, stupid with, smart with, serious with, sublime with, sad with. And yet I was being bombarded with messages telling me to be with as many women as possible. I'll always remember Wilt Chamberlain talking about sleeping with 20,000 women. And yet what we don't hear about is that in his last interview at the end of his life he said that he'd found out "having one woman a thousand different times is much more satisfying."

I'm not making a moral judgement about sleeping with numerous partners; as long as it's consensual and safe, I have no problem with it. But I am saying it would be nice to broaden the strictures of masculinity to include young men who desire sustained, caring relationships. And there are plenty of men like that. They just have a hard time admitting it.

So, I was one confused 22-year-old when it came to women and sex, my head swimming with all sorts of impulses, conflicts, and tensions that I didn't have a clue how to sort out.