276
PARTISAN REVIEW
that make the traveler unable to select the precise orbit of his wander–
ing.
Though this city of night was very much of a daylight affair
in Paris, in the general confusion you could not always be sure of
the person you were talking to. Some future edition of Baedeker, I
imagine, will have to deal with this new problem of travel conversa–
tion: vVhat kind of conversation is appropriate among homosexuals,
heterosexuals, or among mixed company, while
en voyage?
When do
you transgress the bounds of propriety by a remark that presupposes
your own sex or the sex of your interlocutor? I saw one boy wince
at a casual reference to a woman, and by now many travelers must
know the embarrassment of the isolated heterosexual in the midst
of homosexual chatter. Such confusions of identity, of course, are all
part of the familiar and traditional game of recognition that the
invert is compelled to play out of self-defense. But travel provides
an opportunity for a still richer confusion of roles, varieties, and
nuances, in the course of which the traveler may even permit him–
self to be pleasantly confused about his own identity. Two of these
varieties that flourish in remarkable forms abroad are the homo–
sexual mother and the homosexual virgin.
In her most noticeable social version, the homosexual mother
is the girl who plays the reigning queen for a whole circle of the
boys. She helps supply the feminine atmosphere that they desire, and
in return she may preen her ego as the center of attention. Usually
she gets out of this an excessive but bogus femininity, a certain
glittering ability for chatter, wisecracks, flash; but the ambiguity
of her position is also more than likely to make her go bitchy, hard,
and brittle because, though her reason for being in the group is
that she is a woman, she is not in the end treated as such by any
of the men. Wherever a colony forms abroad, some such mother
is bound to appear. But the traveler no longer leaves this merely to
chance, he makes his mother part of his travel preparations. Walking
one day along the Rue Rivoli, opp'osite the Tuileries, I was hailed
by a former friend, Louis X- whom I had not seen in ten years.
(This kind of chance encounter was typical of a summer in which
everyone was on the move, so that you were as likely as not to run
into anybody anywhere.) Louis had grown a bit bald and had filled
out, but looked just as I should have expected: a bright and ag-
