566
THALIA SElZ
tltlOuS naptime revels was no fairy himself, however. At first
he simply seemed to pull a blank around women. Maybe he was
just too tired or discouraged. Maybe he wanted to work more
than to chase girls. This disturbed my father. He had not the
usual over-aggressive male's fear of homosexuals; quite the op–
posite, in fact. He relegated to them a position as honorable as
that of women, only less fortunate.
"There are three species of sexual humans in the world."
He hammers
his
fist on the dinnertable for silence, and the
knives and forks skip at our places.
"First (with a broad wink toward my mother), the least
important: women who sleep with Men. Next, fairies who sleep
with each other or with Men; and finally, Men who sleep pre–
ferably with women, but with fairies if there aren't any women
around or if they need a free meal or a little extra cash. These-"
He stops for an instant to swallow: during his harangue
he has been cramming food into his mouth with the same breath–
less insatiability with which he talks.
"-are called the
bulls (bools);
homosexuals and women
we call the
cows."
Mother is furious. She hacks her food in bits and snaps it
off the fork.
Chin arched intellectually-I have recently discovered
Well
of Loneliness
wedged in at the end of one of our bookshelves–
I inquire where he would place Lesbians in his scale. It is one
of the compensations for our peculiar childhood that he almost
always considers Jason's and my questions seriously. He stops
chewing, thoughtfully clears his sinuses, and replies:
"Upon reflection I can recall only two important Lesbians:
Sappho and Queen Elizabeth. And though I have none of the
usual prejudices-in fact, I was once in puppy-love
(poppy–
lahve)
with a beautiful Lesbian girl named Rosemary-how
is
it possible to count a movement (
!)
which in approximately five
thousand years of recorded history has produced only two sig–
nificant examples? Whereas from Plato to Gide there have ex-
