Christopher and His Kind Read Online Free PDF Page B

a Communist, so perhaps his unbourgeois behavior wasn’t altogether spontaneous but a part of his political persona.
    Nearly all the friends who looked in on Karl in the afternoons were middle-class queens. They had a world of their own which included clubs for dancing and drinking. These clubs were governed by the code of heterosexual middle-class propriety. If two boys were sitting together and you wanted to dance with one of them, you bowed to both before asking, “May I?” Then, if the boy said yes, you bowed again to the other boy, as though he were the escort of a girl and had just given you his permission to dance with her.
    Soon after Christopher’s arrival, Karl had given him a photograph of himself on which he had written: “From one who would like to be your friend.” The inscription was an appeal. Karl wanted to win Christopher away, before it was too late, from Francis—whom he regarded, with sad affection, as a hopeless case—and from what Francis represented: low life, drunkenness, scandals. Karl hoped to convert Christopher to a way of life more worthy of the Third Sex by introducing him to some nice boy with steady habits who had clean fingernails and wore a collar and tie. Christopher was touched by Karl’s concern for him. He really liked Karl, and respected everything about him but his respectability.
    Like the young man with female breasts and everyone else who entered the domain of the Institute, Christopher had automatically become a museum specimen, subject to Hirschfeld’s diagnosis and classification. Karl told him, in due course, that Hirschfeld had classified him as “infantile.” Christopher didn’t object to this epithet; he interpreted it as “boyish.” You couldn’t call him a pretty boy—his head and his nose were too big—but he did look young for his age, with his fresh pink complexion, inherited from Kathleen, bright eyes, and glossy dark-brown hair flopping down over his right cheek. He also had a boyish grin, full of clean white teeth. Far better to be boyish, he thought, than effeminate. He could never join the ranks of Karl’s friends and play at nicey-nice third-sexism, because he refused utterly to think of himself as a queen. Wystan was much more mature than Christopher, in this respect. Labels didn’t scare him.
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    When night came, Christopher was off with Francis to the bars. Here Francis was, of course, a well-known figure. The boys’ version of his name was Franni. And since, in German, you can put the definite article before a friend’s name—thus making it into a title like that of a saga hero—they also often called Francis “Der Franni,” The Franni. Christopher and Wystan anglicized Franni into Fronny in their letters to each other. The name appears in several of Wystan’s poems, and the Fronny character is present, though unnamed, in the published version of The Dance of Death. He is one of the roles mimed by the Dancer. As the paralyzed patron of a boy bar, he is wheeled onto the stage, makes his will, orders drinks all round, and dies.
    In the bars, Christopher used to think of Francis and himself as being like traders who had entered a jungle. The natives of the jungle surrounded them—childlike, curious, mistrustful, sly, easily and unpredictably moved to friendship or hostility. The two traders had what the natives wanted, money. How much of it they would get and what they would have to do to get it was the subject of their bargaining. The natives enjoyed bargaining for bargaining’s sake; this Francis understood profoundly. He was never in a hurry. Indeed, his patience outwore theirs. Francis bought them drinks but promised nothing, and the night grew old. “I never get the really attractive ones,” he used to say. “The ones I finish up with are the ones who haven’t anywhere else to sleep.” Actually,