Mirrors of Narcissus Read Online Free PDF Page A

attractive children, on the other hand, were judged to be more outgoing, friendly, intelligent, and creative. Mind you, all this was about children the teachers had never even met.”
    “So what does all that prove? I could have told you that without an experiment.”
    She became serious, a tiny wrinkle appearing between her eyebrows. “Well, the result seems to show that a teacher’s initial impression of a child will determine how he will act toward the child—whether he will give him encouragement, or ignore the child’s true potentials. Naturally, children who receive more attention and love will respond in ways which stimulate their intellectual and social growth—in other words, succeed in the ways by which society measures accomplishment. So from a very young age, the dice are loaded against unattractive children.”
    “It’s not only teachers. We all judge people by their looks. Subconsciously and otherwise.”
    “True. I have to admit that’s what first drew me to you, Guy.”
    “Bingo.”
    Christine was the first girl who’d ever been open about her sexual attraction towards me. Perhaps it was all the psychology she’d studied, but she had never been shy about expressing her erotic feelings. And she liked to enunciate clearly what it was about me, physically, that she liked. It was that which excited me most: I could see myself through her eyes, and become aroused by the image of myself I saw there.
    For her, sexuality was the key to a person’s character. She was completely open about her own sexuality. We had long talks about our sexual awakenings, and (on my part, guardedly) about our love affairs in the past. I’d told her about the many girlfriends I’d had, but not about the thoughts that went through my head as I was making love with them, or what I had to do to excite myself. I hadn’t quite opened up with her to the point where I could confess that all the girls had merely been for decoration, to hide my true inclinations. And that in my mind I’d had to change many of them into boys before I could become sexually interested in them.
    Christine, for her part, kept nothing back from me. That was how I knew I was the fourth boy she’d made love to. I knew all about my predecessors, Craig, David, Brian, and Julian. She knew I was curious about the boys in her past and didn’t try to hide anything. I wasn’t exactly the jealous type. I’d fantasized about being able to enter her body and watch through her eyes as she made love with other boys.
    Because of her open attitude toward sex, people felt relaxed in her presence, and would confess things they wouldn’t have dreamed of revealing to other people. I’d even told her about my one homosexual experience in high school. My ability to confess this to her—and I felt able to, perhaps because she was a woman—was another bond between us.
    She felt that all people were basically bisexual—a belief which I shared—and that we all had a sort of gauge within us, one side indicating heterosexuality, the other, homosexuality. With most people, the needle pointed closer to heterosexual, with varying degrees of distance from it. Nobody was completely hetero, or for that matter, homo. She felt that we all had urges both ways, which fluctuated with time and circumstances.
    In junior high, she had had a crush on an older girl in school, even to the point of writing secret love letters. So she could understand homosexuality. I told her that my adolescence was also a confusing period of transition, though I stopped short of telling her that my most satisfying sexual experience had been with that one boy, and that my most vivid and erotic sexual fantasies were those involving men.
    She wanted no secrets between us, so it was a torture for me not to be able to tell her everything. I longed to do away with this great secret which I carried, but I knew that this very secret was the bond which linked us so tightly together. And though she was the only