(Terrence writing)

Among flesh and blood gay men is a rather cliched rhetorical question, "What causes heterosexuality?" There is a second one, "Is there a cure?"

Since our exposure to the current world, and that especially on the Internet, there have been profound changes in how gay sex is perceived. To me the biggest change is the availability of photographs of men having sex with each other. I am told that forty years ago the possession of photographs such as are currently seen meant that the possessor risked a lot of jail time.

I come from another era and culture, that of eighteenth century Prussia. As a youth I was sent to a military academy to be made into a soldier. I was of slight build and shy, and was, by today's standards, something of a sissy. My father had already "donated" my eldest brother to the Church, and my next oldest brother was sent to law-school. He did not want to become a lawyer and managed to get to Hamburg and from what I recall went to sea and was never heard from again. As for myself I did not wish to leave my dear mother and my closest sister, and was quite upset at being trundled off to a strange place with strange people. However, in those days, Papa's word was law and all of my crying and protesting earned me a beating. That may sound horrible to today's readers, but that was standard for the time. If you protested the decision of either parent, but especially your father, you were caned, sometimes brutally. The tears such treatment caused were also cause for punishment, especially in boys, for if you cried you were admonished once to stop crying and then beaten some more. I understand that this is of remote antiquity, if you know anything of ancient Greek culture you will remember that the Spartans were great believers in "toughening" their boys. Most cultures of Indo-European origin were similar.

On arrival at the school I realized quickly that I had been put in something of a paradise! I was quickly introduced to sexuality, about which I had only the vaguest notions. I was the kind of boy who would get tremendously excited at the sight of a naked man, and when we were done with classes for the day, it was time for the older boys to pick a younger boy to play with. Some were quite gruff and were looking only to let off their libidinous urgings. Others wanted some semblance of femininity about them and there were those of us who were called "maidens" and we were provided with girl's clothing and were "courted" by these older boys. Some of we maidens were not happy with this set-up, but I was. I regularly became a "bride" to some boy, who would introduce me to his version of "wedding night," in which I was plied with wine or brandy, and then proceeded to "lose my virginity." These older boys, even the rough uncaring ones, were quite careful when it came to sodomizing a younger one, because to cause internal injury due to penetration was a sure way to kill someone. Although my own introduction to such sex was painful at first, the good and very intense feelings generated by it became my solace for being far from home.

As the years passed by, I would be sent home on holiday, which at first made me quite happy, but I came to see these occasional visits as an annoyance. I wanted to get back to school to pick up my education, so to speak. But I actually did quite well as far as academic matters were concerned. I was taught by the more considerate of my "husbands" not to fear pain, and a number of the boys taught me how to fight. This was a matter of practicality in some ways, because no "barrack - that is the modern word, we were called "grupen" - could afford to be shamed by having a coward or sissy in its ranks. I grew to be quite tall and started developing a muscular physique. The muscles came because some of the boys would insist on exercising with me as a prelude to sexual relations; others would start "foreplay" (another modern word) with traditional Greek wrestling, which meant you both took off your clothes and wrestled until one of you pinned the other. The winner did then what he wanted with the loser, which usually meant the loser would get quite thoroughly fucked. That was not a bad thing, but no boy wants to be kown as a loser and gradually I became quite aggressive in my wrestling skills. The night that I first overpowered another boy was quite an event!

I was a little smaller and not quite of matching physique as that of my "husband", but I had learned to twist and turn, evade and counter-grapple with a ferocity that made me tougher and tougher to pin down. I had been scolded more than once about my unwillingness to submit to certain boys, and I would just listen and nod as they licked bruised lips and rubbed their strained muscles. The night in question I had been paired off with a boy who had something of a grudge with me because of the way I had treatd him, and he was all about "teaching me a lesson." Unfortunately he was unable to better me as we wrestled, and when I had finally pinned him we had both endured quite a mutual battering. Using fists in traditional Greek wrestling was, of course, forbidden, but in the grupen-haus at night it was a common thing for a fistfight to happen, and as we were left to our own discipline these went officially unnoticed. If bones were broken, it was always claimed that a fall down the stairs was responsible. But on the night in question my "husband," who was not at all being "romantic," just wanted to beat me up. As it turned out he was the one who got beaten, and I was the one who turned the tables on him by making him my "maiden" for the evening. As he had not been handled in such a way for several years, he was not pleased with his fate, although I was more than pleased to take my delight with his rigid muscularity. The strongest man, he with the firmest and most toned of muscles, is quite soft inside, as I found out that night. His plan of "teaching me a lesson" thwarted, there was little that he could do but to submit to my advances. I quickly found that having an unwilling partner was no real pleasure and in the middle of the night sent him back to his bed with a hard kick to his ass. I was never bothered by him again, and had little in the way of "socializing" (another modern word) with him. At first he was all fawning and wanting to be my good friend, but as he had shown me no affection, or spirit of camaradie, I paid him little mind after that.

I was now in a position to choose my own maidens and was quite the paramour. I found that those boys my age who had gotten to top of form were like myself, they were quite decent in all ways, and I was accepted by them as a peer after having trounced the bully who thought to teach me my never-learned lesson. I had no desire to force myself on a younger boy, preferring instead to woo them. This was done by helping them with their studies, teaching them how to fight, getting them toned in the muscles, and to some extent helping them with their artistic skills.

I feel that the modern sense of what Prussian culture of my day was like does not allow that we were quite fond of music; our emperor amused himself whenever he could by playing the flute, and he was often seen at the symphonic presentations in the court. He spoke several languages, including Russian, French, English and Latin. We as boys were expected to emulate all of his achievements, because, well, he was the emperor, and as such was the national hero. He was the country's "Papa." Unlike the little "fuhrer" to come, he was able on all fronts of being a well-cultured, well-mannered man of the world. We boys adored him. Perhaps the reality was otherwise, but we were proud to have such a man at the helm of our country.

The bonds of love formed in a military school such as I attended were close to the Platonic ideal, where no boy would stand by in a battle and watch his lover get killed, he would be by his side fighting with him until the death of them both. Such high-sounding feelings were, in battle, one thing; as expressed in the watches of the night by boys lerning to be men were quite another. I would be embarrassed to list the conversations we would have with each other in a romantic interlude, because the words which would pass between such a pair were as sophomoric and honey-coated as that which passed between any man and actual maiden. Pledges of undying love, the giving of lockets of hair, even rings were passed between a given couple. The only thing missing was the "sanctity" of marriage, and I recall having more than one doleful conversation with this or that maedchen about how sad the world was that we could not marry. Although I myself never went so far, some boys would actualy "marry" under the hands of a third who would act as "priest," but most of us shied away from such things because we were afraid of trespassing that which we felt belonged to God.

As I actually became a man, and I mean physically, I was unlike many of my classmates in that my desires for other boys continued unaltered. Many of the other boys discovered girls as they got older and would tend to think of their dalliances of their younger days as mere preparation for the intimacies of marriage proper, or they would start saying that it was a matter of their circumstance that they were physically intimate with other boys. I myself did not feel that way at all.

I had been introduced to any number of girls as I got older, but never felt any attraction to them physically. Some were quite beautiful by anyone's standards, others were not. I was expected to choose one of these girls as my wife, or at least announce my preferences to my father, who would have made the arrangements necessary for a wedding. Fatherly patience was surprisingly high in this matter. Some boys' fathers would just pick a girl, any girl, that happened to be of some financial or social gain to the boy's family, but in this my father was quite lenient. I would tell him why I found fault with this or that girl and he would accept my judgement in the matter, and wait until the next engagement. Personally I wished to go right back to school and pursue my latest "maiden," developing a short-lived but intense love-affair with a younger boy.

All of this was brought to an end, however, when I was called up for military service along with the other boys olde enough and competent enough to actually be real soldiers in a real war. The reason for this may be written in one word, one name: Napolean.