I have always--always--been the androphile*, and addict of androphiliac pornography, that I am. Proof of this is my memory, at the age of five years old, of attending with my parents a showing of The Sea Hawk, starring the radiantly beautiful, thrillingly well hung, Errol Flynn. We sat in the balcony, with me in the aisle seat, my mother next to me, and my father next over. It was the sort of adventurous, swashbuckling movie, with a an adventurous, swashbuckling, good-looking hero, that already I preferred to anything else, even to Disney animations (though Mickey Mouse as the Sorceror's Apprentice would have been a close call). I was, happily, immersed in it, valuing the valor and the intrepidity of the heroic Mr. Flynn--when suddenly he was captured, somehow divested of most of his clothes, and set cruelly, with blows of the lash and villainous abuse, to rowing a galley. The enormity of his evil fate was revealed when, suddenly, capriciously, he was ordered to stop rowing, and lay sweaty, unshaven, and utterly lovely in his rowing shorts, across his oar, panting for breath. In a flash, I perceived what had escaped the notice of the Hays Office and (at least consciously) my parents: With every labored breath that he took, his large virile member (as was later attested to by Truman Capote**) strained against his rowing shorts in an entrancing fashion. I quite forgot to breathe--Suddenly, like an angry cobra, came the urgent hissing of my mother: "Stop squirming!" Then for the first time I wished my parents dead. Leaving the theater after the movie, I walked ahead, eyes half-closed, holding within myself the vision of Errol Flynn in his rowing shorts, and without a word climbed into the back seat of the four-door Packard sedan and lay down. Suddenly my mother's hand was on my brow, and she was saying, "What's the matter with you? Have you got a fever? You're acting strange, like you're sick or something." And for the first time ever, the very mature thought occurred to me that I wanted to strangle my mother with a knotted stocking.

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* The word androphilia, so far as I ever knew, was my own invention when I started writing this day's blog. Subsequent research (Googling) on the internet has revealed that others--namely, Jack Malebranche--have used it before me, with approximately my own meaning; though without the implicit intentional contrast with the word "pedophilia," suitable to my falling in lust at the age of five remarkably precocious years with a thirty-something year old man.

** Saying that anything was "attested to" by Truman Capote (one of the world's most notorious pathological liars) is, of course, a contradiction in terms. Moreover, the incident alluded to (Capote's performing fellatio on Flynn) is improbable on several counts: As is well known, Flynn, though several times married to women, and considered by everyone who knew him a lady-killer par excellence, preferred strong, good-looking, masculine men of approximately the same age as himself as friends, roommates, and (in the Australian sense) "mates"--that is, as his emotional complements. It is unlikely that the swishy, epicene Capote could have got close enough to Flynn, at any age, to have engaged in any kind of sexual activity with him--or that Flynn would have enjoyed it if he had. Fortunately, there are other sources which validate my boyish estimation of his "endowment," including the certainly true statement of Errol Flynn himself that he had been asked to "tape down" his genital prominence, and that he had--and always would--refuse to do so.