Personal Beauty

is something that, to the dismay of women and other minorities, is mostly bestowed on young, white males. I well recall the evening, sometime late in my twelfth year, when, having just showered, and, reaching for the first clean clothes that lay to hand, I skinned on a pair of jeans shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt--and joined my family in the living room to watch television. As I hoisted myself into the oaken rocking chair that my mother usually sat in, I noticed that she was oddly solemn when she looked at me: "You look..," she started to say, then stopped, and started again to say, "You should wear T-shirts like that more often. You look good in them." And it dawned on me, with a faint sense of irony, that my mother was telling me I was beautiful.

Not being a girl, I thought being beautiful was something funny, but not important or especially significant, that had just happened to me. It made me delay the proper development and exercise of my body through late adolescence--but then, when in my twenties, I began to work at jobs of hard labor, I did rather bloom spectacularly. And, coincidentally, while I blossomed  physically (and not to mention the prodigious amount of reading that I was doing in French, English and American literature, and other arcana), the all-male sex-steambaths roared into dominance in the cities where I then lived, in Portland (Oregon), Seattle and San Francisco. And, as I say, I had, probably, for me, enough sex; while stepping blindly through the mine-field of AIDS (without contracting the HIV virus). The reason for which is mostly Luck, and partly Attitude.