replenishing the uh exchequer. And now, Carl, there were perhaps”—one finger tapped the file which gave out a faint effluvia of moldy jock straps and chlorine—
“occasions. When no uh economic factors were involved.”
A green flare exploded in Carl’s brain. He saw Hans’ lean brown body—twisting towards him, quick breath on his shoulder. The flare went out. Some huge insect
was squirming in his hand.
His whole being jerked away in an electric spasm of revulsion.
Carl got to his feet shaking with rage.
“What are you writing there?” he demanded.
“Do you often doze off like that??? in the middle of a conversation… ?”
“I wasn’t asleep that is.”
“You weren’t?”
“It’s just that the w hole thing is unreal. . . . I’m going now. I don’t care. You can’t force me to stay.”
He was walking across the room towards the door. He had been walking a long time. A creeping numbness dragged his legs. The door seemed to recede.
“Where can you go, Carl?” The doctor’s voice reached him from a great distance.
“O u t. . . Away . . . Through the door . . .”
“The Green Door, Carl?”
The doctor’s voice was barely audible. The whole room was exploding out into space.

“Know Marty Steel?” Diddle.
“Yes.”
“Can you score off him?” Diddle?Diddle?
“He’s skeptical.”
“But you can score.” Diddle diddle “You scored off him last week didn’t you?” Diddle???
“Yes.”
“Well you can score off him this week.” Diddle . . .
Diddle . . . Diddle . . . “You can score off him today.”
No diddle.
“No! No! Not that!!”
“Now look are you going to cooperate”—three vicious diddles—“or does th e . . . does the Man comhole you???”
He raises a fay eyebrow.
“And so Carl you will please oblige to tell me how many times and under what circumstances you have uh indulged in homosexual acts???” His voice drifts
away. “If you have never done so I shall be inclined to think of you as a somewhat atypical young man.” The doctor raises a coy admonishing finger. “In any case. . . ”
He tapped the file and flashed a hideous leer. Carl noticed that the file was six inches thick. In fact it seemed to have thickened enormously since he entered the room.
“Well, when I was doing my military service . . . These queers used to proposition me and sometimes . . . when I was blank . . . ”
“Yes, of course, Carl,” the doctor brayed heartily. “In your position I would have done the same I don’t mind telling you heh heh heh. . . . Well, I guess we can uh
dismiss as irrelevent these uh understandable means of

word???” His eyebrows shot up and down with incredible speed. Carl could not be sure he had seen anything unusual. The doctor’s face opposite him was absolutely immobile and expressionless. Once again Carl experienced the floating sensation in his stomach and genitals of a sudden elevator stop.
“Yes, Carl, you seem to be running our little obstacle course with flying colors. . . I guess you think this is all pretty silly don’t you know. . .???”
“Well, to tell the truth. . . Yes. . .”
“You are frank, Carl. . . This is good. . . And now. . . Carl. . .” He dragged the name out caressingly like a sweet con dick about to offer you an Old Gold-(just like a cop to smoke Old Golds somehow) and go into his act. . .
The con dick does a little dance step.
“Why don’t you make The Man a proposition?” he jerks a head towards his glowering super-ego who is always referred to in the third person as “The Man ” or “The Lieutenant”.
“That’s the way the Lieutenant is you play fair with him and he’ll play fair with you. . . We’d like to go light on you. . .If you could help us in some way.” His words open out into a desolate waste of cafeterias and street corners and lunch rooms. Junkies look the other way munching pounding cake.
“The Fag is wrong.”
The Fag slumps in a hotel chair knocked out on goof balls with his tongue lolling out.
He gets up in a goof ball trance, hangs himself without altering his expressions or pulling his tongue in.
The dick is diddling on a pad.

pursed his lips. He closed the file and put his hand flat on it and leaned forward. “Carl, when you were doing your military service . . . There must have been . . . in fact there were long periods when you found yourself deprived of the uh consolations and uh facilities of the fair sex. During these i no doubt trying and difficult periods you had perhaps; a pin up girl?? Or more likely a pin up harem?? Heh i heh heh. . . ”
Carl looked at the doctor with overt distaste. “Yes, of course,” he said. “We all did.” “And now, Carl, I would like to show you some pin< up girls.” He pulled an envelope out of a drawer. “And ask you to please pick out the one you would most like to uh make heh heh heh. . . .” He suddenly leaned forward fanning the photographs in front of Carl’s face.
“Pick a girl, any girl!” Carl reached out with numb fingers and touched one of the photographs. The doctor put the photo back into the pack and shuffled and cut and he placed the pack, on Carl’s file and slapped it smartly. He spread the photos face up in front of Carl. “Is she there?” Carl shook his head. “Of course not. She is in here where she belongs. A woman’s place what???” He opened the file and held out the girl’s photo attached to a Rorshach plate. “Is that her?” Carl nodded silently. “You have good taste, my boy. I may tell you in strictest confidence that some of these girls . . .” with gambler fingers he shifts the photos in Three Card Monte Passes“are really boys. In uh drag I believe is the

Carl ran into a park and found an empty bench beside a bronze faun with cymbals.
Let your hair down, chicken. You’ll feel better.” The tourist was leaning over him, his camera swinging in Carl’s face like a great dangling tit.
“Fuck off you!”
Carl saw something ignoble and hideous reflected back in the queen’s spayed animal brown eyes.
Oh! I wouldn’t be calling any names if I were you, ‘chicken. You’re hooked too. I saw you coming out of The Institute.”
What do you mean by that?” Carl demanded.
Oh nothing. Nothing at all.”



Well, Carl,” the doctor began smiling and keeping his eyes on a level with Carl’s mouth. “I have some good news for you.” He picked up a slip of blue paper off the desk and went through an elaborate pantomime of focussing his eyes on it. “Your uh test . . . the
Robinson-Kleiberg floculation test.. .”
“I thought it was a Blomberg-Stanlouski test.”
The doctor tittered. “Oh dear no. . . . You are getting ahead of me young man. You might have misunderstood. The Blomberg-Stanlouski, weeell that’s a different the sort of test altogether. I do hope . . . not necessary. . . .”
He tittered again: “But as I was saving before I was so charmingly interrupted . . . by my hurumph learned young colleague. Your KS seems to be . . .” He held the slip at arm’s length. “. . . completely uh negative. So perhaps we won’t be troubling you any further. And
so .. .” He folded the slip carefully into a file. He leafed through the file. Finally he stopped and frowned and

cunt full of colored glass splinters under the Northern Lights.
He washed his penis and buttoned up his pants.
Something was watching his every thought and movement with cold, sneering hate, the shifting of his testes, the contractions of his rectum. He was in a room filled with green light. There was a stained wood double bed, a black wardrobe with full length mirror. Carl could not see his face. Someone was sitting in a black hotel chair.
He was wearing a stiff bosomed white shirt and a dirty paper tie. The face swollen, skull-less, eyes like burning pus.
“Something wrong?” said the nurse indifferently. She was holding a glass of water out to him. She watched him drink with aloof contempt. She turned and picked
up the jar with obvious distaste.
The nurse turned to him: “Are you waiting for something special?” she snapped. Carl had never been spoken to like that in his adult life. “Why no. . . .” “You can go then,” she turned back to the jar. With a little exclamation of disgust she wiped a gob of semen off her
hand. Carl crossed the room and stood at the door.
“Do I have another appointment?”
She looked at him in disapproving surprise: “You’ll be notified of course.” She stood in the doorway of the cubicle and watched him walk through the outer office and open the door. He turned and attempted a jaunty wave. The nurse did not move or change her expression.
As he walked down the stairs the broken, false grin burned his face with shame. A homosexual tourist looked at him and raised a knowing eyebrow. “Something wrong?

The doctor did not seem to hear. He drifted out of his chair and began walking around behind Carl, his voice languid and intermittent like music down a windy street.
“I may tell you in strictest confidence that there is definite evidence of a hereditary factor. Social pressure. Many homosexuals latent and overt do, unfortunately, marry. Such marriages,often result in. . . Factor of infantile environment. “The doctor’s voice went on and on. He was talking about schizophrenia, cancer, hereditary disfuction of the hypothalamus.
Carl dozed off. He was opening a green door. A horrible smell grabbed his lungs and he woke up with a shock. The doctor’s voice was strangely flat and lifeless, a whispering junky voice:
” The Kleberg- Stanislouski semen floculation test. . .a diagnostic tool. . . indicative at least in a negative sense. In a certain cases useful-taken as part of the whole picture. . . Perhaps under the uh circumstances.”
The doctor’s voice shot up to a pathic scream. “The nurse will take your uh specimen.”
“This way please. . .” The nurse opened the door into a bare white walled cubicle. She handed him a jar.
“Use this please. Just yell when you’re ready.”
There was a jar of K.Y. on a glass shelf. Carl felt ashamed as if his mother had laid out a hanldekerchief coy little message stitched on like: “If I was a cunt we could open a dry goods store.”
Ignoring the K.Y. he ejaculated into the jar, a cold brutal fuck of the nurse standing her up against a glass brick wall. “Old Glass Cunt,” he sneered, and saw a

first love,” the doctors voice receded. He seemed actually to have gone away through an invisible door leaving his empty body sitting there at the desk.
Suddenly he spoke again in a crisp voice. “And so you may well wonder why we concern ourselves with? the matter at all?” He flashed a smile bright and coldi
as snow in sunlight.
Carl shrugged: “That is not my business . . . what am wondering is why you have asked me to come here! and why you tell me all this . . . this .. .” *
“Nonsense?”
Carl was annoyed to find himself blushing.
The doctor leaned back and placed the ends of his fingers together:
“The young,” he said indulgently. “Always they are in a hurry. One day perhaps you will learn the meaning of patience. No, Carl. . . . I may call you Carl? I am not evading your question. In cases of suspected tuberculosis we—that is the appropriate department—may ask, even request, someone to appear for a fluoroscopic examination. This is routine, you understand. Most of such examinations turn up negative. So you have been asked to report here for, should I say a psychic fluoroscope???? I may add that after talking with you I feel
relatively sure that the result will be, for practical purposes, negative.. . . ”
“But the whole thing is ridiculous. I have always interested myself only in girls. I have a steady girl now and we plan to marry.”
“Yes Carl, I know. And that is why you are here. A blood test prior to marriage, this is reasonable, no?”
“Please doctor, speak directly.”

that the uh phenomena is common enough, and, under certain circumstances a matter of uh concern to this department.”
For the first time the doctor’s eyes flickered across Carl’s face. Eyes without a trace of warmth or hate or any emotion that Carl had ever experienced in himself or seen in another, at once cold and intense, predatory and impersonal. Carl suddenly felt trapped in this silent underwater cave of a room, cut off from all sources of warmth and certainty. His picture of himself sitting there calm, alert with a trace of well mannered contempt went dim, as if vitality were draining out of him to mix with the milky grey medium of the room.
“Treatment of these disorders is, at the present time, hurmph symptomatic.” The doctor suddenly threw himself back in his chair and burst into peals of metallic laughter. Carl watched him appalled. . . “The man is insane,” he thought. The doctor’s face went blank as a gambler’s. Carl felt an odd sensation in his stomach like the suddend stopping of an elevator.
The doctor was studying the file in front of him. He spoke in a tone of slightly condescending amusement: “Don’t look so frightened, young man. Just a professional joke. To say treatment is symptomatic means there is none, except to make the patient feel as comfortable as possible. And that is precisely what we attempt to do in these cases.” Once again Carl felt the impact of that cold interest on his face. “That is to say reassurance when reassurance is necessary. . .and, of course, suitable outlets with other individuals of similar tendencies. No isolation is indicated. . . the condition is no more directly contagious than cancer. Cancer, my

sexual deviation.” The doctor rocked back and forth in his chair. His glasses slid down onto his nose. Carl felt suddenly unconfortable.
” We regard it as a misfortune. . . a sickness. . . certanly nothing to be censored or uh sanctioned any more than say. . .tubercolosis. . . Yes,” he repeated firmly as if Carl had raised an objection. . . “Tuberculosis. On the other hand you can readily see that any illness imposes certain, should we say obligations , certain necessities of a prophylactic nature on the authorities concerned with public health, such necessities to be imposed, needless to say, with a minimum individual who has, through no fault of his own, become uh infected. . .
That is no say, of course, the minimum hardship compatible with adequate protection of other individuals who are not so infected. . . We do not find obligatory vaccination for smallpox an unreasonable measure. . .I am sure you will agree that individuals infected with hurumph what French call ‘Les maladies galantes’ heh heh heh should be compelled to undergo treatment if they do not report voluntarily.”
The doctor went on chuckling and rocking in his chair like a mechanical toy. . .Carl realized that he was expected to say something.
“That seems reasonable,” he said.
The doctor stopped chuckling. He was suddendly motionless. “Now get back to this uh matter of sexual deviation. Frankly we don’t pretend to understand-at least not completely-why some men and women prefer the uh sexual company of their own sex.We do know