At the age of 47, in the days of duress that preceded and followed, my father's death, I began to experience impotence. At first, the circumstances were a predictable mix of fatigue and lack of attraction. The old experiential screen that was "open to all cummers" had to let go of its dilettante appetite and recognize that the head and its intellectual sexuality had to defer to the head of my penis with its higher standards for desire. Whereas I used to be able to shoehorn the contours of any body into that dishonest intoxication that will invariably get one laid, this shift demanded that I return to the classic barometer, penile arousal as the indicator to pursue or to pass. This variation on the instinctual tension between fight and flight would become, as months and years of adjustment were to learn, infused with a real panic. In much of the gay culture and certainly in that corner where I have rooted my identity as a faggot, sexuality is the armor one wears into the battle against the narrow minds and primal shame of the old regime.
"This journal is not a mere literary diversion. The further I progress, reducing to order what my past life suggests, and the more I persist in the rigor of composition--of the chapters, of the sentences, of the book itself--the more do I feel myself hardening in my will to utilize, for virtuous ends, my former hardships. I feel their power." --Jean Genet
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