December 10 Friday 1a 1948

H. just left. We had a long talk. We had gone to the movies and I asked him to come up, knowing the possibility of the course of our conversation toward channels concerning him and his thoughts and me dissecting and explaining them for him. Purely selfish, though I didn’t admit it. I wanted the conversation. This inflation of my ego. It is the only way of inflating it that gives me the least pleasure, though I still reprimand myself as much for it as I do other selfish motives, this still gives me pleasure, which the others don’t. This is sort of a game. The other isn’t for it’s so obvious, so common. We got down to his telling me things I know he’s never told a soul. His deepest thoughts and actions. From masturbation to fear to anxiety. When finally at the end, “You’re the only person in this whole wide world that knows me so completely, understands me so perfectly, even more than I do myself.”
      It’s stuff like that that I hate, for it’s just that that makes me show myself—not others, for I’m pretty good at putting on an act of indifference; perhaps with a smile, but always quickly rushing to pick up where we left off before the flattery—so obviously my vanity. I sit there gloating in a moment’s pleasure, but I embarrass myself to myself, not to anyone else but just to me.

I could feel the sexual attraction being built up for him, but knew that I did not want to go over and feel him up or touch him at all. It was because we were alone talking. Whenever I see in the movies an instance where one man says to another, “Can we go somewhere and talk,” I feel to myself the wonder that they have no guilt in wanting to be alone together for talk. And for the not-at-all difficult reason that that is just the situation E. and I have always had, or any other boy who I know was ‘able’ when the intentions were sexual. As a result all intimacies between me and another man, intimacies in conversation only, have roused sexual enhancements unconsciously and the desire was brought about not in itself but because of the association with past desires in similar situations.
      But I also discovered there lay no possibility in my ever “making” him, as he admitted one time of being seduced and submitting and of being disgusted after. And of not minding homos up to the point of when they start getting aggressive. If he is ever to be made it is to be done without force but must come about intimately natural.
      I’m beginning to think the attraction is not sexual, in these circumstances anyway, for there are others where I know it is, but that it is intimate desires to unite physically as has been going on mentally. Platonic and yet with sex, but only physical in that it wasn’t the driving force, but instead was only the repelling force. In other words, the uniting was determined in that the physical would not bring about but it would prevent.