My Years With Proust - Day 433

   "Oh! I can spot them in an instant.  If we walked together through a crowd, you'd see that I never make a mistake." And anyone looking at Morel at that moment, with his girlish air enshrined in his masculine beauty, would have understood the obscure divination which marked him out to certain women no less than them to him.  He was anxious to supplant Jupien, vaguely desirous of adding to his regular salary the income which, he supposed, the tailor derived from the Baron. "And with gigolos I'm surer still.  I could save you from making mistakes.  They'll be having the fair at Balbec soon.  We'll find lots of things there.  And in Paris too, you'll see, you'll have a fine time." But the inherited caution of a servant made him give a different turn to the sentence on which had had already embarked.  So that M. de Charlus supposed that he was still referring to girls.  "Do you know," said Morel, anxious to excite the Baron's senses in a fashion which he considered less compromising for himself (although it was actually more immoral), "what I'd like would be to find a girl who was absolutely pure, make her fall in love with me, and take her virginity."

   M. de Charlus could not refrain from pinching Morel's ear affectionately, but added ingenuously: "What good would that do you?  If you took her maidenhead, you would be obliged to marry her."

   "Marry her?" cried Morel, feeling that the Baron must be tipsy, or else giving no thought to the sort of man, more scrupulous in reality than he supposed, to whom he was speaking. "Marry her? No fear! I'd promise, but once the little operation was performed, I'd ditch her that very evening."

   M. de Charlus was in the habit, when a fiction was capable of causing him a momentary sensual pleasure, of giving it his support and then withdrawing it a few minutes later, when his pleasure was at an end. "Would you really do that?" he said to Morel with a laugh, squeezing him more tightly still.

   "Wouldn't I half! said Morel, seeing that he was not displeasing the Baron by continuing to expound to him what was indeed on of his desires.

   "It's dangerous," said M. de Charlus.

   "I should have my kit packed and ready, and buzz off without leaving an address."

   "And what about me?" asked M. de Charlus.

   "I should take you with me, of course," . . .

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, pp. 1040-1041

In this odd little exchange between M. de Charlus and his lover Morel the younger man starts off by bragging about his ability (a sort of heightened spider sense) to detect other homosexuals (not that either of them is actually admitting to being homosexuals, even to Marcel).  Morel tells us, "Oh! I can spot them in an instant.  If we walked together through a crowd, you'd see that I never make a mistake." I think it was back in the 80s that I first heard someone discuss their "gaydar" (I don't know if anyone even uses that term any more) so obviously the concept, or at least the mythology, is much older.  I've always believed that unhappily married men and women, especially if they aren't having much sex, send out some sort of phermonal signal to others in sort of a strange evolutionary quirk that promotes infidelity (nature needs us to reproduce, and somebody's got to be doing it).

Morel then makes this statement: "what I'd like would be to find a girl who was absolutely pure, make her fall in love with me, and take her virginity."  Now, is this simply the linguistic equivalent of a beard?  I'm thinking of the great character from Mad Men who was clearly gay, with the requisite long-suffering wife to drag around the parties, but yet in the early 1960s couldn't admit it and thus lived a shadow life, including often bragging about his sexual conquests. In the case of Salvatore Romano (played beautifully by Bryan Batt) he was trying so desperately to fit into society, although it might have only been because of economic necessity.  Is Morel's statement, followed up by his declaration that he would lie to the young woman to get her into bed and then pack his bags and dump her, more a frustrated, and fanciful, rejection of society?  On the one hand it is an act of bravado and "typical" male selfishness, just like all the other painfully heterosexual men.  However, on the other hand, he is choosing one of the icons of polite society, the virginity of a young girl, and essentially defiling it, an act which allows him to display his disdain for the very society that marginalizes him.