Anyway, they'd just moved me onto an open ward where there wasn't as close supervision, but you were still in the army. Every Wednesday morning there is a stand-by inspection. You have to clean the barrack. There's a bay of twenty-two beds, eleven on each side. I'm fourth from the end as you go around the circle. So like there's the Colonel, who's Chief of Neuropsychiatry, there's the Major, who's my doctor, there's a lieutenant, who's the nurse, and some aide.

They walk in. They get to me, and my doctor says, "Colonel, this is Specialist Rostron. You remember Specialist Rostron. You spoke with Specialist Rostron last week." And the Colonel says, "Ah, yes, Specialist Rostron, how are you today?" I say, "Well, feelin' a little nervous, sir." He starts chiding me. "Well don't you think that's a good reason for being here?" And I said, "Well, isn't that a Catch-22, sir? I'm nervous because I am here!"

I actually said that. He got furious. He turned red in the face and stormed out, and everybody had to follow. And I looked around with a "What did I say, what did I do?" expression on my face.

After another year had gone by I finally got the courage to walk into Paul's office after this long guilt-ridden absence and say hello to him. When he saw how out of it and fucked up I was, he said, "Dean, I wouldn't say this to most people in a period like this, but you know, you could do a lot worse than to go through the enlistment experience that the army offers you. If you found that you were going to be sent to Vietnam and put in combat, you could just let the sickness come out. Let it come to the surface so that they would give you a medical discharge."

Anyway, I still couldn't believe that Paul really wanted to be in my life. But once I allowed myself to calm down a little bit and just accept it and accept my not understanding it, then I could stand to be with him for more than ten minutes at a time -- and without having a drink first. That's when the relationship started to jell. And once I was able to break through this homophobic barrier, then I didn't need to go on with this army idea. Paul said later, "I'm so glad you didn't go into the army. You don't need to do that now."

Paul learned this from observations he was now making about how some people were using the Center to have fun and relax while other people seemed to be getting "creativity poisoning" from it. A lot of strange overstimulated things were going on in those days.

And I don't think Paul ever quite decided what the purpose of a lover was. Sometimes he'd say, "Dean, a lover is somebody that gives you inner freedom or security and helps complete you, gives you a foundation for life, a home to come to. But the people you learn from are your friends." And other times he would say, "A lover is the person who shows you who you are. You can't grow without a lover." He switched between these two views several times during the years I lived with him.

What it means to me is that if somebody is sending me signals that they can't handle communicating openly about truth and right, or that they can't handle the idea of my being independent -- of people having their own ideas about the world and developing their own sensibility and their own way of life -- then I sort of give them a full blast of it. I don't lure them on, carrot by carrot, but rather let them see the whole picture so they can reject it with a full knowledge of what they're rejecting -- with a clear conscience, so to speak.

But still it's amazing how much truth is out there to find, you know? I mean, I just went through Jung's Psychological Types and learned that people have been writing about polarity for hundreds and hundreds of years. It's like a fire that hasn't quite ignited yet, but it's smoldering? And maybe in another hundred years, it will ignite and then all of a sudden everybody will see it and feel it and be able to talk about it, and people won't understand how they could ever have not seen it. The idea that all men have the same personality structure will be regarded as about as primitive a belief as the divine right of kings.

Jung does a good job of outlining the history of polarity theory. He covers Plato, the medieval scholastics and modern philosophers, biographers and novelists. There's this biographer named Ostwald who wrote up a number of famous scientists and figured out whether they were what he called classic or romantic types -- and his descriptions of them are uncannily Rosenfelsian. Darwin, for example, he would have called a classic type, since he plodded slowly and deeply and only published late in life when he was really sure of his findings -- just as Paul did. Huxley he would have called a romantic, since he was constantly in the fray of battle, dramatically impressive in bearing and broad in influence but having less lasting scientific importance. Ostwald's description of Helmholtz' personality sounds exactly like Paul, down to the last neurotic tic. His moods, his habits -- the way he documented his discoveries even -- are so like Paul. The spookiest thing was knowing that Jung's book was written in the 1920's and that he was quoting from a book that was written many years before that.

I guess I'm getting ready for my next performance too. Now that Paul's gone, I feel like I have a great weight off my back. I'm very proud of what I gave him, but my entire adult life had been driven by wanting him to believe in me. And now I can live my own way. I don't know what that means, yet, but it certainly means that I can conduct experiments that he would have been shocked by. One thing I'm doing that would have upset him, for example, is letting a woman be in my life.

He loosened up quite a bit towards the end, though. After I moved out of his apartment in 1975 I started going to dances and events that weren't just for gays only. It was so refreshing, you know, to feel alive, to feel excited, to feel available, to stop denying my attraction to women? I eventually found the courage to tell Paul what I was doing, and, to my great relief he found it in himself not to condemn me for it but to face the truth that for me this was a legitimate exploration. We even spoke one day about this one woman I had slept with -- it was a few weeks after she and I had broken up. It means an awful lot to me now that he finally came to accept my right to experience my psychological needs independently of his theoretical model of who I was. It means he really wanted to be my friend.