Page 399

This page is deliberately provocative, mixing disgust, sexual frankness, and speculation to expose how crude public thinking about homosexuality can be.

The closing turn matters most. After the shock of the opening lines, the page lands not in doctrine but in uncertainty, calling sexuality a mystery of one's own body and refusing any tidy moral summary.

An eight-line provocation that opens with deliberate crudeness - 'Before AIDS, I / thought mixing / semen and shit / was a bad idea' - and a shrugging 'other / than that, who cares'. The shock is a feint: the page lands on something almost tender and agnostic, calling 'homo- / sexuality' (broken across the line as the speaker writes it) 'just a mystery / of your own body', trading public squeamishness for private wonder.