WHAT HAPPENED

I put on my own smile of martyrdom"" and wearing it all the way through this discontinuous confessional -- rubbing salt in the wounds of the wrists he's cut -- here's George Lionel at the thin end of looking backwards. At the mother who called him sonny while the baseball coach and others called him sissy, at the nice, withdrawn father who was a failure, at the two stronger attachments of his childhood (Lily who had a bad time of it; Charley, the son of the town's first family, who had a worse one); and at all the more temporary ones ending with Christopher, a pianist, which is what George began as. Lionel in telling his everyday story uses all the cliches we would like dropped from our facon de parler (""queer as a three dollar bill"") as well as our thinking (see above) so that after coming out in On Being Different he's walked right back into the closet and closed the door saying ""Things never work out the way it is in fairy stories even for fairies.