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Oh, that fear of his self-abandonment—far worse than my abandonment—how it goaded me!

As performed by Geoffrey Streatfeild and Julian Ovenden, this dance seems to encompass the whole course of a relationship – and arguably of a collective moment in gay history – as it progresses from energizing self-abandonment to a wilting self-awareness.

And though it may be the warp of my own experiential lens, I have always found the men disproportionately drawn to these structures of mediated self-abandonment.

We can fall for people who seem to complete, like a perfect puzzle piece, a side of us that is not healthy, who answer some call in us for sweet rescue or some fantasy of self-abandonment, some fantasy of giving up our autonomy, of reversion or return, of regression.

To be disturbed in one's intimate sorrow and self-abandonment at a death-bed by a stranger's intrusion, an alien voice....