Two things amused me recently in the NYRB: Toni Bentley on Balanchine and- not available online- Gabriele Annan's review of Richard Wollheim's Germs: A Memoir of Childhood, which could be subtitled, "The Heterosexual Faggot." The book sounds intimate, grand, and silly. And Bentley's encomium to her Master is what one would expect from a bottom. At the same time it's hilarious when worshipful servants accuse others of vulgarity. Not that she's wrong, but it's funny.

A few years ago when I was in Spain for a couple of months I walked through a street festival in a small town and spent a few minutes watching a flamenco performance. First the school children in groups, then adolescents, and finally a duet between two adults. The man was obviously gay, his theatricality slightly off, the gestures too gently mannered, unconvincing, though it would be unnecessarily cruel to say inappropriate. The woman, however, as if to compensate, was wonderfully masculine; worshipping an ideal of maleness that she found necessary, or desirable, to embody in herself.