“I WEAR HIS RING AS PART OF HIM”, 1966-69:
A LETTER TO WOLF VOGEL
This letter to the author is the sixteenth and last chapter of Secret Love: Eros between Boy and Man (2022), an anonymous translation of Wolf Vogel’s Heimliche Liebe: Eros zwischen Knabe und Mann (Hamburg: John & Ernst, 1997).
Dear Wolf,
You’ve invited me to say a little about my youth for this book. I’m happy to accept the offer. You know that, as a young person, I started a sexual relationship with a man, which went on for several years. Is what I have to report really that significant? Would other people—perhaps parents, or even young people—be interested? I hope so.
Mind you, your offer to anonymize persons and places dumbfounds me. I would prefer not to do this, because I stand by the relationship I had with Werner at the time, would not have missed it for the world, and in no way feel it is something “shameful,” which has to be hidden. Frankly, I’ll stick with openness, as a sine qua non so to speak, because how can you—through your book—achieve anything when, at the same time, you’re indirectly rendering it taboo? In order to be able to properly portray the texture of my relationship at the time, I have to properly express things, describe details, put pleasures and pains into order. I do this from the perspective of decades’ worth of hindsight.
I got to know my adult friend when I was sixteen years old. My parents had a vacation home in northern Italy, and I stayed with them there during the 1966 summer break. Werner was 51 years old at the time and also had a home nearby which, after many years of working abroad, he’d purchased as a place to retire to. He was a widely-travelled man of the world, who’d lived in South America for quite a while; upon my first encounter with him, he already corresponded to my idea of a cosmopolitan person. He was cultivated, and got along quite well with my parents—my father was a distinguished judge.
Consequently, in one of Werner’s visits to my parents’ place, I became acquainted with him myself. He invited me out to dinner. Due to my bourgeois conservative upbringing, I saw in this invitation something unusual, but also, fascinating.
We dined at a stylish restaurant in a small town on Lake Maggiore, and Werner told me about ancient Greece, and Socrates and Plato’s “Symposium,” about the ideals of classical Greek philosophy, and boy-love. I was enraptured. Never before had an adult treated me as an equal—my father, at least. The world that Werner revealed to me took me far beyond the Greek classes at our school, where Plato was just a lesson topic. This dinner would indelibly implant itself in my memory as a sort of “symposium” which—beyond my admittedly youthful enthusiasm—marked the turning point of my mental and intellectual development.
Following this summer vacation, Werner and I began writing each other. He remained at his home in Italy; I lived with my parents in Bonn, attending a Redemptorist[1]-run school, and longing—in the claustrophobic bourgeois-clerical atmosphere of my life in Bonn—for the breadth of Werner’s world.
The following summer, Werner came to stay with us in Bonn. That first morning following his arrival, he came into my bedroom, in order to have a look at me. He probably thought I was still asleep—which is exactly what I pretended to be. His hand sought out my body under the covers. He stroked me, and my heart pounded with excitement. I d never felt anything like it. It might sound crazy, but, up to this point, I’d had no sexual experiences whatsoever. In this respect, I was completely retarded. I’d never even masturbated; I simply did not know that, with just a bit of movement, one could give sexual pleasure to oneself. Today, I am amazed at so much naiveté; but, being raised in a bourgeois-conservative home, combined with Redemptorist schooling, had left me in a state of sexual ignorance up to the age of sixteen. That morning, Werner bestowed on me the first orgasm of my life. It was an intoxicating feeling, and I certainly would have enjoyed it even more if I hadn’t continued to pretend I was asleep.
In the days that followed, he came into my room and repeated his body-play. From this time on, I demonstrated to him that I was awake, and in agreement with his stroking. One morning, when Werner was sitting on my bed, my brother came into the room. He just barely managed to make our morning ‘bed chat’ look harmless.
I don’t think my parents ever found out about what took place in my bedroom back then. Although my mother may have suspected something, she said nothing; my father was pretty indifferent towards me anyway. My parents were already contemplating divorce at the time.
When Werner left, I began to regularly masturbate, which I revelled in. I didn’t have any sexual contacts with boys or girls my age, although I was attracted to girls. My surroundings merely promoted sexual abstinence; but not bodily pleasure. In any event, there were no girls at our school. So, I frequently thought about my adventures with Werner. Also, the exchange of letters between Bonn and Italy continued on undiminished. I longed for him, for stimulating conversation with him, for stories from his life, for the art that invited him to settle down in Italy for some peace and quiet.
The more Werner came to visit, the more we wrote each other, the smaller and more cramped my parental home seemed to me. Werner had already mentioned that I could move in with him in Italy if I wanted. His house was big enough for an additional occupant. He even attempted to impress this idea on my parents, with the remark that, of course, their vacation home would only be a couple of kilometers away from his place. But my parents still hesitated. Therefore, I had to content myself with only being able to frequently see and make love to Werner while on holiday.
Two years after the first encounter with Werner, I made one of the most important decisions with regard to my future. I was eighteen years old, and needed to set a course for my life. My parents were on the verge of divorcing, and I had to decide for myself whether to join the army. Werner made an unambiguous offer to take me in.
I simultaneously came to a point where I felt I no longer wished to live in my current surroundings. School had become unbearable, absolutely unbearable. It had so extremely negatively colored my life up to that point. The scent of freedom—which Werner had introduced me to and which I so infinitely loved—was stronger than my parents’ misgivings.
In September of 1968, against my father’s wishes, I went to Italy and moved in with Werner. My mother was even able to partly come to terms with this step, since she was divorced, and wanted to settle down into her Italian vacation home for the long-term.
In my new home, Werner opened up a new world to me. He got me admitted to the Europe School in Varese, a school with an international student body, including both girls and boys. I had a sense of being in a completely new world, in which I also found the perspectives and support which my father had not provided. Perhaps Werner, in this phase of his life, was something of an ersatz father for me—in the role of a sympathetic, loving father.
The school was thirty kilometers away from Werner’s house. This necessitated giving some thought to the issue of transportation. Werner bought me a used car, and anyone who’s eighteen years old can understand the sense of freedom associated with that. I went to a school which opened up my eyes to different countries, new languages, and cultures other than the claustrophobic, religiously-imprinted Bonn of my early youth. And Werner was the one who’d made all of this possible. Not only were there absolutely no problems associated with living with him: He supported me scholastically and musically; he’d done things for me that I could not understand at the time. What motives might a 53-year-old have for tape-recording me and my guitar for hours on end? This is still beyond me. As is the fact that a man of this age would make his first attempt at arranging schooling, establishing contacts in order to cultivate admission possibilities, and more.
But I would like to come back to the question of how the eroticism continued, as did my feelings of love. I did love Werner, in my own way. But slowly, this feeling changed more and more into a form of gratitude, and a sense that, here, I am understood.
But there were also clear differences. The initially trouble-free sexual get-togethers, which took place, furthermore, at the level of mutual masturbation, then became a problem when, eventually, Werner wanted something more. In the meantime, two-and a-half years had passed since we first become acquainted. Warner’s head was in conflict with his heart. In his head, he was very much in line with the Greek ideal: Only the boy is supposed to be happy, and nothing should happen that the boy is not okay with. For him, it was fundamentally a sine qua non that his boy was heterosexual. He also saw that I’d become older, and hinted that soon, I might no longer be as sexually attractive to him as I’d once been. But in his heart—not to mention his libido—he strove for more extensive sexual activities, which I had rejected. Not because I’d rejected him. I just wasn’t into that.
On occasion, there were affectionate activities in which I remained passive; and although I definitely did not find them to be immensely enjoyable, they weren’t burdensome either. What was most agreeable to me was when we organized our swim-parties, or masturbated each other while enjoying a nice bottle of red wine. I had absolutely no problem with this sort of thing. I don’t want to attach too much importance to these things, but they did mark a turning point.
Then there came a time when I met this girl at school. Of course, I’d already had contact with girls—on holiday trips, for example. I’d also already had sexual intercourse with a girl once; but this was not what you’d call love. I really did fall in love with this girl from the Europe School. As was inevitable, I also told Werner about Jutta, and asked if I might be able to have her over for the weekend. Jutta had tolerant parents, in whose home we would also have been able to be intimate. But because Jutta was only fifteen years old, I preferred to spend the weekend with her at Werner’s house. Werner had no problem with that whatsoever. The room I was staying in was separated from the rest of the house by a set of stairs; this also afforded me options vis-a-vis Werner. And in this room—my room—I had my first sexual experience with a girl whom I loved.
Sexual pleasure with girls soon found itself competing against eroticism with Werner. This brought about a certain cooling of the relationship with my friend, although the contacts did continue. It only became problematic when my desire to go to Jutta grew stronger; this meant that—in order to bridge the distance involved—I would leave on Saturday afternoon, and return on Sunday evening. And of course, after three or four months, this turned into a problem for Werner.
Although I am able to today, at the time, I did not understand what Werner meant when he said: “There’s none of you left for me.” I probably felt an obligation to attend to Werner’s needs; however, because my emotional commitment to Jutta was stronger, they simply were not going to be met. It wasn’t so much joy that I felt being with Werner as it was a sense that I owed him my presence, although, of course, my preference would have been to go to Cittiglio in order to see Jutta.
This state of affairs continued for several months. In November 1969, Jutta became pregnant. The doctor diagnosed an ectopic pregnancy, which was terminated in a Catholic hospital no less, because the life of the mother was in danger. This situation was also a turning point for Werner, because he now realized that I was no longer the former boy, but instead, a man. The time had come for me to make a clean break. And although Werner did make the break intellectually, he was still not able to detach himself from me emotionally. Therefore, his and my emotional lives were subject to dramatic fluctuations—but only because Werner kept his problems all bottled up, instead of openly addressing them. Then he was like a wall for days on end; a sad, tear-filled wall. This mostly made me sorrowful, because it brought my sense of gratitude down from the level of voluntariness. This situation escalated to a point where, around 2:30 in the morning, I simply drove away, saying to myself: I can no longer do this, and I am no longer going to do this.
I found a new place, thirty kilometers away, where my mother lived. Werner would visit me from time to time, occasionally asking if we might be able to spend a couple of hours together, which we did. But those sad eyes, which expressed his longing and grief over the separation—this was too much for me. I simply could no longer withstand this emotionally. I told him that, though I would be happy to go out to eat with him, I no longer wanted to be with him sexually. Werner was of the opinion that, in that case, it would be better to break off contact altogether. In the end, this was accomplished definitively. What came to my rescue was the fact that a short time later I left anyway, because I got my high school diploma, and wanted to study in Milan.
A few years later I moved to London, in order to study and make music professionally. All contact with Werner ceased. From my family, I occasionally heard about what he was doing and how things were going for him. He continued to live and paint in Italy. He even exhibited and received awards in Germany.
In the summer of 1977, therefore, at any rate 6 ½ years after Werner and I parted ways, I returned to Italy with an English girlfriend for a long vacation, and spontaneously decided to pay Werner a visit. I took my girlfriend—who knew nothing about the relationship with Werner—along with me. With a feeling of foreboding, I climbed the steps leading to his house. He opened the door, and after his initial shock—it was really akin to a shock, because, after all, he wasn’t expecting me—he invited us in.
The atmosphere that evening was tense at first: but after a bottle of wine, we talked about old times. Following that night, we stayed in contact via letters. I was living in London by the way. But when I went to Italy, in order to visit my mother or reunite with college friends, I always looked up Werner as well, and in these visits, things were exactly how I’d wished they had been some seven years previously. I felt how nice it was to talk with Werner, sensing the many things we had in common as well as what he still meant to me.
Werner passed away in 1980, leaving me 15,000 marks in his will. He’d requested that I drop his urn—Werner wanted to be cremated—in the Mediterranean, which I did. I had heard about Warner’s death just as I was arriving in Italy on Easter vacation. Warner’s sister gave me the news. She’d probably heard that I could be reached at my mother’s house.
The news hit me like a ton of bricks. Initially, I thought I must still have a guilty conscience, because, I’d been either unable or unwilling to fulfill many of his wishes. His death came as a shock to me; I hadn’t reckoned on him dying so young. His death meant a real loss for me; the loss of a close relationship, which one cannot maintain forever, but nevertheless does not want to do without. A friend was dead; no—more than a friend.
Today, with the benefit of hindsight, of course the question presents itself: What made this more than a friendship? What did this relationship mean to me, for my life? I would like to phrase the answer as follows: Every year since his death, my estimation of how much Werner has given me, how much he contributed to making me what I am today, has grown greater.
Every year, it has become clearer to me what I have to be thankful to him for, how he’s shaped me. Every year, my gratitude towards him grows. It is a voluntary gratitude, which no longer has anything to do with my sense of obligation at the time, that I should or even must show gratitude to him.
Maybe the best way I can put it is as follows: Werner was a combination of a friend and a father. What he’s bequeathed to me is symbolized by his ring, which I wear on my finger, as a part of him. Werner has also taught me not only that deep relationships between people can exist, but also, that several, equally valid relationships can be maintained simultaneously—an important insight for me. My professional career would certainly have taken a different course without him: mastery of the Italian and English languages is the basis of my occupation. Without him, I would not have played in a professional band, would not have made records/recordings.
But I also frequently have had the thought: Would you, perhaps, have sometimes behaved differently towards him, if you’d had the perspective of the present-day, the wisdom you now possess? However, his life and mine took the courses they did; not otherwise. On the whole, I think that my decisions have been the right ones. If someone were to ask me which person has shaped my life, in terms of overall development, then I would have to say: He was number one. There are other people who have strongly influenced my life, but Werner set the course. Therefore, despite some painful experiences, I have pleasant memories of this relationship, including its erotic moments, even if the separation process did not proceed as I myself would have wished. But with the exception of the last two or three months, I found the eroticism to he pleasurable, not problematic. And of course, the problem of the dissolution of relationships is not limited to those of the man-boy sort. I’ve had similar separation fears and pains with regard to relationships with women, although, from time to time, sexual desire for a woman will still be there, even when an internal separation has already taken place.
I have been telling Uta, my current wife, about my relationship with Werner since the very first day I met her. After all, at the time I met her, Uta was just eighteen years old, and I was already thirty-two. Consequently, given the age-difference, some problem or another was to be expected here as well. We have been together for eleven-and-a-half years now, have been married for seven years, and have two children, a boy and a girl.
We have often talked about how it would be if, for example, our youngest, Nicolai, were to run into a “Werner.” I’ve been quite outspoken: I would greet such a relationship not with hesitancy, but gratitude. The fears which, as a parent, one would understandably have about it would, first and foremost, be related to the following question: Is he a man like Werner, and how does one know right away if he is a man like Werner? I believe that all you can do is give it a try, placing a lot of trust in the child.
What do you think?
Regards, Martin
[1] ‘Redemptorist’ refers to the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer, a Roman Catholic order. [Translator’s note]