The irony, however, wasn’t lost on him that he, Dr. Peter Luce, director of the Sexual Disorders and Gender Identity Clinic, past general secretary of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex (SSSS), champion of the open investigation of human sexual behavior, opponent of prudishness, scourge of inhibition, and crusader for physical delights of all kinds, should find himself, halfway around the world in the erotic jungle, feeling so uptight. In his annual address to the society in 1969, Dr. Luce had reminded the assembled sexologists of the historical conflict between scientific research and common morality. Look at Vesalius, he said. Look at Galileo. Always practical, Luce had advised his listeners to travel to foreign countries where so-called aberrant sexual practices were tolerated and consequently easier to study (sodomy in Holland, for instance, and prostitution in Phuket). He prided himself on his open mind. To him, human sexuality was like a great big Bruegel painting and he loved watching all the action. Luce tried not to make value judgments about the sundry clinically documented paraphilias, and only when they were patently injurious (as with pedophilia and rape) did he object. This tolerance went even further when dealing with another culture. The blow jobs being performed in the Longhouse of Men might upset Luce if they were happening at the YMCA on West Twenty-third Street, but here he feels he has no right to condemn. It doesn’t help his work. He isn’t here as a missionary. Given the local mores, these boys aren’t likely to be warped by their oral duties. They aren’t growing up to be typical heterosexual husbands, anyway. They just move from being givers to being receivers, and everyone’s happy.
But then why does Luce get so upset every time the kid starts rubbing his feet against his back and making his little mating calls? It might have something to do with the increasingly anxious sound of the calls themselves, not to mention the kid’s worried expression. It may be that if the kid doesn’t pleasure the foreign guests he’s in for some kind of punishment. Luce can’t explain the kid’s fervor any other way. Is white semen believed to possess special power? Unlikely, given the way Luce, Randy, and Mort look these days. They look like hell: greasy-haired, dandruffy. The Dawat probably think that all white men are covered with heat rashes. Luce longs for a shower. He longs to put on his cashmere turtleneck, his ankle boots, and his suede blazer and go out for a whiskey sour. After this trip, the most exotic he wants to get is dinner at Trader Vic’s. And if all goes well, that’s how it’s going to be. Him and a mai tai with a parasol in it, back in Manhattan.
*
Up until three years ago—until the night Pappas-Kikuchi blindsided him with her fieldwork—Dr. Peter Luce was considered the world’s leading authority on human intersexuality. He was the author of a major sexological work, The Oracular Vulva, which was standard reading in a variety of disciplines ranging from genetics and pediatrics to psychology. He had written a column of the same name for Playboy from August 1969 to December 1973, in which the conceit was that a personified and all-knowing female pudendum answered the queries of male readers with witty and sometimes sibylline responses. Hugh Hefner had come across Peter Luce’s name in the newspaper in an article about a demonstration for sexual freedom. Six Columbia students had staged an orgy in a tent on the main green, which the cops broke up, and when he was asked what he thought about such activity on campus, Assistant Professor Peter Luce, thirty-four, had been quoted as saying, “I’m in favor of orgies wherever they happen.” That caught Hef’s eye. Not wanting to replicate Xaviera Hollander’s “Call Me Madam” column in Penthouse, Hefner saw Luce’s column as being devoted to the scientific and historic side of sex. Thus, in her first three issues, the Oracular Vulva delivered disquisitions on the erotic art of the Japanese painter Hiroshi Yamamoto, the epidemiology of syphilis, and the custom of the berdache among the Navajo, all in the ghostly, rambling style that Luce modeled on his aunt Rose Pepperdine, who used to lecture him on the Bible while soaking her feet in the kitchen. The column proved popular, though intelligent queries were always hard to come by, the readership being more interested in the “Playboy Advisor”’s cunnilingus tips or remedies for premature ejaculation. Finally, Hefner told Luce to screw it and write his own questions, which he did.
Peter Luce had appeared on Phil Donahue in 1987, along with two intersex persons and a transsexual, to discuss both the medical and psychological aspects of these conditions. On that program Phil Donahue said, “Ann Parker was born and raised a girl. You won the Miss Miami Beach Contest in 1968 in good old Dade County, Florida? Boy, wait till they hear this. You lived as a woman to the age of twenty-nine and then you switched to living as a man. He has the anatomical characteristics of both a man and a woman. If I’m lyin’, I’m dyin’.”
He also said, “Here’s what’s not so funny. These live, irreplaceable sons and daughters of God, human beings all, want you to know, among other things, that that’s exactly what they are, human beings.”
*
Luce’s interest in intersexuality had begun nearly thirty years ago, when he was still a resident at Mount Sinai. A sixteen-year-old girl had come in to be examined. Her name was Felicity Kennington, and his first glimpse of her had inspired some unprofessional thoughts. She was very good-looking, Felicity Kennington, slender and bookish, with glasses, which always killed him.
Luce examined her with a grave face and concluded, “You’ve got lentigines.”
“What?” the girl asked, alarmed.
“Freckles.” He smiled. Felicity Kennington smiled back. Luce remembered that his brother asked him one night, with a lot of suggestive eyebrow movement, if he didn’t sometimes get turned on examining women, and that he’d responded with the old line about how you’re so caught up in your work that you don’t even notice. He had no trouble noticing Felicity Kennington, her pretty face, her pink gums and child-size teeth, her shy white legs that she kept crossing and uncrossing as she sat on the examining table. The thing he didn’t notice was her mother, sitting in the corner of the room.
“Lissie,” the woman broke in, “tell the doctor about the pain you’ve been having.”
Felicity blushed, looking down at the floor. “It’s in my—it’s just below my stomach.”
“What kind of pain?”
“There’s kinds?”
“A sharp pain or dull?”
“Sharp.”
At that point in his career, Luce had given a total of eight pelvic exams. The one he gave to Felicity Kennington still ranks as one of the most difficult. First, there was the problem of his terrible attraction. He was only twenty-five himself. He was nervous; his heart throbbed. He dropped the speculum and had to go out for another. The way Felicity Kennington turned her face away and bit her lower lip before parting her knees made him literally dizzy. Second, the mother’s watching him the whole time didn’t make it any easier. He’d suggested that she wait outside, but Mrs. Kennington had replied, “I’ll stay here with Lissie, thank you.” Third, and worst of all, was the pain he seemed to cause Felicity Kennington with everything he did. The speculum wasn’t even halfway in before she cried out. Her knees vised, and he had to give up. Next, he tried merely to palpate her genitals but as soon as he pressed she shrieked again. Finally, he had to get Dr. Budekind, a gynecologist, to complete the examination while he looked on, his stomach in knots. The gynecologist looked at Felicity for no more than fifteen seconds, then took Luce across the hall.
“What’s the matter with her?”
“Undescended testes.”
“What!”
“Looks like andrenogenital syndrome. Ever seen one before?”
“No.”
“That’s what you’re here to do, right? Learn.”
“That girl has testes?”