Small people victory

" I'd forgotten that this act was not as purely symbolic for him as it was for me. I remembered that he considered all this to be pleasure, as Herod tought Salome's dance was until he heard what she wanted as a reward. [...]
Sometimes I think I seduced and betrayed Mr. Beattie because neither ibe action nor the other alone but the complete cycle allowed me to have sex with a man and then to disown him and it; this sequence was the ideal formulation of my impossible desire to love a man but not to be a homosexual. Sometimes I think I liked bringing pleasure to a heterosexual man (for after all I'd dreamed of being my father's lover) at the same time I was able to punish him for not loving me. [...]  Beattie was a friend of sorts, or at least an accomplice, but he was also a stand-in for all others adults, those swaggering, lazy, cruel, masters of ours (how refreshing it was that at Eton the teachers were actually called masters ). I who had so little power - whose triumphs had all been minor victories of children and women, that is, merely verbal victories of irony and attitude - I had at last deep drunk from the adult fountain of sex. I wiped my mouth with the back of an adult hand, smiled and walked up to the dinning hall humming a little tune. "

-Edmund White, A boy's own story