Behavior: Four Lives in the Gay World

The personal experiences related below are those of a male homosexual, a lesbian and a girl who calls herself bisexual, and a former homosexual who has undergone extensive psychotherapy. In otherwise candid interviews with TIME correspondents, all four requested that they be identified by pseudonyms.

CHARLES ELIOTT, 40, owns a successful business in Los Angeles. In the den of his $60,000 house he has a bronze profile of Abe Lincoln on the wall and a copy of Playboy on the coffee table. Wearing faded chinos and a button-down Oxford shirt, he looks far more subdued than the average Hollywood male; he might be the happily married coach of a college basketball team—and a thoroughgoing heterosexual. In fact, his male lover for the past three months has been a 21-year-old college student. He says: "I live in a completely gay world. My lawyer is gay, my doctor is gay, my dentist is gay, my banker is gay. The only person who is not gay is my housekeeper, and sometimes I wonder how he puts up with us."

Eliott has never been to an analyst; introspection is not his forte. Why did he become homosexual? "Well, my mother was an alcoholic; my brother and I ate alone every night. I was the person who always went to the circus with the chauffeur. But I wouldn't say I was exactly sad as a child; I was rather outward-going." He went to prep school at Hotchkiss, and on to Yale. There he discovered his homosexual tendencies.

Eliott returned home to Chicago to run the family business; to maintain his status in the community, he married. It lasted five months. After the divorce he married again, this time for two years: "She began to notice that I didn't enjoy sex, and that finally broke it up. I don't think she knows even today that I am a homosexual."

It took ten years to make Eliott give up his double life in Chicago for the uninhibited world of Los Angeles. He avoids the gay bars, instead throws catered parties around his pool. "I suppose most of my neighbors know," he says. "When you have 100 men over to your house for cocktails, people are going to suspect something. Now that I no longer try to cope with the straight world, I feel much happier."

"If Katie were a man, I would marry her and be faithful to her the rest of my life." So vows Rachel Porter, 21, who is slightly plump, wears her blonde hair in a pert pixy cut, and works as a secretary in a Manhattan publishing firm. Rachel has been seeing Katie Burns, a tall, strikingly handsome private secretary in a large corporation, for three years now, and sharing an apartment with her for three months. Yet Rachel's feelings are mixed. "I don't really say to this day that I am a lesbian," she says. "I'm bisexual. My interests are definitely guys, and eventually I'd like to have a child or two, probably out of wedlock." Katie, by contrast, in the past three years has given up dates with men.