The sex offender

This extravagantly imagined tale chronicles the rehabilitation of a man - a lapsed teacher who is guilty of having had a love affair with a twelve-year-old boy. While the man's crime was to mistake molestation for love, his cure will partake of the same confusion. In the name of love, the police and the doctors will molest him, inside and out. Subjected to a battery of strange therapies (many of them actual practices in health institutions across America), the man struggles to understand and embrace the lessons being offered to him by the Criminal and Health Ministry in charge of his new life. Under orders of the Doctor-General Nicholas, he is to find a new career away from the schools. He will become a writer: an occupation deemed therapeutic by the ministry's professional staff. As the city descends into winter, the man finds his life falling into a regular routine: psychoanalytic sessions with his doctor; aversive therapies in the laboratories of the technicians; long afternoons spent idling at the Cafe Eichelberger; and each evening, a secretive sojourn to an underground club, the Burlesque, to watch the forbidden entertainments of a towering drag queen banned from the city's o