Читать книгу The Twenty-Third Century: Nontraditional Love онлайн

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People with high-paying jobs can still find a way out. Two heterosexual couples can disguise themselves as lesbians or gays, take out credit at a bank and purchase a two-family house. It would be difficult to find fault with them in public. When they visit friends, go to the movies or go on a walk, the women walk with the women, and the men with the men. Linking arms, in an embrace – they do what they can. Only when it becomes dark, when the doors are locked and the window shades are drawn do they run off to different bedrooms for an hour, and then come back. You never know when somebody might inform on you.

However, things are not quite so strict if you are not thinking of raising a family. After all this is the twenty-third century and we live in the USA, in a democratic country, where men are not prohibited from walking along the street with women, dining with them in restaurants, joking, snuggling up to them tenderly, and dancing the ancient tango. This used to be a rarity, acceptable only among the young hippies, people who grew up preferring audacious tricks, shocking those with refined morals. In our grandparents’ times, there were explanatory signs in all the public places – in theatres, in restaurants and in buses – “men only,” or on the other hand, “women only.”