Camille's willingness to be where she was didn't surprise me much. I never found resistance to THIS. Very few time I didn't even ask, so, no one ever said NO to me. Only in one case, that of Marie, I found someone who actually was looking for THIS. I suspect many are like Marie and don't admit it or are naturally afraid of confronting THIS, as I was when I was very young.

I was envious of Camille, I could not have her experience. I never had her experience. I had to wonder how it was for her. I wanted to ask, but I was afraid my question would destroy the magic for both of us. Because this moment was magical.

I was probably six years old when I had the most intriguing conversation with my younger brother. He was four. We wanted to tell each other our secret. We didn't know the words, we didn't know how to describe our secret to each other, but we knew what it was. I knew it was THIS and my brother knew he was different from me. He knew he was gay. How did we know this? We knew who we were and we needed to tell that to each other.

Our parents would've been horrified to hear our hidden conversation. What we did tell to each other is that we could trust each other with this, and probably we didn't even use the word trust. I don't remember the words we used, but that's what we meant. It was our secret and now that what we knew about each other, we simply went on to live our lives.

Looking at Camille through the lens I was looking at what I always wanted to see. It was the image of sublime suffering, the kind I found in Church, in the paintings my grandparents had at home, the large painting of Christ on the Cross. the image of St Sebastian with his arrows piercing his body, the image of St Julia hanging naked from her cross...

And to me had the aura of the sacred, not the profane. When I first went to New York, in 1972, I visited, for the very first time in my life, a porn shop. We didn't have them here, where I grew up and if there were any, I didn't know about them. It was scary. It was overwhelming, it was not cool. I didn't like it one bit. I felt that it demeaned what I loved the most. It robbed me of romanticism and true sensuality.

Looking at Camille through the lens, looking at her suffering, I wanted to see the beauty of it. I felt that it would be so easy to cross the line from an artistic vision to a cheaper version of itself.

One afternoon, some many years before, when I skipped school as part of a plan and got home to wait for my girlfriend, I made a great discovery. She also skipped school and came home, we were living in the same house, lucky me, and met me in my father's bedroom. For the first time we had the entire day to be together, alone and do whatever we wanted to. After hours of whipping and sex, we were laying naked in bed, the light of the sun smiling at us. That's when I thought that THIS was the greatest thing in my life. That's when I said to myself that I was not a monster, that I was fine and I was free. And looking at Camille through the lens now, I think exactly the same.