He used his hands to work out the intricacies of the slacks and undershorts and brought Affenlight out into the open - Affenlight, strange synecdoche! - and bent and kissed him on the tip of the penis in a womanly way.

A WOMANLY WAY?

After folding the sweater neatly he placed it on the warped wooden floorboards between Owen’s two-toned shoes, which looked like saddle shoes of old, and, with the limberness of a man no older than forty, the soundly thrumming heart of seventeen, slid down from his chair and knelt upon it, a hand on each of Owen’s knees. Kneeling, whatever the circumstances, could hardly fail to remind him, however ironically, of childhood bedside prayer, the old Latin Mass - he’d hardly been since Vatican II - and, given the hour, vespers, ad cereum benedicendum, as they used to say.

This fucking book, I swear to God. I had to read that second passage a second time before I realized what was going on: Harbach is overwriting to compensate for the fact that he couldn’t actually detail a homosexual oral sex scene. Instead, he compared it to a Catholic prayer. Sure! 

If these homos don’t fuck at some point in this book! I don’t know what I will do! Well, nothing! But I will be mad! The dudes are figuratively blowing each other out on the baseball field but God forbid the actual homosexuals (well, the faggot and a half, I guess) ACTUALLY BONE. Never before have I had so many thoughts about the politics of homosexual sex in popular literature! Ugh!