Roy touching Joe at bar

That was the point, Roy did seduce Joe Pitt, body and soul. It was more intimate than if they had actually had sex. He used him to write his legal papers for him, and make him look good. He was so seductive that Joe just let him take all the credit for it. When Joe was yelling at Louis about how he deserved to be happy, that was straight from Roy and his ideologies. Joe Pitt was Roy's boy. He taught him everything he knew.

This is how I feel today.

This is how I feel everyday!

There is an "optional" scene toward the end of the play that was not in the movie (and that is sometimes not included in productions of the play) in which Roy's ghost appears to Joe, kisses him, and tells him to go out and "transgress a little." It is an interesting scene, but I think it is not really necessary, since, as arti-7 says, Roy did seduce Joe, even if he never "penetrated more than Joe's spiritual sphincter," as Belize puts it.

Joe has been raised to believe that any corruption in him is a secondary evil to the sin of his homosexuality, and that incorrect belief leads not just to a dangerous self- and other-directed homophobia but also to the even more dangerous idea that the other corruptions he is engaged in--the non-sexual but more virulent corruptions of the law and politics that he perpetrated for the judge he clerked for and then for Roy--are not sinful, when they are really his worst sins (well, those and what he does to his wife). He gives himself a pass on the wrong things (his work for the judge and Roy; his awful treatment of Harper; his violence toward Louis) because he thinks he has already been condemned to hell for his homosexuality any way.

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