In One Person

by John Winslow Irving

  The poet Lawrence Upton was of that generation of older gay men who basically believed that most gay men were bottoms, no matter what they said—or that those of us who said we were tops would eventually be bottoms. Since Larry and I met in Vienna, our enduring disagreement concerning exactly what was said on our first “date” was further clouded by what many Europeans felt in the sixties, and still feel today—namely, that we Americans make entirely too much of the top-or-bottom business. The Europeans have always believed we were too rigid about these distinctions, as if everyone gay is either one or the other—as some young, cocksure types tell me nowadays.

  Larry—who was a bottom, if I ever knew one—could be both petulant and coy about how misunderstood he was. “I’m more versatile than you are!” he once said to me, in tears. “You may say you also like women, or you pretend that you do, but I’m not the truly inflexible one in this relationship!”

  By the late seventies, in New York, when we were still seeing each other but no longer living together—Larry called the seventies the “Blissful Age of Promiscuity”—you could only be absolutely sure of someone’s sexual role in those overobvious leather bars, where a hankie in the back left pocket meant you were a top, and a hankie in the back right pocket signified that you were a bottom. A blue hankie was for fucking, a red one was for fist-fucking—well, what does it matter anymore? There was also that utterly annoying signal concerning where you clipped your keys—to the belt loop to the right or left of the belt buckle on your jeans. In New York, I paid no attention to where I clipped my keys; I was always getting hit on by some signal-conscious top, and I was a top! (It could be irritating.)

  Even in the late seventies, almost a decade after gay liberation, the older gays—I mean not only older than me but also older than Larry—would complain about the top-or-bottom advertising. (“Why do you guys want to take all the mystery away? Isn’t the mystery an exciting part of sex?”)

  I liked to look like a gay boy—or enough like one to make other gay boys, and men, look twice at me. But I wanted the girls and women to wonder about me—to make them look twice at me, too. I wanted to retain something provocatively masculine in my appearance. (“Are you trying to look toppish tonight?” Larry once asked me. Yes, maybe I was.)

  I remembered, when we were rehearsing The Tempest, how Richard had said that Ariel’s gender was “mutable”; he’d said the sex of angels was mutable, too.

  “Director’s choice?” Kittredge had asked Richard, about Ariel’s mutability.

  I suppose I was trying to look sexually mutable, to capture something of Ariel’s unresolved sexuality. I knew I was small but good-looking. I could also be invisible when I wanted to be—like Ariel, I could be “an airy Spirit.” There is no one way to look bisexual, but that was the look I sought.

  Larry liked to make fun of me for having what he called a “Utopian notion of androgyny”; for his generation, I think that so-called liberated gays were no longer supposed to be “sissies.” I know that Larry thought I looked (and dressed) like a sissy—that was probably why I looked like a bottom to him, not a top.

  But I saw myself as an almost regular guy; by “regular,” I mean only that I was never into leather or the bullshit hankie code. In New York—as in most cities, through the seventies—there was a lot of street cruising. Then, and now, I liked the androgynous look—nor were androgynous and androgyny ever words that gave me pronunciation problems.

  “You’re a pretty boy, Bill,” Larry often said to me, “but don’t think you can stay ultra-thin forever. Don’t imagine that you can dress like a razor blade, or even in drag, and have any real effect on the macho codes you’re rebelling against. You won’t change what real men are like, nor will you ever be one!”

  “Yes, Professor,” was all I usually said.

  In the fabulous seventies, when I picked up a guy, or I let myself be picked up, there was always that moment when my hand got hold of his butt; if he liked to be fucked, he would start moaning and writhing around—just to let me know I’d hit the magic spot. But if he turned out to be a top, we would settle for a super-fast 69 and call it a night; sometimes, this would turn into a super-rough 69. (The “macho codes,” as Larry called them, might prevail. My “Utopian notion of androgyny” might not.)

  It was Larry’s formidable jealousy that eventually drove me away from him; even when you’re as young as I was, there’s a limit to enduring admiration being a substitute for love. When Larry thought I’d been with someone else, he would try to touch my asshole—to feel if I was wet, or at least lubricated. “I’m a top, remember?” I used to tell him. “You should be sniffing my cock instead.” But Larry’s jealousy was insanely illogical; even knowing me as well as he did, he actually believed I was capable of being a bottom with someone else.

  When I met Larry in Vienna, he was making himself a student of opera there—the opera was why he’d come. The opera was partly why I’d chosen Vienna, too. After all, Miss Frost had made me a devoted reader of nineteenth-century novels. The operas I loved were nineteenth-century novels!

  Lawrence Upton was a well-established poet, but he’d always wanted to write a libretto. (“After all, Bill, I know how to rhyme.”) Larry had this wish to write a gay opera. He was very strict with himself as a poet; maybe he imagined he could be more relaxed as a librettist. He may have wanted to write a gay opera, but Lawrence Upton never wrote an openly gay poem—that used to piss me off, more than a little.

  In Larry’s opera, some cynical queen—someone a lot like Larry—is the narrator. The narrator sings a lament—it’s deliberately foolish, and I forget how it rhymes. “Too many Indians, not enough chiefs,” the narrator laments. “Too many chickens, not enough roosters.” It was very relaxed, all right.

  There is a chorus of bottoms—numerous bottoms, naturally—and a comically much-smaller chorus of tops. If Larry had continued his opera, it’s possible he would have added a medium-size chorus of bears, but the bear movement didn’t begin until the mid-eighties—those big hairy guys, consciously sloppy, rebelling against the chiseled, neat-and-trim men, with their shaved balls and gym bodies. (Those bears were so refreshing, at first.)

  Needless to say, Larry’s libretto was never made as an opera; his career as a librettist was abandoned in-progress. Larry would be remembered only as a poet, though I remember his gay-opera idea—and those many nights at the Staatsoper, the vast Vienna State Opera, when I was still so young.

  It was a valuable lesson for the young would-be writer that I was: to see a great man, an accomplished poet, fail. You must be careful when you stray from an acquired discipline—when I first hooked up with Larry, I was still learning that writing is such a discipline. Opera may be a flamboyant form of storytelling, but a librettist also follows some rules; good writing isn’t “relaxed.”

  To Larry’s credit, he was the first to acknowledge his failure as a librettist. That was a valuable lesson, too. “When you compromise your standards, Bill, don’t blame the form. Opera is not at fault. I’m not the victim of this failure, Bill—I’m the perpetrator.”

  You can learn a lot from your lovers, but—for the most part—you get to keep your friends longer, and you learn more from them. (At least I have.) I would even say that my friend Elaine’s mother, Martha Hadley, had a greater influence on me than Lawrence Upton truly had.

  In fact, at Favorite River Academy, where I was a junior in the winter of 1960—and, Vermont boy that I was, given my naïveté—I had never heard the top or bottom words used in that way Larry (or any number of my gay friends and lovers) would later use them, but I knew I was a top before I’d ever had sex with anyone.

  That day I made my partial confession to Martha Hadley, when Mrs. Hadley’s obvious dominance made such a strong but bewildering impression on me, I absolutely knew that I ceaselessly desired fucking other boys and men, but always with my penis in their bottoms; I never desired the penis of another boy or man penetrating me. (In my mouth, yes—in my asshole, no.)


  Even as I desired Kittredge, I knew this much about myself: I wanted to fuck him, and to take his penis in my mouth, but I didn’t want him to fuck me. Knowing Kittredge, how utterly crazy I was, because if Kittredge were ever to entertain the possibility of a gay relationship, it was painfully clear to me what he would be. If Kittredge was gay, he sure looked like a top to me.

  IT’S REVEALING HOW I have skipped ahead to my junior year abroad in Vienna, choosing to begin that interlude in my future life by telling you about Larry. You might think I should have begun that Vienna interlude by telling you about my first actual girlfriend, Esmeralda Soler, because I met Esmeralda shortly after I arrived in Vienna (in September of 1963), and I’d been living with Esmeralda for several months before I became Larry’s writing student—and, not long after that, Larry’s lover.

  But I believe I know why I have waited to tell you about Esmeralda. It’s all too common for gay men of my generation to say how much easier it is today to “come out” as a teenager. What I want to tell you is: At that age, it’s never easy.

  In my case, I had felt ashamed of my sexual longings for other boys and men; I’d fought against those feelings. Perhaps you think I’ve overemphasized my attraction to Miss Frost and Mrs. Hadley in a desperate effort to be “normal”; maybe you have the idea that I was never really attracted to women. But I was—I am attracted to women. It was just that—at Favorite River Academy, especially, no doubt because it was an all-boys’ school—I had to suppress my attraction to other boys and men.

  After that summer in Europe with Tom, when I’d graduated from Favorite River, and later, when I was on my own—in college, in New York—I was finally able to acknowledge the homosexual side of myself. (Yes, I will say more about Tom; it’s just that Tom is so difficult.) And after Tom, I had many relationships with men. When I was nineteen and twenty—I turned twenty-one in March of ’63, shortly before I learned I’d been accepted to the Institute for European Studies in Vienna—I had already “come out.” When I went to Vienna, I’d been living in New York City as a young gay guy for two years.

  It wasn’t that I was no longer attracted to women; I was attracted to them. But to give in to my attractions to women struck me as a kind of going back to being the repressed gay boy I’d been. Not to mention the fact that, at the time, my gay friends and lovers all believed that anyone calling himself a bisexual man was really just a gay guy with one foot in the closet. (I suppose—when I was nineteen and twenty, and had only recently turned twenty-one—there was a part of me that believed this, too.)

  Yet I knew I was bisexual—as surely as I’d known I was attracted to Kittredge, and exactly how I was attracted to him. But in my late teens and early twenties, I was holding back on my attractions to women—as I’d once repressed my desires for other boys and men. Even at such a young age, I must have sensed that bisexual men were not trusted; perhaps we never will be, but we certainly weren’t trusted then.

  I was never ashamed of being attracted to women, but once I’d had gay lovers—and, in New York, I had an ever-increasing number of gay friends—I quickly learned that being attracted to women made me distrusted and suspected, or even feared, by other gay guys. So I held back, or I was quiet about it; I just looked at a lot of women. (That summer of ’61 in Europe—when I was traveling with Tom—poor Tom had caught me looking.)

  WE WERE A SMALL group: I mean the American students who’d been accepted to the Institut für Europäische Studien in Vienna for the academic year of 1963–64. We boarded one of the cruise ships in New York Harbor and made the trans-Atlantic crossing—as Tom and I had done, two summers before. I quickly concluded that there were no gay boys among the Institute’s students that year, or none who’d come out—or no one who interested me, in that way.

  We traveled by bus across Western Europe to Vienna—vastly more educational sightseeing, in a hasty two weeks, than Tom and I had managed in an entire summer. I had no history with my fellow junior-year-abroad students. I made some friends—straight boys and girls, or so they seemed to me. I thought about a few of the girls, but even before we arrived in Vienna, I decided it was an awfully small group; it really wouldn’t have been smart to sleep with one of the Institute girls. Besides, I had already initiated the fiction that I was “trying to be” faithful to a girlfriend back in the States. I’d established to my fellow Institut students that I was a straight guy, apparently inclined to keep to myself.

  When I landed that job as the only English-speaking waiter at Zufall on the Weihburggasse, my aloofness from the Institute for European Studies was complete—it was too expensive a restaurant for my fellow students to ever eat there. Except for attending my classes on the Doktor-Karl-Lueger-Platz, I could continue to act out the adventure of being a young writer in a foreign country—namely, that most necessary exercise of finding the time to be alone.

  It was an accident that I ever met Esmeralda. I’d noticed her at the opera; this was both because of her size (tall, broad-shouldered girls and women attracted me) and because she took notes. She stood at the rear of the Staatsoper, scribbling furiously. The first night I saw Esmeralda, I mistook her for a critic; though she was only three years older than I was (Esmeralda was twenty-four in the fall of ’63), she looked older than that.

  When I continued to see her—she was always standing in the rear—I realized that if she were a critic, she would at least have had a seat. But she stood in the back, like me and the other students. In those days, if you were a student, you were welcome to stand in the back; for students, standing room at the opera was free.

  The Staatsoper dominated the intersection of the Kärntnerstrasse and the Opernring. The opera house was less than a ten-minute walk from Zufall. When there was a show at the Staatsoper, Zufall had two dinner seatings. We served an early supper before the opera, and we served a later, more extravagant dinner afterward. When I worked both seatings, which was the case most nights, I got to the opera after the first act had begun, and I left before the final act was finished.

  One night, during an intermission, Esmeralda spoke to me. I must have looked like an American, which deeply disappointed me, because she spoke to me in English.

  “What is it with you?” Esmeralda asked me. “You’re always late and you always leave early!” (She was clearly American; as it turned out, she was from Ohio.)

  “I have a job—I’m a waiter,” I told her. “What is it with you? How come you’re always taking notes? Are you trying to be a writer? I’m trying to be one,” I admitted.

  “I’m just an understudy—I’m trying to be a soprano,” Esmeralda said. “You’re trying to be a writer,” she repeated slowly. (I was immediately drawn to her.)

  One night, when I wasn’t working the late shift at Zufall, I stayed at the opera till the final curtain, and I proposed that I walk Esmeralda home.

  “But I don’t want to go ‘home’—I don’t like where I live. I don’t spend much time there,” Esmeralda said.

  “Oh.”

  I didn’t like where I lived in Vienna, either—I also didn’t spend much time there. But I worked at that restaurant on the Weihburggasse most nights; I wasn’t, as yet, very knowledgeable about where to go in Vienna at night.

  I brought Esmeralda to that gay coffeehouse on the Dorotheergasse; it was near the Staatsoper, and I’d been there only in the daytime, when there were mostly students hanging out—girls included. I hadn’t learned that the nighttime clientele at the Kaffee Käfig was all-male, all-gay.

  It took Esmeralda and me little time to recognize my mistake. “It’s not like this during the day,” I told her, as we were leaving. (Thank God Larry wasn’t there that night, because I’d already approached him about teaching a writing course at the Institute; Larry had not yet told me his decision.)

  Esmeralda was laughing about me taking her to the Kaffee Käfig—“for our first date!” she exclaimed, as we walked up the Graben to the Kohlmarkt. There was a coffeehouse on the Kohlmarkt; I’d not been
there, but it looked expensive.

  “There’s a place I know in my neighborhood,” Esmeralda said. “We could go there, and then you could walk me home.”

  To our mutual surprise, we lived in the same neighborhood—across the Ringstrasse, away from the first district, in the vicinity of the Karlskirche. At the corner of the Argentinierstrasse and the Schwindgasse, there was a café-bar—like so many in Vienna. It was a coffeehouse and a bar; it was my neighborhood place, too, I was telling Esmeralda as we sat down. (I often wrote there.)

  Thus we began to describe our less-than-happy living situations. It turned out that we both lived on the Schwindgasse, in the same building. Esmeralda had more of an actual apartment than I did. She had a bedroom, her own bathroom, and a tiny kitchen, but she shared a front hall with her landlady; almost every night, when Esmeralda came “home,” she had to pass her landlady’s living room, where the old and disapproving woman was ensconced on her couch with her small, disagreeable dog. (They were always watching television.)

  The drone from the TV could be constantly heard from Esmeralda’s bedroom, where she listened to operas (usually, in German) on an old phonograph. She’d been instructed to play her music softly, though “softly” wasn’t suitable for opera. The opera was sufficiently loud to mask the sound from the landlady’s television, and Esmeralda listened and listened to the German, singing to herself—also softly. She needed to improve her German accent, she’d told me.

  Because I needed to improve my German grammar and word order—not to mention my vocabulary—I instantly foresaw how Esmeralda and I could help each other. My accent was the only aspect of my German that was better than Esmeralda’s.