by Ned Rorem
By night Jackson Park is a cruising ground. Same trees, same byways, same oak and forsythia which in the afternoon seem real, even banal, change meaning as shadows take over. The city’s mouth exhales over the vanished hubbub, emitting an incense of lust; children’s cries melt into silence, the ever-present odor of the lake intensifies with menacing promise, a new provisional neighborhood vibrates on the old soil; and the lovers’ lanes, so lately quaint and precise, become a blur of lewd possibility. In The Grand Piano Paul Goodman speaks of the hours that grow into years while “looking for love where it can’t be found, waiting for love where it will not come,” a refrain more familiar to gay than to straight citizens, if only because promiscuity is—was—a mode imposed from without. Might one argue that heterosexual males, given the opportunity for unpunished promiscuity, would jump at the chance? By extension they too might argue that sex with one person doesn’t necessarily “get better”; on the contrary, the first time can be so great as to brook no repetition: anonymity releases inhibitions (idiocy being the goal of good sex), and man-as-animal shows his true nature. Gide even suggests (or makes his character Olivier suggest in Les faux-monnayeurs) that death is a lyrical reaction to the perfect screw—”He understood killing oneself, but only after having reached such heights of joy that anything afterward must be a descent.” In any case, cruising in search of the chance encounter—an encounter more evaded than welcomed, since just around the corner something better, etcetera—is excellent exercise and geographically educational.
Such clever ruminations were far from my mind when Géorg Redlich, knowing my limited sexual intercourse had hitherto been practiced only among equally limited peers, led me into the park like a mother bear with her stupid cub, proposing to teach me the feints and ruses of the chase. I am not an aggressor (though I like to get my way), and my style, such as it was, would have to emerge solely through trial and error. So long as Géorg, or any other “peer” bent on mutual mischief, was with me in the park, I never did a thing.
One unseasonably mild March evening, when I was fourteen, I went alone into Jackson Park, veering now from the usual paths toward what was called The Wooded Island, a picturesque but remote area in the central lagoon, approached by bridges at either end that were closed off at midnight. Sporting a too-warm maroon crewneck sweater which I felt made an apt pedestal to offset my young head, and carrying Anatole France’s Le lys rouge, partly because it was bound in matching maroon leather and partly for conversational purposes (yet who would converse?), I was perspiring at the gorgeous horror of the unknown. I had almost reached the second bridge without passing a soul and was about to turn back and call it a night when a form materialized from the gloom and planted itself before me. This was a man—that is, not a boy but a grown-up, a mystery, aged nineteen or maybe thirty, a novel category. He was bigger than I, virile and wiry, with black curly hair and a two-day stubble, smelling dimly but sexually of gasoline and whisky. He could have been a garage mechanic, a trigonometry major, or a shoe salesman. He sized me up with a charcoal gaze, then without a word steered me under the bridge where he pushed me, calmly but firmly, onto a heap of dry ferns which seemed to be there for just this purpose. I was tense, confused, thrilled, passive, not as a woman but as a little boy, as he bestrode me like a sheet of hot snow from lips to ankles. For several moments he lay thus, not moving; then quickly opened his pants, and mine, and for perhaps five minutes ground down on me interfemorally until he spewed a liquid paste across my thighs and belly. No word was spoken. Again he lay still until his panting subsided. Rising up he buttoned his clothes, and with a “So long, kid,” disappeared forever through the dark elms.
At home in bed his sweat remained with me, the eternal fragrance of Lake Michigan was wafted through the window infusing the little room as it had infused the park an hour ago, and I felt dizzy with unreleased violence. Next night I looked for him in vain, finding only Le lys rouge forgotten among the leaves. The next week too I looked, and for the next few months.
If I describe this adventure so “finely” it’s because I had fallen in love. The heart, when first taken out of its antiseptic box and exposed to air, aches more poignantly than it ever will again. I blush to note it here, but soon after this episode I sketched music for the famous verses: “By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth: I sought him, but I found him not. I will rise now, and go about the city in the streets, and in the broad ways I will seek him whom my soul loveth.” (Knowledge of this poetry came not from any Bible class but from my first Dietrich movie, Song of Songs.) In fact, I sought the man with the stubble more than “in the broad ways”: I sought him in the gardens of Monet, the novels of Genet, the preludes of Ravel, the statues of Easter Island, the biographies of Jack the Ripper, and in a thousand beds and bars of Europe and the East. The not finding is, in a sense, art. Though art isn’t, conversely, not finding. (Picasso: “Je trouve d’abord, je cherche après.”) (Imagine being rich as Croesus and able to trace the past. Imagine being led to “his” hospital room today in, say, Urbana or Wichita, or rather, to his grave. The joke of it!) Those musical sketches for “Song of Songs” I showed to Leo Sowerby, but didn’t tell him what had impelled me toward the text. I never told anyone.
The park became a habit. I would sit on a bench or not sit, wait or not wait, talk or not talk to strangers. Mostly I was a prick-tease, not knowing quite what was expected of me, or too shy to initiate, even to acknowledge, what I might ache to perform. Would I go home to cry or masturbate? Not always. Sometimes I’d go to “their place” and not put out. Most often what was done was done in the grass. Risks in retrospect appear ghastly—weren’t there muggings in the old days? Or was I too naive to sense danger in either anticipation or disappointment, and thus protected from evil? There is no god except for drunks, say the French.
Six conclusions:
1. Was he a child molester? (A mole-ster, as I used to misread the word, the way I misread goatherd as goath-erd.) The only trauma was a broken heart. I have never been molested by an adult, though as a minor I molested adults, in the sense of posing as inflammatory. The sense of myself as an erotic object, as it does with all children, came early. But I was never arrested for adult abuse.
2. The fact of being passive was something I took to like a duck to water, literally. That scene with the unshaven adult mirrors the imprinting of ducks which, hatched in a laboratory, think of humans as their mothers. Homosexuality is not a choice, but homosexual roles might be. The geography, the choreography, of our first gay experience, if we take to it (but we will take to it only if we’re already queer), affects all ensuing experiences. Do I believe this? Or did my “role” already come naturally? (The business of role-playing may seem anathema to gays of the 1990s for whom turnabout seems always fair play.) My alcoholism, innate but revealed only years later, was at first an excuse to be passive without guilt. Yet to be passive—successfully so—is to be loved. Anyone can love, but to be loved requires qualities that are neither taught nor bought. N’est pas aimé qui veut.
3. Is the physically weaker person—the woman—always the subservient one? In choral music the basses are the bottoms, the sopranos the tops. But for every top there must be a bottom? Not so. An unaccompanied soprano can be convincing. Yes, but a single line always has an implied harmony supporting it from below. (To the ancient Greeks high and low in music meant the reverse of what they mean to us. Or so I once was told.)
4. Man is a preorganizer of his senses. That one sensual occasion, in all its solitudinous melancholy, did not make me what I was; I was what I was and thus sought and recognized that one sensual occasion, an occasion replicated ten thousand times, in fantasy and fact, with ten thousand stubble-chinned males. By the same token I later came to sigh with exasperation—won’t they ever learn!—when reading yet again some biographical phrase like: “Rorem’s long years in France were crucial in determining his musical style.” My musical style was determined at birth, and was fully realized before
I moved to France. (What are “long years” as distinct from “short” ones?)
5. Homosexuality in itself is not interesting, any more than heterosexuality. Only as a political issue—which it nearly always is today—does it become worth talking about. Except, of course, in autobiographies. So there’s my dirty little secret. Not so dirty, really, and hardly a secret. Little? No, big as a cyclone enveloping my every behavioral viewpoint since infancy.
6. I don’t much care for the “me” herein portrayed. But then, I am not my type.
The Wooded Island by day was something else, a suite of small formal gardens shaded by large Japanese pavilions, relics from the 1893 world’s fair. The two pavilions, one a tearoom-giftshop, the other a residence, were caretaken by Shoji and Frances Osato, a Japanese-American couple, very cultured. Mother and Father had chatted with them and, learning that their daughter Sono was a member of the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, told us about them—“us” being me and Perry O’Neil.
Perry remained the premier pianist in U-High, but we were hardly rivals—were in fact intimate despite his being an upperclassman. Dangerously intimate, Mother felt, playing all that “sentimental” music (her word for both Serge Koussevitzky and Artie Shaw) on the bedroom phonograph. In public Perry loved Rosemary, in private, me. We bought gallery tickets to every performance of the Ballets Russes, which arrived for a fortnight each Christmas at the Auditorium Theater. We apotheosized the stars who, by virtue of being tangible dozens of times each winter, became “friends,” mute and glowing: stylish Riabouchinsky, craning her neck and flapping huge yellow wings before the curtain at the start of Rimsky’s Coq d’or; pretty Baranova disguised as a frump in Nabokov’s Union Pacific; exotic Toumanova in the blue-lit magic of Chopin’s Sylphides. These girls were mere teenagers, like us, yet not that far from the great Diaghilev whom we had read about, over and over and over, in Romola Nijinsky’s scandalous biography. The mature females were Danilova, wistful as she waved good-bye at the end of Gaîtés parisiennes and Tchernicheva, who as the sultana in Scheherazade seemed even then old-fashioned, like Pola Negri. The danseurs nobles were more enchanted still: Youskevitch, Frederick Franklin (with whom I would work in Washington a quarter century later), the volatile Massine with his already legendary Tricorne, and Le rouge et le noir based on Shostakovich’s First Symphony, a masterpiece from the musician’s nineteenth year. (No other nineteen-year-old in our century has written as flawless a work of that scope—not even in the France of Rimbaud, or in America, land of the young.) Sometimes these glimmering presences would come into the lounge during intermission, or into the auditorium drugstore where we had sodas after the show. They spoke French, Russian, seemed short and theatrical yet timid, like us, when we asked for autographs.
At home in our living room Perry and I (blush!) re-created L’aprèsmidi d’un faune, using a mess of incense, scarves from Mother’s cedar chest, and the tastelessly tasteful Stokowski record which gave new meaning to the concept of rubato by stretching solo lines of flute and oboe into an irresistible excruciation of silver taffy. Ah well, as the ever-wise Montaigne decreed: “It needs at least as much perfection to develop an empty theme as to sustain a weighty one.” So Perry and I, like every adolescent in history (except maybe Rimbaud), confusing enthusiasm with self-expression, and self-expression with art, developed to perfection our empty theme.
To this spectacle—so oft rehearsed, so amateur—we invited the Osatos. Frances came with her younger Nisei daughter Teru, who, after my sister, Rosemary, was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen, all ivory and jet and peach, with a smile inscrutably American. For them we danced our duet. Perry, I’m afraid, played the nymph, short hair and hirsute thighs, whisking out of sight at crucial moments to turn over the Red Seal disc. I “danced” the faun, inviolable and icy, ruminating on David Lichine’s slow-motion antics, while audibly sniffing mucus as I sounded an invisible reed.
Frances in turn invited us to a matinee featuring, like a sparkler on the Fourth of July, Sono as chief odalisque in Scheherazade. And we went backstage. What a wonderland compared to Mary Wigman’s backstage! The unchoreographed agitation of the corps rushing this way and that! The undisguised safety pins in Sono’s pink costume (“No one sees them from the audience,” she explained)! Her layers of makeup, and her indifference to me and Perry! Even so, Sono would become a friend in later years when the rest of the Osato clan had vanished.
Very young I had somehow learned that mixed marriages, being the opposite of incest, made for a balanced longevity. Looking now through the sheaf of melancholy letters, I am reminded of how Frances remained staunch. During the war she stayed with her husband in an internment camp (while her elder daughter, to keep hold on the ballet, became Sono Fitzpatrick), then divorced him, moved to New York where Sono became a semi-icon as the first ballerina to defect to Broadway in One Touch of Venus, while Frances herself became a high-class seamstress. We met often, went to the theater, and practiced songs at home together. Frances was handsome and elegant, continental out of Nebraska, and with a soprano voice which, though grainy and faint, sent thrills up the spine when she intoned Debussy’s “Je tremble en voyant ton visage” and Basque folk tunes learned on the knee of her beloved French tutor, Bertelin. Proud of her son Tim’s West Point career, Frances was chagrined that I allowed myself to be rated 4-F at my third and final induction examination, even after the war. Still, as a woman she felt ill-placed to lecture a man on patriotism since his very life was at stake. Today, feminists who feel that men get all the breaks, must bear in mind that millions of male teenagers, against their will, even against their awareness, are conscripted, indeed jailed, by their country to serve as cannon fodder. Again today, as a Quaker and pacifist, I could wish that women and gay men would spend less time petitioning for equal rights in the military and more time getting rid of the military.
I have a long letter from Frances, in her scrawl which could be Mother’s, detailing her deterioration by cancer in 1952. Teru had died of the same at twenty-five. Now Tim, in 1954, wrote me of his mother’s death, sending along a box of her precious songs. Tim himself, beset with an increasingly physical neurasthenia, killed himself a generation later. Sono, a treasured acquaintance, survives. Once while drunk in 1962 I took a bed rail and banged my left shin until it cracked and bled, for no other reason than to show my lover I was alive. My life was saved, over the years, by the tenets of AA, while that of Sono Osato is held together by other necessities.
Perry, meanwhile, and I understandably went “all the way” with our sentimental revels. Not just The Afternoon of a Faun, but Daphnis and Chloë, The Rite of Spring, and tens of other Stokowski interpretations whose sensuous exaggeration goaded us down the primrose path. We “had sex,” lost our cherries—if that loss can be defined through nonejaculatory friction. (For a decade, after I’d slept with hundreds of men, the concept of virginity still seemed represented as something one lost only to the opposite sex. Though virginity’s where you find it; mine had been lost, all alone, to Igor Stravinsky. Could current times define grown-up sex as anything that might cause AIDS?) Ejaculatory friction came months later with D., more male than Perry, with gnarled biceps and ruddy cheeks. D. had gained cachet on the block not only by being a super athlete with super grades, and by playing the risky game of pressing our neck arteries so as to produce in us a popperlike swoon, but of teaching other boys to cum. When in the intimacy of his gray sheets he brought me to orgasm I thought something terribly wrong had exploded in my urethra. Yet for a week I masturbated three times a day, winnowing that down to twice, then once a day for months. Those wads of Kleenex, those mucky socks. D. was straight, merely horny. He became an eminent professional still in Chicago’s South Side. Perry, after premiering Ravel’s Left-hand Concerto rippingly with the WPA’s new Illinois Symphony under Madame Antonia Brico in 1941, premiering my own Second Sonata in WQXR in its first version ten years later, and recording the four MacDowell sonatas on a small label, suddenly quit. He was
a terrific pianist, far better than I, with an infallible metronomic instinct, mercurial fingers in Rachmaninoff as in Scarlatti, a neat, ruby tone, and a dependable, caring style in chamber music. But as prodigy confronting the real world he found the rat race unremunerative, threw in the sponge, and became a librarian. Today he lives quietly on Jane Street with his friend Tom and never listens to Stokowski. (I just phoned him. He said: Sure, write anything you want.)
Like everyone of my generation I was weaned on Leopold Stokowski. From Saint Matthew to Sacre “his” classics give off an opulence so contagious that we were all immured in the viewpoint—or earpoint—whether or not we approved. Being idolized by the idle rich and the vast unwashed, as well as by specific eccentrics (i.e., poor composers), Stokowski became, with the Garbo-Fantasia-Vanderbilt era, a legend. Legends, emerging as they do from myths, can never by definition be touched personally; and indeed, I never truly knew the man. But we did have a certain personal rapport which I now recall with mixed feelings. To peek ahead for a minute:
During the early 1950s we were introduced a couple of times in Paris. His cool social loftiness, in contrast to his conductorial fire, intimidated. I had no idea that he remembered these meetings (maybe he didn’t), much less that he knew my music, when a decade later he included my Eagles on his debut (!) concert with the Boston Symphony. I was impressed that he had not contacted me, that he had not (unlike most performers who deign to play American music) insisted on a first performance; rather, that he simply programmed this already published music as though it were a natural repertory item. His broadcast of Eagles (10 March 1964) was the most scintillating interpretation I ever heard. I admired Stokowski, as all composers must, for the attitude that the newness of new music is irrelevant to its worth: our music is music, not “modern music.”…When I told him this a year later (at another of those strained backstage encounters), he greeted the praise with a glazed stare and didn’t seem to know who I was.