My Husband and My Wives

by Charles Rowan Beye

  In retrospect I feel fortunate that I lived at a time when I could enjoy relationships, however limited they may have been, with so many great guys. I grew up in circumstances where I had little access to male company. As it is, males in our culture are notorious for their repression in expressing their feelings, or any other intimacy. A chance blow job is not a moment for “sharing,” as Oprah would no doubt put it. But the repeated experience of sexual intercourse, however it is framed, with the attendant moments of before-and-after sitting about, usually in a parked car, is a psychically intimate experience. I think of a fraternity boy at the university with whom I met often, always in my car, where we graduated from the simplest oral-genital transaction to the exposure and manipulation of his naked chest, and his fondling me, albeit through clothing, and finally to long, wet kisses before, during, and after his orgasm. Our last encounter was when a friend hailed me from a parked car in downtown Iowa City, where he was sitting with his girlfriend and, lo and behold, this same guy, his fraternity buddy. Of course, I did not acknowledge that I knew him; it was obvious that my high school friend had summoned me over to exhibit one of the wits of his hometown. What was ironic was that I had a far more superficial relationship with my high school friend whom I had known for years than I had established with the other fellow.

  There are those who pity me for coming late to the full realization of the various attitudes and experiences of homosexual lovemaking. I concede their point, but I must insist that when my straight partner was a totally agreeable fellow I was strenuously aroused by the correlation of anticipation, by the delight of feeling in control with males whom our culture has designated as in control, modulating their rising passion, practicing the slightest retard, feeling my own surge of power as they surrendered all control at orgasm. Once, when I was in my late forties, because of an amusing mistaken exchange of instructions and telephone numbers with friends abroad I found myself in the hotel room of a major American professional athlete. It was clear that he knew I was gay, and that it would be acceptable to act on the fact; there was no doubt that he was gorgeous, if a giant, at least a foot taller than I. His twenty-five-year-old brown body, which was perfectly sculpted, made me think of nothing so much as the Riace bronzes in Reggio Calabria. To have this huge creature thrusting into me, groaning and shouting in a deep baritone, thrilled me, particularly the moment when he erupted into paroxysms of ecstasy, when it seemed that he had lost all control and I was dominating him. Afterward in our mutual postcoital repose I looked up at the ceiling over his shoulder, realizing that I could not move out from under him without his permission, which made me consider for the first time what women experience as the norm. He was a witty, intelligent man with whom I had a memorable half day, more treasured because coincidental and unexpected. I can’t believe there would have been the commonality between the two of us, separated as we were by age, race, education, interests, if we had not chanced upon sexual intimacy. Clearly he and I both would have liked to spend more time together, but he was only passing through on his way home to his family.

  My sophomore year in high school did not improve as it continued. With the end of winter came another of Mother’s bombshell announcements, this time that she had put our house on the market and we were moving. The house she had chosen was a compact fake colonial two-story, four-bedroom dwelling with the conventional one and a half baths, living room, dining room, and kitchen, set on what real estate agents would call a “decent-sized” lot. It was one of four or five homes built in the postwar development of a forested spit of land adjoining an established neighborhood, a great place for a man with two kids who had just made tenure at the university, someone on the way up. Did she feel as I did that coming from our large house on the hill we would be more or less camping out? She did not comment, but then Mother was not the kind of person to dwell on the apparatus that formed the sets for her life’s performance, nor verbalize her concerns; if I had been less the self-engrossed teenager I might have noticed what she had been experiencing: the servant class had decamped, and managing so large a house without servants was becoming intolerable. I did indeed feel guilty at my impotence watching her struggle to take the spent coal (called “clinkers”) out of the giant furnace, a task which the fragile vertebrae of my lower back made a physical impossibility. In our old house there was a lot of enforced walking about: the kitchen had the stove, the pantry had the refrigerator and sink for washing dishes; there were only two telephones, one in the lower back hall, one in my mother’s bedroom, and the recent war prohibited additional service. With no one in the kitchen always available to pick up after the first few rings, running “to get the phone” was, I am sure, one of her nightmares. I imagine our aged gardener must have come to shovel the myriad walks, stairs, and driveways that ran about the property.

  I often wonder what giving up that house meant to her. It was the locus of her married life, where she raised a family and entertained on a grand scale. The new house was more the setting for the life of Mr. and Mrs. Cleaver. At age fifty-five she was going to learn again those cooking skills she had once acquired at Fanny Farmer’s Boston Cooking School. Her new kitchen, with its vinyl floor and Formica table and counters, was also the room in which we would be eating, since there was not only nobody around to cook the food, there was no one to serve it—and come to think of it, no one to make the beds and dust the floors. Since she was a tight-lipped adherent to the code of “Never complain, never explain,” I have to imagine that wartime wage inflation made the cost of a staff more than she could afford, if indeed she had found anyone in the forties who still wanted to go into domestic service. Our meals resembled what one ate at a club: a lamb chop, a steak, roast beef, calf liver, roast chicken, with a rotating selection of vegetables and a salad. I’m sure the stiff drinks she tossed down beforehand made the routine meals and unforgiving setting palatable enough.

  She was not opposed to youngsters taking a drink or two. I well remember her ordering me a bourbon old-fashioned in the restaurant of the Palmer House on a shopping expedition to Chicago, and growing angry when the waiter brought up the state liquor laws. Her improbable denunciation of the poor man, claiming that he was like a Communist stooge forcing some state law between a mother and her son, led to his surrender and the arrival of the drink. Still, Mother was no fool about drinking; I remember her drawing my attention to a friend of my sister who controlled the pain of his wartime injuries with heavy drinking, using him as a lesson for me in accepting the pain I endured in my back rather than surrendering to addiction. Still, she was willing to serve me a cocktail in the late afternoon before she set out to make the dinner. Because they unlocked our tongues into a semblance of friendly conversation, I always enjoyed our afternoon cocktails, although they began when I was only sixteen and we had just settled into our new house. They became a ritual, developed, I am sure, as an unconscious response to the impasse in our relationship at which we soon very dramatically arrived.

  Any honest emotional bond between my mother and me died within a twenty-four-hour period in late April, a month after my sixteenth birthday, when in fact my world came apart completely. Every detail of the gruesome experience remains with me. One day, I was sunning myself on a blanket while reading a book when Mother returned home, came to the porch, and summoned me in. The tone of her voice was a premonition; the look on her face made me steady myself to keep from fainting.

  “I have just been talking with Father Putnam,” she began in the coldest, most serious voice I think I had ever heard her use. “He has told me awful things—”

  Waves of reaction crashed into my brain with howling sounds. I was desperately attempting to gain a purchase as the ground shifted, swayed, opened under me. Aristotle defined that moment in tragedy when the character realizes everything as anagnorisis. The moment, for instance, when Oedipus realizes that he is not the successful king of Thebes so much as he is the murderer of his father and the bed partner of his mother, the taboo figure creat
ed by a destiny that mocked his pathetic attempts to escape his fate. This was that moment for me. I think of the scene in the MGM film Marie Antoinette when Norma Shearer as the doomed queen is shown in close-up after the lackey has looked at the coin in his hand and realized that Robert Morley is Louis XVI in disguise. They are in their coach at Varennes trying to flee France, and at that moment reality shatters the delusion. I think of the second act of Verdi’s Macbeth after the king has seen the ghost of Banquo, as the guests begin to depart the banquet hall in horror, and the king and Lady Macbeth add their voices to the choral song as they realize that their dream is a delusion, their murdering Banquo to get on with their life won’t succeed. I do not know how much I must credit to innocence and naïveté, how much to denial, but whereas I had been blind before, suddenly in a flash I saw it all. The jeers of the students, the cruel barbs I could somehow let pass me by. They did not describe for me my condition, my situation. But that cold, precise voice coming from those almost pursed lips: “That your name is written on lavatory walls. That you are doing terrible things. I don’t understand what he is talking about.” That hit home. She shivered, shook herself as though to dislodge the incubus: “Horrible, terrible.” I began to cry. Everything was being taken from me. I had no foundation any longer. I felt myself sinking into some limbo where I was alone and without shape or form. “You must go talk with Father Putnam. I will send you to a psychiatrist.” I sobbed harder. Now it turned out I was crazy!

  There I sat in the living room, by the picture window, the sun cloaking me in warmth … but no, that was not it at all, no, it was the sun like a naked bulb over the culprit’s head as he is worked over by some detectives attached to the precinct. And there across from me, somewhat by contrast harder to see—or was I blinded by my shame and guilt?—stood Mother. And then she was gone. Without extending a hand toward me, without any further remarks, she left the room. We were never to speak of this again in the eight years that remained of her life. In fact, we never had another honest conversation.

  How strange and sad it is that for the next sixty years I never questioned her response. That she did not sit by me, put her arm around me, tell me she loved me, cry with me over my sorrows, did not seem unusual to me then. Intellectually I have been convinced that the “normal” parent would have; otherwise I still don’t get it. Father Putnam, our Episcopal priest, changed for me into a monster of betrayal. Why did he not come to me first, talk with me, who was his acolyte at Holy Communion almost every Sunday, who was so often the crucifer at the later service, who was president of the St. Vincent’s Guild, the association of altar boys, at the church? How, I have often asked myself, could this brash young priest, new to the parish, have gone up to a woman on the street as indeed he had and delivered such information? How could he have been so blind to the limitations of understanding in a woman who was so obviously a product of a Victorian-Edwardian upbringing? One wonders at the fact that he went on to become the bishop of Oklahoma and was much praised by the people there at his death. At the risk of judging, which the Lord says is a dubious practice, I say that the swine had much to answer for when he met his Maker.

  At Mother’s request—“hysterical demand” perhaps is better—I went to see him. He urged that we descend to our knees and recite the prayer of general confession together. When we got to the words, “We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness,” and I realized that he wanted us to have in mind the behavior that he had brought to my mother’s attention, I could not, would not submit to such self-condemnation. If nothing else, I knew in my heart and would go to the stake in my belief that I was without blame or sin for wanting sex with another male, of this I remained convinced, and I rose and walked out the door and I never entered a church again as a communicant.

  I set off for the appointment with the psychiatrist the following day in complete terror. His office was in the psychiatric hospital, not too distant a walk from our home. It was not quite twenty-four hours since Mother had accosted me. Since then she had spoken to me in measured somber tones of trivial matters upon the occasions that brought us together. I truly felt that I was going to go mad, such was the turmoil of emotions that I could no longer identify, sort out, or manage. Most of all I was trying to resist being suffused with guilt and shame. The absolute joy and excitement of sucking cocks, of taking cock up my ass, had suddenly become dirty, degraded. God, Church, priest, Mother all called me dirty. I kept hearing Mother’s “your name on lavatory walls.” In my mind I saw the words Charlie sucks cock as I had never seen them before. The mechanism of denial that had protected me up to this point failed, when, as it were, my mother, our priest, and the institution of God’s Church stood beside me in the smelly men’s room looking at the grimy off-white tile wall with the pen marks on it: Charlie sucks cock. I had never felt so depleted; I wanted to kill myself. Before meeting with Father Putnam I had gone to the library just across the street from the Episcopal church to look up something on mushrooms, on poisons, but I was so sunk into depression that I could not even read what I was looking at. Now I struggled to walk smartly down the sidewalk that took me to the office of Dr. Miller. He, as fate would have it, looked very much like my late father: gray at the temples, a mustache, steely eyes, a severe compression of his lips when in repose. I quailed.

  “What is your problem?” he began quietly and soberly. I began to snivel, and, through my coughs, stammering, and sniffs managed to mention as abstractly as possible my sexual interests.

  “But, I mean, what is it exactly that you do with these boys?”

  “What is it that you are doing, Charlie?” he said again when I could not speak, and I heard an empathetic tone in his voice.

  “Fooling around,” I mumbled in reply.

  “Fooling around? How?”

  “With the other boys,” I whispered.

  “How? What do you do?”

  “Just fooling around.”

  “Yes, but what exactly? You take hold of them?”

  “Yes,” was all I could muster.

  “Take hold of the penis?”

  “Yes.”

  “Put it in your mouth?”

  And so it went, detail by detail. Slowly he drew from me explicit detailed statements about the sexual acts. The transformation in my feelings was swift. Whereas before I had been trapped, cornered, cowering before the onslaught of my mother and Father Putnam telling me that what I did was evil, suddenly I was the author of my acts as I spoke them. They were mine, and nobody could take them away from me, alter them, give them another meaning. The sentiment may not have lasted long, but its immediate liberating effect stayed with me for a long time, really forever.

  There was silence when I finished my rather slim litany of the sexual behavior and positions I had so far managed. Dr. Miller puffed on his pipe, another maddening similarity to my late father.

  “The problem is…” he said at last, taking the pipe from his mouth and looking me directly in the eyes, “the problem is that you need to be more discreet. You know, you are a little too emphatic, too obvious. Keep a lower profile; that’s what I would recommend. People tend to talk, you know.”

  Benediction. We said little more; I departed and walked slowly home. My chest, which had felt in the last twenty-four hours as though it had been shut, turned in, hardened almost to the point of denying my breathing, suddenly opened. I was too exhausted to be happy, too apprehensive of Mother. But Dr. Miller had called me whole, had called me sane, had called me normal. It was not the substance, but the style. “Need to be more discreet.” The words stayed with me like the kindly squeeze of a hand on the shoulder.

  The gay community has its stories of the ugly sessions between hapless youth and ponderous shrink as the latter tries to wrench the psyche of the former around to some kind of “normal” behavior, whether through words, shock therapy, or some other kind of demeaning resistance to what is obviously a natural instinct. I was so very, very lucky. In those three days I had confirmatio
n of some basic truths: first, that I could never count on my mother’s emotional support; second, that I knew in my heart and soul that if there is a god, he, she, or it would want me to be as I was; and, third, that an adult, a doctor charged with healing the sick in spirit and soul, a man whom fate had made resemble my father, had let me know that there was nothing wrong with anything I had been doing.

  Another profound change in the emotional landscape was that I was no longer dishonest. Perhaps my mother would never bring up my sexual orientation again, but she would know what it meant for me to stand next to a good-looking male, what it might mean to see me coming out of my bedroom in the company of one, or going off to the movies; most of all she would not be urging pretty young girls on me as date material. What I learned years later was that she sometimes talked to my older siblings about my gayness, that she confided in her favorite sister-in-law, who also had a gay son, that she discussed me with the psychiatrist more than once, but she never said another word to me. Paradoxically, a profound truth underlaid our dishonest relationship, however much unspoken. Once in the more enlightened 1970s I had a young boyfriend who, shortly after we began our relationship, announced that he intended to tell his parents that he was gay. The old fogy in me counseled caution and silence, whereupon he said, and I shall never forget: “I don’t want either of them to die without knowing me as I truly am.”

  And I think of all the men and women who have lived their lives entirely as a lie with the people meant to be most profoundly intimate with them. Nothing could be sadder. I have friends who cry at the mention of their dead parents and don’t know why, but I am sure that they ache over the basic lie of their relationship. I was also lucky that I never had to experience the long, drawn-out trauma of resistance to and then surrender to the process of “coming out.” Whether they liked it or not, everyone in my hometown had to recognize me as a “queer,” “cocksucker,” “homosexual,” “different,” whatever.