I missed the simple virility of my high school friends pumping their orgasms into me while we huddled in the backseat of my car. One night I was walking disconsolately away from MacDougal Street when I caught the eye of a man glancing my way while he was in conversation with another fellow. He quickly came over to my side to introduce himself and ask if I needed a ride anywhere. He was a curly-haired man, short, stocky, and swarthy, and his companion was a taller, muscular black man. With the recklessness of the young I accepted a ride to my rooming house with both of them. As we pulled up before my address, he asked if he could come in, telling the other fellow to explain to his wife that he was “hung up at the gym.” It turned out he was a boxing manager, a “deeze and doze” James Cagney tough guy such as I knew only from the movies. He never explained himself but clearly enough he went for wrestling around naked in bed with a young guy, getting blown, jerking the other fellow off. I liked his smell, liked his muscles, his roughness, directness, humor. Of course, it was a moment in the night, but I could not stop to think of the difference with the sex I had been having all that fall. I know it is perverse, but there is a certain kind of “guy-guy” who turns me on; I leave it to the shrinks.
By chance, during roughly the same time, I took to spending Friday evenings in a midtown bar featuring a Dixieland jazz band with a beautiful woman friend of mine from work. The money I spent on beers guaranteed that I would go hungry after Thursday noon, but I reckoned the music and camaraderie were worth it. Shortly thereafter the bar became our place for a pickup routine that with an essential variation was a staple of a host of comic films of the time, the ones in which some beautiful woman is out on the town with her plain-Jane girlfriend and they bump into a handsome guy, more often than not a sailor, and his ordinary friend searching for fun and romance. The narrative arc has the two lookers falling for each other, with their sidekick friends turning to each other as consolation prizes. We played that film routine one Friday night after another. The bar was frequented by the military and by college students. My woman friend was a real beauty who easily attracted first-class sailors or university students to her side, which left their buddies to talk with me. As the night wore on and libidos raged, the good-looking guy would confess that he and his friend had not thought to get themselves a room for the night, whereupon my friend would invite the guy home, which left his friend out of luck until he reluctantly accepted an invitation from me. On the surface of it the invitation produced no particular hesitation. Strange men sleeping in the same bed was not the aberration then that it would be now; the Depression and the war had made doubling up a commonplace. Two men lying side by side in their underwear, however, can go just about anywhere they want to take it. Most nights I lucked out; otherwise I practiced discretion. Mostly it was lopsided sex, me giving, them taking, but I liked the companionship in it.
I met and hooked up with plenty of gay men here and there on the sidewalks of New York, but as far as negotiating the bars and the gay scene, I seemed to be a failure. As luck would have it, a case of gonorrhea forced me back to Iowa, back where I knew doctors who would give me discreet treatment, and where I could go back to the university. There were plenty of sympathetic doctors and clinics in New York, obviously, so I must have wanted to go home. The noble experiment was over. “Noble” I say with irony, thinking of all the brilliant gay youngsters who came to the city and stayed to make a name for themselves. Was I a simpleminded wimp or was this the way it was supposed to be? To this day I cannot decide.
Back home the doctor who treated me required that I give up sex for six months, and so I turned all my energies to study. At this point my intellectual self had been formed from my extensive reading as an invalided youth, the many classic films I saw in the MoMA film series shown at the State University of Iowa throughout my earlier teen years, and the rigor and discipline of researching and writing on all conceivable subjects for college-level term papers. I enrolled in Intensive Ancient Greek, which with doubled class hours and extended assignments brought the student enough mastery to move into second-year coursework after one term. And why Greek? I had hated Latin in high school, although I did well enough in it. The previous summer, however, in shopping at registration for courses I discovered something worth only two credits called The Love Poems of Horace and Catullus. It sounded like an easy A, and I enrolled. The instructor that summer was intellectually seductive enough that I followed him into Intensive Greek and thereafter into courses in the literature of Greek, and from there I went on to be a classics major. That was the summer term of 1949. Almost half a century later I was to retire from my endowed chair as Distinguished Professor of Classics at the City University of New York, author of six or seven books and maybe fifty articles, mostly on the subject of ancient Greek literature or the civilization. I had found my life’s work; what is more, I had found in me a passion, an obsession, really, that for years rivaled what riveted me to another human being. I guess I might say that it was the Great Love Affair of my life. And, having sympathetically listened to so many young people flounder about trying to figure out what interests them, I am deeply grateful that I found a life’s calling, and so early on. Perhaps it made me narrow in some ways, because it wasn’t until I retired that I really started to study other matters in some detail, European history or economics, for example. But for decades my absorption in the study of antiquity, particularly ancient Greek literature, gave me real coherence and purpose.
I ran across Dottie, my initial term-paper client, who introduced me to a male couple. Dottie’s friends were the first two men whom I had ever encountered who were committed to each other and obviously in love. Somehow I had lived in this small town all my life and never fully recognized that there must be a pool of potential lovers on the one hand and a place where they congregated on the other. These sweet guys recognized me for the naïf I was, and promised to take me to the gay bar that sat on the street bordering the campus. For over two years I had been a regular at the bar next door, owned and run by a father of a high school friend, but somehow never noticed that a very different clientele was patronizing its neighbor. I suppose they wouldn’t serve minors, so I never entered. It wasn’t exactly a gay bar, but rather the bar where the university’s students of drama, writing, and music congregated, which tended to include the gay population as well. So it was a bar in which one could wave one’s hands, flit about, in general behave as differently as possible from the patrons of the bar next door, where townies like myself and the fraternity and athletic crowd hung out.
Thus began the second phase of my life in a gay bar. I guess I went to the Uptowner, as it was called, almost every night of the week, and usually came away with someone to sleep with. Not for the night, surely, because I was living at home while attending university, but for a few hours in a dormitory room or rooming house. These were fellow students, for the most part, Iowa boys, with all the virtues of small-town rural life, that is, basically friendly, not aggressive, easygoing. Just the same, they had an edge, they were wounded people with all the tendencies to lash out, nurse grievances, and feel inferior that came from the knowledge that they were freaks and pariahs in the minds of the larger population, sinners, of course, to the Christian community, which would generally include their parents and other family members.
I found them so different from the men I had met in the gay bars of Manhattan, who were mostly older, more experienced, for whom the mere act of homosexual intercourse was no longer a psychic challenge. The Iowa boys, by contrast, were at the very beginning of their careers as homosexual men and as such working to shape what they perceived to be their identity. At this stage their sexuality was the all-powerful defining aspect of their sense of self. Simply acting on it consumed them utterly, because it made them; it had to be that way if they were to develop any self-respect, perhaps only dimly understood. I think that the hostility and opposition that they sensed everywhere, and often enough confronted more dramatically, made them fight back as hard as t
hey could with the self, their identity they were shaping, which meant in this environment a life lived by thoughts of homosexual sex and its enactment. Most of them did not think beyond the orgasm to the possibility of a relationship with the man who had helped them to it. They needed first to be comfortable acting out their erotic selves and at the moment it took all their time.
I have always believed that their capacity for focusing on the sex act per se was encouraged by the fact that their partner was another male, equally focused. My prejudice is that women are instinctively attuned to creating relationships out of any sexual encounter; heterosexual males are encouraged or forced to think beyond the immediate sexual act because their partners are female. It’s the tired old “commitment” discussion yet again. I know that theories of biological destiny are out of fashion, but there we are. Women are stuck with what comes out of their womb and they jolly well want someone around who will look after them. In the same sense the human race needs to produce new generations and so society invents systems that force people into raising children like a church that calls divorce a sin, like a religion that stones adulterers to death. In a sense, males who attach themselves to a woman have no choice. Left to himself, a male can have an orgasm and get on with his day without thinking; young males more often than not include masturbation as much a part of the morning’s ritual as shaving or brushing their teeth. It is all over in a matter of seconds. Two males working at it together can still complete their mission in minutes and be back on the road or into the office or whatever in no time. Who even remembers? The stupendous incidence of promiscuity among gay males relative to straight males derives in my estimation from what I claim is a biological truth rather than the gay male’s incapacity to make moral judgments.
The fall term of my junior year at the university I had sex with more good-looking, clean-cut, nice young men than ever before or since. But we did not do repeats. And I learned very quickly from my mistake one evening of trying to make the first night a necking session so as to “get to know” him. When I met that particular guy the subsequent evening, he turned away from me, and it was only from friends that I learned how disgusted he was that we had not gone the whole way as we should have when we were together the first time. Years of hanging out with the girls in high school, sharing in their fantasies of love and romance, had conditioned me to believe in certain silly courtship rituals that had absolutely no place in gay life, and indeed seemed to most guys as completely ludicrous. What a fool I was! How obtuse. And yet I had met Dottie’s friends, a loving committed male couple. The succeeding months into the winter and thereafter left me alternately depressed at not having a relationship and hopeful that there were the ingredients for one out there somewhere.
As the year went by I grew more and more disenchanted with my experience of the gay bar. It is a prejudice that has stayed with me for life. Consider for instance the musical Falsettos, in which a man leaves his wife for another man. Consciously or unconsciously the relationships between the bereft wife and her second husband and that of the two lesbian neighbors are so much deeper than that of the two gay males, who cannot finally give each other much of anything. It struck me as significant that the scene supposedly depicting the gay couple’s relationship was on a squash court, a scene of high and aggressive competition—the truth of male-male relationships I was to learn very well later on in my life. Gore Vidal’s first novel, The City and the Pillar, describes a young gay male in love with his teenage straight friend. In adulthood they meet again and the gay makes a pass, only to be spurned, which causes him to kill the unfortunate straight. Vidal later rewrote this novel when gayness became more acceptable, changing the ending from killing to anal rape. One understands male prisoners using anal intercourse as an instrument of control or revenge, but it is distressing to find a gay novelist treating what should be for him, and indeed for his gay character, a principal vehicle of the expression of love in a similar fashion. These examples describe the absolute separation of sex from love that is the dreadful psychic fallout from being told from pubescence on that homoeroticism is evil, self-destructive, or socially corrupt. One can love, or one can have sex. One cannot find it in the same person. It is like those men who have been so denatured by the teachings of the Catholic Church that they can only have good sex—that is, fun, recreational sex, by definition sinful—with prostitutes and not with their wives. But the climate that produced that mind-set does indeed seem to have undergone radical change. I noted in the last years of my teaching career that young gay males were dating, often restraining themselves from having sex on the first few evenings out together. Nowadays the gay world is clothed in increasing respectability, if one can use such a word anymore. It is an idea that numbers of gays deplore; still, it ought to make testing relationships a lot easier for young males.
Simultaneous with my bar life I kept on studying ancient Greek literature, which was helping me forge an aesthetic, ethical, and moral system to take the place of the Christianity I had discarded. The Judeo-Christian religions offer a god who takes a personal interest in humans, rewarding those who please him by their good works, punishing those who disobey him. There are rules to be kept or broken, and when broken, the active contravention of the law of this god is called sin and is punished. The Bible stories narrate that mankind sinned by disobeying God and eating the apple, and successive generations are born with sin. God so loved the world that He gave His only son Jesus, who came into this world to free man from this original sin. After death there is heaven for those who have led a good life, hell for those who have disobeyed the laws of their god. Roman Catholicism has a system of priests who stand for the god figure who can offer the truly repentant absolution from the sins they have committed. I had cast off this system of belief because I refused to accept the idea that homosexual lovemaking was in contravention of the laws of God and was a sin. That was the start and I proceeded to dismantle the rest as so much superstition, retaining only the Christian ethic based on love with which I had been raised. In fact I think it is not a bad idea to repeat to myself: “May the spirit of love and truth and peace make its home in your heart now and forever more.”
Studying the culture of the ancient Greeks brought to me the vital information that in most of their societies it was socially desirable for a male of twenty to forty to take a mid- to late-teenage boy as his lover. Homosexual physical love is a topic of their literature, their art, their laws, and in the fabricated conversations that survive in the writing of Plato and Xenophon. A man was not a real man unless he had a young boyfriend. Nothing could have given me more support than knowing that the culture that is held to be the very basis of Western civilization valorized male-male erotic relationships as essential for the good society.
In their religious thinking the ancient Greeks had no such personal god as the ancient Hebrew texts describe. Nor did they have a system of belief, a dogma that establishes what is right and what is wrong. The literature is the best expression of their beliefs. In the Iliad when Achilles says to Priam, “There are two jars before the door of the house of Zeus, one filled with good, one with evil, and Zeus takes from the jar of evil and sprinkles it upon mankind, and sometimes adds from the jar of good,” the narrator is providing a picture of a god who is indifferent to humankind and afflicts them or rewards them in an arbitrary way that has nothing to do with them. The story of Oedipus is of a man who at birth is prophesied to marry his mother and kill his father. His parents send him to be exposed on the hills, a shepherd finds the infant, and out of kindness gives him to someone who takes him to a faraway city. The boy grows up to manhood and sets out to travel, then meets an old man at a crossroads whose carriage bars his passage and in a fit of temper kills him. Journeying on to the city, he meets the widowed queen and marries her, only to discover years later, after she has borne him three children, that he is the long-lost son of his wife and the man he had killed on the road. This story is about deep and impossible evil that a man was born
to commit, and nothing can prevent it from happening, no matter how hard the participants try. Through no fault of his own and despite strenuous efforts, Oedipus grows up to do what he was born to do. Instead of trying to justify evil with a system of sin and punishment, the ancient Greeks accepted misfortune as the luck of the draw. It made complete sense to me—how could it not?—having fallen from a balcony at four, having lost my father at six, watching my mother’s way of life disappear while at the same time discovering my community turning on me as an object of scorn and derision, living in an age when the newsreels projected death and destruction and the industrial annihilation of an entire people. Somehow the Christian notion that one gets what one deserves was too odious.
The Iliad is many things, but one central strand is the story of a young man who discovers as we all must that he is doomed to die, and that fact cancels out any eternal value in living, so that whatever we do in life is all we have and our only definition. In this sense life is tragic; aware, intelligent people live with the knowledge that they are doomed, but act as positively as they can because they want to make each act of life have meaning. This can go in strange ways, of course. One thinks of Aeschylus’s conception of Clytemnestra, who kills her husband Agamemnon because he as a general ordered the death of their daughter to propitiate the gods for his military expedition, and she as a mother of that daughter makes killing her husband a way to redeem and valorize motherhood and womanhood. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle were stressing a common cultural belief when they asserted that man aims at the good, man is a heroic and noble creation. Ancient Greek statuary also attests to that belief; it was amplified and reshaped in the Italian Renaissance of the fifteenth century. Nothing would have been more repellent to the ancient Greeks than the notion of some Christian sects that man is depraved. That belief is as far different from the tragic sense of life as one can go. It is important to remember that Clytemnestra, Oedipus, and all the others did the best they could, just as much as we latter-day human beings need to remember that important truth about ourselves.
My Husband and My Wives Page 8