Friends gave me a black-tie dinner for my fiftieth birthday. It was fun, from the hors d’oeuvres and champagne through to the baked Alaska at the end and beyond, when the guests gave brief testimonial performances and I gave a giant twenty-minute drunken response. Among the guests were old friends, three of my four children, and the three young men I have just described. As I reflected later about the evening, I was struck by the disquieting fact that my three children were the only guests present who did not know that those men were my lovers past and present. My young man’s recent determination to tell the truth to his parents made my silence all the more painful. In one of life’s great coincidences my older son had recently written to say that he was angry at my silence and evasion about the marriage in the years when it was fracturing. His letter seemed to demand a new truth. And so it was, when I knew that the children were spending Christmas with their mother on the ancestral farm, I wrote to him there asking him to share the contents of the letter with his siblings. I wrote that “I have been a practicing homosexual since I was fifteen,” named a number of so-called family friends over the years with whom I had been intimate, revealed what role these three young men played in my life, sealed the envelope, sent it off, and waited for a reply. None came.
At roughly the same time, when I girded myself to tell some dear friends in New York—they were a couple I had known through Penny from her undergraduate days at Radcliffe-Harvard—about this wonderful young man and of course at the same time revealed my sexuality, they were congratulatory, enthusiastic, and kind. Encouraged by this, I began telling people piecemeal; but it was difficult for me and for friends of long standing to look at me, the twice-married father of four, and now grandfather of one, and see a gay male living with a young man in Cambridge. One woman, a very old friend, whom I encountered at a symphony performance, gave me an embrace because she had not seen me for a long time, then turned to notice the young man at my side and could only manage, “Well, yes, hmmm…” before turning away into the crowd. It is extraordinary how many people had trouble with this change in my public identity for years, until at last I invited them to a church to witness my wedding.
My children, however, came around easily enough. There was no answering letter from my son, but after the holidays, when my younger daughter was staying with me before going back to college, we went out to dinner, at which point she looked me in the eye and asked, “Well, do you want to know the reactions to the letter?” They were (1) Penny’s: “He has cheapened our marriage by telling you”; (2) oldest son: “I don’t want to know”; (3) second son: “No way! He taught me how to have sex with a woman! But, oh, my God! All those young guys hanging out for the night in his house? I never thought!”; (4) older daughter: “I want to kick myself for bad-mouthing all those gay guys in front of Dad, the ones I worked with last year. It was just because what I was wanting were some cuties to date me”; (5) and my younger daughter said nothing. My older daughter, moreover, then set out to learn about homosexuality, joining the gay support group on her campus and making friends in the gay community. With all the children there was always awkwardness, more, I think, because my lovers could easily have been their siblings, perhaps also from the fact that, as those things go, I had a stronger attachment to them than to my own flesh and blood, at least in some ways and for certain moments in time. I wonder if my children have been hurt by that more than they will admit. Still, I was blessed with their love as they all worked to understand their father in a new way.
Now everything was in the open at home, but not at work. There were many faculty in those days, the beginnings of the eighties, who were comfortable identifying themselves as gay. It was so ironic that I, who had once been so open, now was hesitant, at least in office situations where people knew me as a divorced professor with four children. People I had to deal with at the university were not enough well-known to me to bother explaining the permutations of my emotional life. It was just the beginning of a great shift in thinking: people could be married, or formerly married, and they could be gay. This was preceded by the devastation of the AIDS epidemic, which brought gay people widespread attention that they had not had before, and perhaps as much sympathy as opprobrium. For instance, when I went to my fortieth high school reunion in 1988 as a divorced man, seven years after the first case of AIDS had been identified in 1981, several classmates made an effort to tell me of young men in their neighborhood who were sick and dying of AIDS. I figured it was their way of acknowledging that the teenage boy whom they remembered as the queer, the fairy, the cocksucker was now endowed with a certain dignity known as “gay man.”
My young lover, in addition to having doubts about continuing to find this fifty-year-old man acceptable as a sexual partner, was also chafing at the fact that I was the only male with whom he had had sex. As he began to move about in gay circles he discovered the widespread promiscuity that was and perhaps still is the norm of the gay experience. He and I wrestled with the interesting question of whether gay males act out a promiscuity that is inherent in their sexual predilection or whether heterosexual males would be far more promiscuous than they are if they were not bound to a wife and children. When we talked about gay baths, I told him that I was not psychologically up to having a partner whose other outlet was serial sex in evenings at the baths, although what was more powerful was my inability to hear of a companion telling of his exploits. My belief is that sexual intercourse is either a love-filled experience designed to bind two people closer together or it is more in the nature of a bowel movement, designed for much-needed physical relief. As the latter, it need not be commented upon or even mentioned, for that matter. At the time I had been reading about what they were calling the “gay disease” that was spreading in San Francisco, which made me cautious from a new perspective. I had only twice in my life gone into baths. Obviously it was a different experience from making out with one’s high school acquaintances in the backseats of cars, and more like picking up hustlers from street corners and bringing them to one’s office. From the two times I was in a bath I would say that the difference is the anonymity, the fact that one can move from one to another naked body and indulge as one chooses without any personal involvement.
Oddly enough, the first time I went into a bath was in the seventies, in Boston, and remarkably after a Classics Department reception at Harvard to which I was invited as an alumnus. There I met a former student who was himself a classics professor at one of the nearby institutions. We both got drunk and left the party together, when, to my great surprise, he suggested we go to the baths in downtown Boston. I knew him only as a thirty-five-year-old conventional married male, so this was really a shock of adjustment. We rolled around naked with a bunch of guys there, then took showers, put on our clothes, and went home without commenting on this novel experience together. A few months later when I was having coffee with him I was startled to hear him tell me that he had been back to the baths. In the rigid theater of my mind I could not cast him as a gay male, especially since he did not in any way change his manner or voice from the conventional fellow I had known forever. Where was the mask? The facade? I have often thought of that. He and I were old friends, intellectuals sharing the same knowledge, both married with children, and, as the evening at the baths showed, both at ease with same-sex experiences. Why didn’t I build on that evening? Why didn’t we become lovers? Wouldn’t that have resolved problems of married life in Brookline?
My introduction to a sexual life had been with boys I knew well; I knew their families, where they lived, often their history, and it was from that context we could talk together before and after our encounters. That was my model for interaction with men who prostituted sex; some of the most interesting conversations I have had in Europe have been with young men postcoitally sitting and smoking a few cigarettes and describing their lives to me in answer to my questions. I could recount meeting all sorts of interesting young fellows here in the States. I don’t think you get that kind of c
hatting in the baths. But the issue of the moment was that I was too old for my young friend, soon to become my ex-lover. He needed a greater validation of his sexual habits and of his body and person as performing elements in a sexual drama. So our breakup was all for the best for him. Good luck and God bless. We remained friends.
The fourth of the young men with whom I had serious romantic relationships was a student I noticed on the day of the inauguration of Ronald Reagan. It was also the first day of second term and he was sitting in my class. He used to make jokes about the coincidence of the first day of class and the inauguration, which is why I remember it. I remember picking him out of a class of twenty-five or thirty because he was ruggedly handsome and ugly at the same time, not to mention the unusually surly and unhappy look he could assume. Even when he showed his attractive side it was remarkable how glum he looked. I became more curious, even alarmed, and at last contrived to stroll with him from the class in the direction of the library, where we were both heading. We stopped at a bench on the way and chatted. I managed to get around to his unhappiness. He came from Colorado, had followed a girlfriend to Boston University, no sooner enrolled than she had left him to start up with another fellow. He stayed on. It was his second semester, he “guessed” he liked his classes; it seemed clear he was not an enthusiastic student, although his conversation marked him as intelligent. It was his first experience of the East Coast, which he did not like. He particularly did not like all the Jewish girls at Boston University; they weren’t like girls back home. I could just imagine what the girls were like in his suburb. It was mostly Catholic, he said. He was an indifferent Catholic becoming more definitely lapsed. He was particularly repelled by the gay boys in his dorm and at the gym, where he played a lot of pickup basketball; they were always trying to hit on him, he thought, when he was showering. All of this was said in an angry voice, which was his most common mode, I could see. He used to work for a gay man at a newspaper in Denver, and once he and the guy had gotten it clear that they were not going to get it on, they were easy with each other, but these gay boys in his dorm, in the showers, he claimed, would not take no for an answer. He found it disgusting.
His Marlboro Man western swagger, gruffness, and angry tone, combined with the inevitable boyishness of being twenty, I found particularly charming. I contrived to talk with him whenever I could. As the weather turned warm I planned to install some used lumber as a fence at my property in Cambridge and asked if he would like to earn money helping me. He abruptly volunteered to work for free. Our work together on this project was, I am sure, what most fathers and sons experience, although my sons and I had never gotten ourselves into this. He and I fought over every detail. I am by nature a controlling figure; in this instance I was twice the age of the man who was working for me. The young guy had a westerner’s contempt for effete easterners, and it was all too clear that he thought I was a typical effeminate literature professor who did not know a hammer from a nail, and there was something personal in these daily disputes too. We each wanted to control, natural enough for two males working on such a project, but it was more that we wanted to insist upon our personalities and identities in the confines of this two-person arena. So the matter of the argument—should the board slant this way or that? should the hammer pound down or up at this point?—mattered all too much. It was entirely funny, we were sniffing each other out, there was some kind of attraction that had nothing to do with the fence-building. I recognized that I found the kid attractive, that I would not mind jumping into bed with him, but of course I would never suggest it, because he would pound me, that was clear. His anger I just chalked up to the fact that he was that kind of person, maybe because he was from Colorado and cowboys all have that tough manner in the movies. Still, we became friends from talking during the lunch breaks I provided. It was clear that we liked each other. I told him he had beautiful eyelashes, to which he just looked glumly down at his half-eaten sandwich, and I felt silly.
Summer came, he went to special courses at Harvard Summer School, I went off to the house at the beach and the peace of my garden. One day in August when I was up in Cambridge, he stopped by to look at the fence we had built, if for no other reason than to argue that it had not exactly been a joint enterprise no matter what I thought. I asked him in for a beer, whereupon he proceeded to tell me excitedly about the great sex he had been having in the summer school dorm in Cambridge. He had never known anything like this. I reminded him that he was indeed a very sexy young man, and obviously a choice specimen for any collection of women. This was a new idea for him; clearly nothing in his Catholic boyhood and suburban school had prepared him for such a jolly summer of promiscuity. He was clearly intrigued as well as made uneasy as he heard me describe his sexual charms in my own flamboyant style. “You remind me of the newspaper editor back in Denver,” he remarked without specifying, but in saying that he relaxed some kind of guard he had up. At least that was how I sensed it.
When September arrived and he went back to the university, he stopped by my office, and I invited him for the weekend to the house at the shore. On Saturday evening a former student of mine, who had transformed herself at age thirty into a singer, suddenly appeared at the door to announce that she and her rock band were performing nearby. The young man was thrilled to meet this minor celebrity, more so when she asked him to come along and sit onstage during the performance. My other weekend guest was a graduate student, with whom I sat talking of her dissertation until she went to bed and I started doing the dishes. Eventually the young man came back, high from his experience, high from the dope they had all been smoking. He came into the kitchen, gave me a hug, touched his cheek to mine, and returned to the living room and lay down on the sofa, staring up at the ceiling and whistling some of the music he had been hearing. When I had finished the dishes, I came into the living room, and saw that his eyes met mine and stayed with me as I moved toward him. I could not resist dropping to the floor beside him and putting my hand on his chest. He turned to smile, then once again gazed at the ceiling. I moved my hand to his crotch, felt him hard there, and pressed a bit.
“Let’s go upstairs,” I said. And that began three wonderful years of an improbable companionship, ending only when he told me with tears on his cheeks, “Homosexuality is just not for me.”
Waiting in the wings, so to speak, was a young woman with whom he had been working, whose interest in him was so palpable that I was amazed he had not noticed long since. It was the truth, and I had to admit they looked beautiful together, and I tried as best I could to keep a smile on my face watching them walk down the garden path, hand in hand, and stand under the chuppah at their wedding in the summer of the following year. I was often amused when I thought that his two bêtes noires, gay men and Jewish girls, had ended up in his bed one after the other. We had lived together, had fought again and again, just like father and son, on many more building projects, and when we went hiking we were like brothers, exploring the trails of Massachusetts, one of his great passions. In the afternoons when we were in bed together we were lovers, but he did not talk of this except when saying goodbye. Years later he invited me to join him in Mexico to show me all the favorite places that he and his wife visited. (It was the impetus for the many trips I have made there, including one six-week stay when I learned the language.) He was just as great a guy in his forties as he had been early on, and I was so happy that our friendship had progressed to this new stage. We steered clear of anything physical on our trip in Mexico, except at the end when we were saying goodbye in the airport. “Well, this it,” he said, as he prepared to see me go off in the direction of what passes for security there and on to my gate. He took me in his arms, we embraced warmly, and then he kissed me on the lips, for not too long a time, but enough to seal into it all that great emotion and passion of the days gone by.
The saga of the boyfriends ends with the young man who had been the first of the four, the young married Englishman. He returned to my erotic
life from time to time in England, in the Norfolk countryside where he was born and in London, then again in New York City off Tompkins Square when he had been divorced. He was always introducing me to another new girlfriend, a habit also of Boyfriend Number Two, and which so clearly unsettled the young ladies. They understood only too well whom they were meeting and how they were being vetted by him. Eventually I myself introduced him to a young woman, who became his second wife. I was best man at their wedding and then their nearby neighbor in Cambridge. And so our affair finally ended, this time forever, as I made clear to his new bride so that she would not have to be uncertain and unhappy when he walked the dog and stopped by for a chat.
SEVEN
SOMEDAY MY PRINCE WILL COME
“With this ring I thee wed,” words spoken before the altar of the Swedenborg Chapel, Cambridge, Massachusetts, May 10, 2008, eighteen years and one hundred forty-four days after we met (Kent Johnson)
Before the prince arrived, however, I lay around for some time asleep with the apple in my mouth. Which is to say, in the landscape of life I was trudging a lot more down in the valleys than looking out joyously from the peaks. Teaching at Boston University was so disagreeable to me that I grew depressed whenever I had to think about going to the campus, let alone actually entering the place. Imagine my joy, therefore, in the autumn of 1981 when I got a call from the chair at Vassar College, a guy I had met when I was in Athens, inviting me to come to the college for the academic year 1982–83 as the Blegen Professor of Classics. This, he explained, was an endowed chair for scholarly research given annually, in which the holder’s main obligation, apart from being a “presence” on campus, was to give a lecture course in the spring semester. It was only four years after my year at the American School. Some academics would have trouble getting leaves in such close succession, but the administration of Boston University, having tried and failed to get me to resign, evidently saw their next best option was to let me take as many leaves as I liked to get me off campus. So I was off to Poughkeepsie for what turned out to be nothing but fun for nine months. The Blegen Professor was housed in a fully furnished little house on the edge of the campus. (“Rather twee, but it will serve,” was the description of one of the previous holders of the Blegen chair.) The campus itself was a miniature park, elegant in its proportion and its plantings, having been designed by the firm of Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer who cocreated New York’s Central Park. Vassar’s faculty and its president welcomed me so warmly that I felt I was in another universe after the coldness, suspicion, spying, and treachery that was daily fare at Boston University. The faculty meetings were an absolute delight, in which one could step over to a sideboard set out with hors d’oeuvres and wine as the debates and discussions grew long.
My Husband and My Wives Page 22