by Roger Ebert
Those were the days of the civil rights movement. We linked hands and sang “We Shall Overcome.” We protested. We demonstrated. Among the students I met at those student congresses were Stokely Carmichael, Julian Bond—and, for that matter, Barney Frank. They were born to be who they became. I was still in the process of changing. My emotional life was catching up to my intellectual and political life.
Later in the 1960s Negros became blacks. As a movie critic, I could watch that happening. The new usage first appears in my reviews around 1967 or 1968. Afros. Angela Davis. Black exploitation movies. Black is beautiful. Long interviews with Ossie Davis, Brock Peters, Sidney Poitier, Abbey Lincoln, Yaphet Kotto. What point am I making? None. It’s not as if I sat at their feet and learned about race. It’s more that the whole climate was changing, growing more free and open, and the movies were changing, too.
At some time during the years after the day I sat on the floor and looked at that little boy’s palm, something happened inside me and I saw black people more clearly—and brown people and Asians as well. I made friends, I dated, I worked with them, I drank with them, we cooked, we partied, we laughed, sometimes we loved. This is as it should have been from the start of my life, but I was born into a different America and was a child of my times until I learned enough to grow up. I do not propose myself as an example, because I was carried along with my society as it awkwardly felt and fought its way out of racism.
When I proposed marriage to Chaz, it was for the best possible reason: I wanted to be married to this woman. Howard Stern asked me on the radio one day if I thought of Chaz as being black every time I looked at her. I didn’t resent the question. Howard Stern’s gift is the nerve to ask personal questions. I told him, honestly, that when I looked at her I saw Chaz. Chaz. A fact. A person of enormous importance to me. Chaz. A history. Memories. Love. Passion. Laughter. Her Chaz-ness filled my field of vision. Yes, I see that she is black, and she sees that I am white, but how sad it would be if that were in the foreground. Now, with so many of my own family dead, her family gives me a family, an emotional home I need. Before our first trip out of town, she took me home to meet her mother.
I believe at some point in the development of healthy people there must come a time when we instinctively try to understand how others feel. We may not succeed. There are many people in this world today who remain enigmas to me, and some who are offensive. But that is not because of their race. It is usually because of their beliefs.
One day in high school study hall, a Negro girl walked in who had dyed her hair a light brown. Laughter spread through the room. We had never, ever, seen that done before. It was unexpected, a surprise, and our laughter was partly an expression of nervousness and uncertainty. I don’t think we wanted to be cruel. But we had our ideas about Negroes, and her hair didn’t fit.
Think of that girl. She wanted to try her hair a lighter brown, and perhaps her mother and sisters helped her, and she was told she looked pretty, and then she went to school and we laughed at her. I wonder if she has ever forgotten that day. I never have. It shames me.
45 MY ROMANCES
FROM THE EARLIEST days of my adolescence, my love life was conducted in secrecy. My behavior centered on a paralyzing reluctance to engage my mother’s anger. Her conviction that I was destined for the Church led to hostility toward any expression of my sexuality. Late one night after an orgasmic session in the front seat of my car in front of one of the university residence halls, I hung my blue jeans in back of my closet, planning to wash them later. With an uncanny sixth sense, she found them there the next morning and waved the proof of my sin before me, accusing me of having “wasted a baby.” I felt humiliated. I began to keep as much of my life as possible a secret from her. If my father had been alive it would have been different, I believe, but he was not alive.
My early social life was conventional. My first date was for an official graduation dance at the Thelma Leah Ritter Dance School, above the Princess Theater. Here I was enrolled after failing to master the fox-trot, the samba, the mambo, and the waltz while practicing with my aunt Martha in the living room of my grandmother’s house on Clark Street. My grandmother, my mother, my father, Martha’s friend Jean, and my uncle Bob, who had never danced a step in his life, sat around offering suggestions.
For that first dance I invited a St. Mary’s classmate I was good friends with, but her name is gone from my memory. We were dropped off at the corner and walked up to the steps, only to find the door locked. I had the wrong night. The evening was saved and much improved when we went instead to see Bridge on the River Kwai at the Princess. Here I enacted the ages-old ritual of casually resting my arm on the back of her seat and then advancing it so slowly that had it not been a long movie it might never have reached her shoulder. When the bombs went off my arm made the final decisive leap.
In high school and the full flood of adolescence, I had powerful crushes and even what I took for the time as love. At some point I made it clear I would not be going into the priesthood—I had no “vocation”—but my mother warned against liaisons with non-Catholic girls. “There’s no future in it. You can’t ever marry them. It’s not fair to the girl.” When I got the euphoric freedom of a driver’s license, she could no longer be sure who I was seeing, and I began a pattern of denying I was seeing anyone at all. I was out with the gang. Or “working over at the News-Gazette.” Or “just down at the Tigers’ Den,” our chaperoned Urbana hangout. Or “I went to the movies.” Eventually I did acknowledge the reality of some of my high school romances: Mary Scott, Marty McCloy, Judi Irle, my senior prom date Carol Zimmer. My mother approved of my high school dates, they were very nice, they came from good families, but I was reminded that I could never marry one. “Why don’t you date a nice Catholic girl?” If I had, my life might have turned out differently. But somehow I had known all of the St. Mary’s girls too well for eight years, and when I reached ninth grade the public school girls seemed, well, women and not playmates. I pointed out that my mother herself, after all, had married a non-Catholic. “Yes, I did. We had to be married in the rectory. I don’t want you making the same mistake.” Apparently a church wedding was more important than my happiness.
The roots of my hesitation began before I even dreamed of romance, much less sex. They involved a fear of my mother’s emotionalism. My parents didn’t have many domestic quarrels, but they left deep wounds as I curled under my blankets and heard angry voices raised and footfalls up and down the little hallway, between the bedroom and the kitchen, and the slamming of doors. Many children grow up with unspeakable abuse. My parents were always loving and kind. Perhaps that made this anger seem more shocking. In my memory, it is my mother’s voice, raised and hysterical, that comes through the bedroom door, and my father’s voice sounds lower, placating, reasoning. What was really going on I cannot say, although I had the impression the arguments always began over money and their two families and then escalated into denunciations, “you don’t love me,” and so on.
I felt a deep aversion to my mother’s anger. I began to avoid confrontation by deception. This pattern deepened in college, and I began a double life. During those years I was drawn eagerly into the campus world of beatniks, bohemians, liberals, writers, artists, theater people, the Campus Folksong Club, and hangouts like the Turk’s Head Coffee House, the Capitol Bar, and certain tables in the basement of the Illini Union frequented by students who seemed thrillingly nonconformist. I began as an enthusiastic Phi Delt and even moved into the house for a semester. What began to change me was a growing liberalism, in those years before the upheavals in the late 1960s. Representing the Daily Illini, I starting attending the summer congresses of the National Student Association. Judy Johnson, the news editor of the DI, brought back from her first one the Port Huron Statement of the new Students for a Democratic Society, and in reading it I found a powerful appeal to my developing feelings. SDS was still then “the Student Department of the League for Industrial Democracy,” a
n element of the Socialist Party USA, the Norman Thomas group of democratic socialists. The card carried an anti-communist statement on its back. I read Thomas’s books, and as editor of the DI began to run his syndicated column. By “syndicated,” I mean that he wrote it for New America, the party newspaper, and mailed us a carbon copy from his typewriter for two dollars a week.
At a congress at Indiana University, I met not only Hayden but Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Julian Bond, Andrea Dworkin, Barney Frank, Jonty Driver, the famously exiled president of the National Union of South African Students, and others who were about to become famous. Their politics were far more advanced than my own. With “We Shall Overcome” ringing in my ears, I returned to live in the Phi Delt house, and I became uncomfortably aware that it was an all-white house. When my semester in residence had ended, I moved back home and never returned to the house for the rest of my undergraduate years. Again I avoided a confrontation. Many of the brothers were my close friends, and I explained, “It takes all of my time to edit the paper.” This was cowardly, but consistent. My life as a liberal bohemian, the labor union songs I learned at the Campus Folksong Club, the women I dated, my handful of black friends, my fellow faux beatniks were all in a separate compartment. I had schooled myself to avoid confrontation through separating the categories of my life. Not many people ever saw me whole.
Sexually, I was incredibly naïve. After childhood as a Catholic only child and high school in a more innocent time, I remained a virgin until the summer of 1962, when I accompanied a team of the university’s wheelchair athletes on a tour of South Africa. I was twenty and acutely aware of my virginity. At a time before the Pill, middle-class sex was more rare than it soon became, but all the same I feared I was missing the boat and was determined to swim out to it.
One night in Durban a group of us went to a nightclub and my inquisitive gaze was returned by a woman on the dance floor. I asked her to dance. Her name was Mary. As our bodies pressed together, it became clear she was not shy. I had a quick erection. “Friendly chap, aren’t you?” she said. I drew back but she pulled me close again. “Want to become better friends?” she asked. The next afternoon I called her number and visited her in a beachfront apartment. She was clearly naked under a shift. She was also friendly and tactful. “Let’s get the business out of the way,” she said, but after I handed over my money I lost my nerve and said, “I don’t have a whole lot of experience. Maybe we could just talk.”
“Stand up here,” she said, and put her arms around me. She laid her head on my chest. She moved against me. She took my hands and pressed them against her breasts under the shift. These were the first breasts I had touched that were not encased in a brassiere. They were full and indescribably gratifying. “Now you’re friendly again,” she said.
Afterward I walked out into the Durban sunlight and my heart sang. I was a man. My head was held a little higher, I put my hands in my pockets and scuffed my feet. This was what it was all about. I went into an Indian restaurant and ordered a curry.
“Mild?” said the counterman.
“Hot,” I said.
“Maybe you like to try medium?” he said.
“Hot. I know what I’m doing.”
My lips burned for twenty-four hours.
Returning to Illinois, I didn’t find sexual intercourse any more easily available, but once I had experienced the delight of orgasm I discovered that girls also knew of such things, and then began a time of adventures made possible because I owned a car. At the National Student Congress at the University of Minnesota in 1964 I finally performed intercourse with a female undergraduate for the first time. I had good luck in 1965 at the University of Cape Town, but it was not until the early winter of 1966, when I was in graduate school, that I finally experienced intercourse with a student in Champaign-Urbana for the first time. I was twenty-three.
My delayed sexual initiation was perhaps not as unusual as it seemed to me. Sex was problematical in everyday undergraduate life. The likelihood was that you might get nowhere—or if you did, you could be disciplined, arrested, or expelled. The university took aggressive steps to prevent sex among undergraduates. They weren’t allowed to live in their own apartments. In women’s dormitories, a strict curfew was enforced, and too many “late minutes” in a semester would get you hauled up before a disciplinary committee. Campus cops patrolled the parking lots of motels, looking for student stickers. It was assumed that by locking down the women, you would prevent sex. If a couple returned to a woman’s dorm early, they could share a sofa in the lounge, monitored by matrons who enforced the Three Foot Rule: three of their four feet had to be on the floor, if you follow me. Car crashes were blamed on speeding toward women’s dorms to meet the curfew.
In 1960, Leo Koch, an assistant professor of biology, wrote a letter to the editor of the Daily Illini that led to a furor over academic freedom:
With modern contraceptives and medical advice readily available at the nearest drugstore, or at least a family physician, there is no valid reason why sexual intercourse should not be condoned among those sufficiently mature to engage in it without social consequences and without violating their own codes of morality and ethics. A mutually satisfactory sexual experience would eliminate the need for many hours of frustrating petting and lead to happier and longer lasting marriages among our young men and women.
How innocuous that seems today. There was an uproar. Outraged citizens’ groups and the Chicago Tribune called for the university to take action. President David Dodds Henry directed Koch’s dean to relieve the biologist “immediately” of his duties. The American Association of University Professors, while not siding with Koch’s views, said he had a right to express them and noted he had been summarily fired without a hearing. The AAUP imposed censure on the university, which lasted until 1964. In that year Illinois redeemed itself by not dismissing the classics professor Revilo P. Oliver after he wrote an article for the John Birch Society magazine charging that John F. Kennedy was a communist agent murdered by other communists because he “was about to turn American.”
Believing I was far behind the curve in my sex life, I hid that from friends who seemed more experienced. I thought I must be one of the last to get on board. I knew many graduate students who were living together. Others were “going to Chicago for the weekend.” I was a member of the Capitol Crowd, the graduate students who drank in a beloved Green Street bar and eatery. I met most Fridays after classes for the $1.15 perch dinner with Chuck Mullins, a math student whose laugh had an influence on my own; Claire and Alex Gaydasch, who brought along shoe boxes filled with computer punch cards; Mike Bobis, a self-proclaimed universal authority; and Jerry Sullivan, an English major who perpetually seemed to be reading Tom Jones. We were the local bohemians, such as the town possessed, and the bar was equidistant from an art theater and the Turk’s Head Coffee House, where students declaimed their poetry. The Capitol’s atmosphere was relaxed. One Friday night an assistant journalism professor took off his clothes and madly ran about. On Monday morning, he met his class. The incident, as they say, “didn’t get back to anyone.”
It was one night in the Capitol that I saw for the first time one man, an actor named Lara Maraviglia, kiss another man full on the lips. We all fell silent, our eyes evading one another’s, and none of us bold bohemians could utter a single word. Something like a mild electric shock ran through my body. No, I didn’t “discover I was gay.” I discovered that other people surely were. Until then homosexuality had been known to me only in novels, poetry, vague scenes in films, and rumor. I knew lots of “queers,” by which I meant “effeminate men,” but my imagination stopped more or less with them laughing about the same things.
Yet I had an active sex life. In the words of the good professor Koch, I petted, although I never heard anyone use that word. The privacy of the photo library at the Daily Illini was a godsend. On the desk of the editor’s office I did some intense proofreading. In the front seat of my father’s
’55 Ford I experienced delights made all the more exciting because they were restricted. We kissed. I fondled breasts. My hands strayed to her netherlands. My own movables were rummaged. Orgasms in the case of both parties were far from unheard of, although you had to know the girl pretty well, and you might pretend they came by surprise. Eventually I progressed to the point where “Oops!” became a word of delight, but that took a while.
Part of the game was to get… right… up… almost… to the Oops! Point. If you helplessly hurtled past it, well, as Dean of Men Fred Turner used to warn, “Always remember, boys! A stiff prick has no conscience.” So he was widely quoted, anyway. I never heard him say it. It was always someone else who had heard him.
As an undergraduate, these evenings were explained to my censorious mother under “working at the DI” or “studying at the Undergraduate Library.” In the spring of 1964, there was a sudden blowup between my mother and her second husband, George, who was accused of treasuring possessions that reminded him of his first wife, Berenice. I walked out and rented a fifty-five-dollar attic room on Green Street, providentially across from the Steak ’n Shake. One afternoon there I was being visited by Lyn Cole, an editor of the Roosevelt University’s Torch. She answered the telephone. It was my mother calling. When I picked up the receiver, I heard her fury. I was living with a woman. I was lying to her. I had forgotten my Catholic training. Now she knew why I’d really moved out. At this time she had never met a single girl I dated in university. Did she think I was celibate? I have no idea what she thought. From that day forward, she met very few of the women I dated, and they were allegedly just “good friends.” Believe me, I know this is pathetic. I’ve never discussed most of it, except with Chaz. It shows a sad emotional obstruction. I am writing about it here because I’ll write these memoirs once, and if I were to suppress such an embarrassing area there is no point in writing them at all.