But there is a time and a place for everything. We even recognize Red China when the right time comes, when we can swallow our pride, when we can shatter our mirror and break out of our shell. I was becoming acutely aware that the cosmic trip was not going to take me much farther. It was going to leave me all alone in a cave somewhere, with no cowboys, sitting in a lotus position looking down at my varicocele, feeling sorry for myself.
I visited Brook again in August. We met for drinks at one of those plush downstairs Washington bars. This time I told him. I told him because after eleven years of silence, I could stand loneliness no longer, I could stand pretending no longer, and I wanted to tell someone that I loved him. I told him because I felt the best years of my life were slipping away, working late at IBM.
With three drinks in me and more stammering and prefacing and blushing than I care to remember, I made the startling, astonishing revelation—that I liked boys instead of girls. I was shaking with adrenaline, and my teeth were chattering.
Thousands of times I had fantasized telling someone I was “a homosexual.” (Which sounds so much worse than telling someone you are “gay.”) And now I had done it, the record spoiled, birth given to the idea. But the rest of the fantasy never materialized. Brook did not stand up in surprise and disgust and shout, “A homosexual?,” attracting the stares of everyone in the bar. Lightning did not strike. The floor did not even move.
He just listened sympathetically. Not sympathy for my homosexuality, but for the trouble I obviously had accepting it. His first question was: Had I seen The Boys in the Band?
No. I should, he said.
We talked for hours; rather, I talked for hours, telling the horrors of sleeping with Kathy in Tossa, Hilda in camp, the red crayon; Tommy, Brian, Hank….
Brook said that he had slept with a few guys at college and that he wanted to be able to find some physical expression for the emotional “love” he felt for other guys. But that he had not had too much success. I guess he is “eight” or “nine” on the scale. What normal male doesn’t have some locker room pat-on-the-butt feelings for his best buddies? Ten is an extreme, not a goal or a standard of desirable normality—no?
When the bar closed, we went back to Brook’s apartment. I got undressed to go to sleep. He came over and put his hand on my shoulder. I felt awkward, embarrassed—he was thinking of me not as a friend when he did that, but as a homosexual, which made it different. I started to move away. I thought he was doing it not because he really wanted to, but because he felt sorry for me, and I was too proud for that. He wouldn’t let me back off. He put his arms around me and hugged. I hugged back, confused but very hard.
He said he wanted me to get used to touching. He said that to a point, he liked contact with me—back rubs, lying on top of each other, wrestling around. He just didn’t want it to go too far; he wasn’t sexually turned on by me. That was the part, of course, that made me feel awkward—like one of the resident faculty members at Yale trying to pick fights with the attractive undergraduates.
So I can’t say that I was at ease or that we had wild, glorious sex together. We wrestled around. But that didn’t matter: I had someone to talk with. I was luxuriating in honesty for the first time in my life. And relaxing my defenses. Creakingly, haltingly at first, and not without second thoughts, yet letting my guard down all the same.
I could tell Brook I loved him. I did. He told me that though it was not sexual, he loved me back. Now I’ll tell you something. He must have loved me in a way, or else he wouldn’t have had the patience to help me through this rather critical period. It put quite a burden on him. He was, after all, the only person I had ever told. Whenever I had something heavy to say from then on, I would call—who else? I didn’t have other friends to spread the weight around to, and there was a lot of weight in the months following August, while I tried to adjust to a whole new way of life, a whole new set of values, a shaking up of all my solidly entrenched defenses.
At first it was all I could do to say the word “homosexual” and its synonyms. It took months, literally, for me to get reasonably comfortable talking with Brook about what I thought and felt. I called and visited frequently.
Once around Christmas he was talking about the British girl he had met over the summer and about how he wished he could go to London for Christmas vacation to see her. He was embarrassed when I surprised him with a roundtrip ticket. I told him I knew that in a way people didn’t like to be given things, that it could ruin a relationship. But he would be doing me a favor if he would just accept the stupid ticket: I had so much damn love inside me that had always been looking for an outlet, and would he just grin and bear it and be the outlet? Brook understood. He accepted the ticket and thanked me once then and once when he returned. Neither of us has mentioned it since. Perfect.
Hank came back from Paris and was home in St. Louis. I found a business excuse to go out and visit. I had missed my ex-roommate a lot that year. Friday night we went to the dating bar to try to pick up a couple of chicks. Unsuccessful and sleepy, we returned to his apartment around two.
“Sit down, Hank. There’s something I want to tell you.” My teeth were beginning to chatter again; my palms were sweating like cold-water pipes.
“Say what?” he yawned, sitting down.
I looked down at my hands. “I don’t know why, but I have always felt exactly the same way you have about sex, except you’ve felt it for girls, and I’ve felt it for boys. For as long as I can remember,” I said, sneaking a glance at Hank, “I have been gay. I mean, I’ve never done anything. You’re only the second person I’ve ever told. But I finally decided I would risk my friendships for a chance to open up….”
So I opened up, and we talked until five in the morning. Of course, I assured Hank that while I loved him, I had long since repressed any sexual designs on him, and he was safe. He blushed.
Hank seemed moved. Unlike Brook, he had never had even the slightest contact with homosexuals except for brushing off the occasional approach. He had never thought much about it. All he knew was that there were some people in the world who were born boys but wanted to be girls and that they were kind of pathetic. But like Brook, the only reaction my revelation apparently evoked was the desire to make things easier. The first thing he did was to tell me he was amazed; next he told me it made no difference to him, that I was still his best friend; and then he asked whether I had seen The Boys in the Band. Or, for that matter, whether I oughtn’t to see a psychiatrist.
I didn’t think so. As a kid, going to a shrink would have caused me even more embarrassment and anxiety and would have robbed me of my cosmic martyrdom. I wouldn’t have been the BLBITW, I would have been a disturbed child. And fourteen-year-olds don’t just walk off the street into a shrink’s office. Their parents bring them. My God! If I wasn’t allowed to ride my bicycle out on the street, do you think I would have been allowed to be a homosexual? My parents would have been shocked and, mainly, awfully unhappy. They would have felt guilty, that they were “to blame”—which is simply ridiculous, because they have to rank among the world’s best parents.
As for seeing a shrink now that I was old enough to go by myself and now that I had broken my inner shell—well, I still didn’t think it was a good idea. After eleven years of thinking about myself for hours on end, day in and day out, I felt I had come to know myself reasonably well. True, I had steered clear of the clinical literature. True, I had been leaning hard on seemingly ridiculous cosmic fantasies, martyrdom, and the like. But I knew what I was leaning on. I knew the self-image I wanted. I knew what I was doing, in a way.
One thing I knew for sure was that I was not changeable. Hypnosis, Freudian psychoanalysis, shock treatments, or just “the right girl” were not going to work in my case. Maybe for someone at “three” on the scale; not for me. From age eleven I had gotten hard when I saw pictures of boxers in Sports Illustrated; I had never gotten hard looking at Playboy. Quite the contrary: The best way I found to get ri
d of my hard-on when it might prove embarrassing was to fantasize sex with a girl.
Nor did I have any desire to “be changed.” I had grown rather attached to myself over the years, screwball though I was. A me that liked girls rather than boys wouldn’t be me at all.
If I had wanted to change, then I would have had a real problem, seeing as how it would almost certainly have been a lost cause, at $25 or $50 an hour, three times a week, for life.
“No, Hank, I don’t want to see a shrink right now. I think I can work things out without one,” I said, explaining about the unlikelihood of my ever “changing.” “Do you think a psychiatrist could make you gay?” I asked.
“No.”
“Well, I feel the same way, only in reverse. Sexually speaking, I’m probably just like you—only in reverse.”
The dam was indeed broken, and I started pouring myself out with increasing frequency and ease to virtually all of my good friends. All were straight, as I expected; all were glad I had told them; and, some amusing awkwardness notwithstanding, all reacted well. Telling them made us closer friends. For my part, I was much more relaxed and happy, not having to think twice every time I opened my mouth. How refreshing to walk down the street with a straight friend and, while he was nudging and leering about the approaching girl, nudge and leer back about the approaching girl’s date!
I have to admit, too, that I relished the initial expression of surprise that would invariably form on my friends’ faces when I told them. It was confirmation that my masquerade had been convincing and that my masculinity remained, more or less, intact.
My straight friends seem pleased that I am honest with them. It shows that I really like them, as I really do—and who doesn’t like to be liked? Telling them does make us closer. And it’s not your average ho-hum conversation. I’m talking about something new to most of my straight friends. In many cases, I’m sure, they listen thinking mainly of themselves—their own playing around in camp, if they did; where they fall on that scale of mine; where they would like to fall; whether a shrink could change their sexuality; what it would be like making it with a guy; who else of their friends might be gay, if I was….
But was I really? I mean, sure, I’ve been talking a lot about it, but the only foreign tongue that has ever entered my mouth has been Hilda Goldbaum’s. Isn’t it time for a litde action?
CHAPTER 7
It was now February of that year of revelations, and I was beginning to run out of straight friends to astound. I had actually gotten to the point that I could speak the words with some fluency.
The economy had seen better days, but I was riding about as high in New York as a twenty-two-year-old junior executive could ride. My parents were awfully proud of me, which was what had always made me run in the first place. The only hints of concern they showed, in a very low-key not-to-be-pushy way, were: (a) that I was working so hard I was not having a “full life,” which in a family like ours is the way intercourse is described; and (b) that I was maybe smoking a little too much grass, and mightn’t it be bad for the genes I would pass down to their grandchildren? (Up to this point, Goliath and Goliath-in-law had not produced any grandchildren. It was beginning to look as though that might be my job.)
My parents’ concerns were pretty well summed up one day about a year ago when I received in the mail a clipping from the New York Times, MARIJUANA IS LINKED TO DULLED SEX DRIVE, read the headline, with the text that followed too ridiculous to quote. My inimitable mother had written across the top: “LET IT BE A LESSON TO US ALL.”
Yes, I was smoking grass. And I must tell you the most remarkable thing. After I had told Brook “who I really was” and all that, I started to get stoned when I smoked. It was the same $15-an-ounce shit, according to our source, and I was rasping it down my tender throat in the same awkward way. (Need I mention that the BLBITW had never smoked cigarettes?) But now I was getting stoned when I smoked it.
In any case, I was doing well in New York, and except for being a sex-starved druggie, was still the perfect son. But every time I talked with Brook, he would ask how I was doing—that is, what progress I had made. And I was wondering much the same thing. The new-found openness with my close friends was sensational, the handshakes were still great—but there is just no limit to human desire. Not to mine anyway.
I would read the bathroom bulletin boards. But I knew that even if I ever did chance to find a “Meet you here at 3 P.M. on the 23rd” sometime prior to 3 P.M. on the twenty-third, which somehow never was the case—I could not possibly show up. Was it possible that those floor-to-ceiling extensions the library had added to its bathroom stall walls were to prevent what I thought they were to prevent? Was it conceivable that those peep holes that had been bored in bathroom stalls all over the world had been bored for peeking?
The only practical course of action I could think of was for one of my straight friends to introduce me to one of his gay friends. But none of my straight friends had any other gay friends. Or at least none they knew of.
I went to see The Boys in the Band. Had it been shown in my high school or at Yale—mandatory, so no one would have to choose to see it voluntarily and thereby implicate himself—I think I would have had an easier time of things. And had I known then which of the actors in this movie were in real life straight and which gay, I would certainly have been given heart!
I am not saying I would have been encouraged to come out in any direct way. To be the powerful, hysterical movie it is—hysterically funny and just plain hysterical—an unrealistic amount of emotion and unhappiness must be crowded into a two-hour gay birthday party. But at least I would have learned a little about gay life, become familiar with some gay lingo. I would have seen a perfectly straight-looking, dignified pipe-smoking man who was gay, and that would have made an impression on me.
I went to see The Boys in the Band not so much to learn gay lingo as to meet someone standing on line or in the theater. I met no one. I think my problem was that I just couldn’t force myself to look “inviting,” however you do that. Well, I suppose a start at looking “inviting” would be to stop looking forbidding. What I looked like, I think, was a straight kid who didn’t want any funny stuff from any of the queers who went to see this movie.
After The Boys in the Band, I secretly went to see a movie I simply could not resist. It was one of the first of the gay porno movies to be shown at regular prices in more-or-less regular theaters, off Forty-second Street. I couldn’t resist it because the ad in the New York Times, no less, was for Andy Warhol’s—That makes it art! An excuse if I’m seen!—Lonesome Cowboy. Need I say more?
I had a team of wild horses dragging me to that movie, and another team of equal strength trying to drag me in the other direction. The reason the first team won was that I was pulling with them and tipped the balance.
Fortunately there was no line to be seen standing in, the ratty old theater was too dark for me to be identified; but it was just light enough for me to realize that the audience was almost entirely old men with overcoats in their laps.
Lonesome Cowboy was quite the turn-on. I snuck out before the end so as not to be seen, and left as Lonesome as ever, only, if possible, hornier.
Then one night in March, flying back to New York from a business trip, I read an article in Esquire that said something about the “Personals” in the classified ad section of the East Village Other.
On the way home, I bought a copy of the now-defunct paper, feeling guilty as I asked for it, as though the newsy could read my motive, and feeling stupid for feeling guilty. Sure enough, the personals were filled with groin tinglers, mostly for male “models” who would pose for nude photography, who were “butch,” whatever that meant—I swear I didn’t know at the time, though I got a sense of it from the word—who were “well hung,” which I supposed to my embarrassment had something to do with that area down there, and who all had different names and measurements and hair colors in different ads, but who all had the same phone numbe
r. Hmmmm.
I called that number several times. Sometimes it just rang and rang. Usually it was busy. And sometimes a male voice answered. When that happened, I simply said—nothing. I was really going to ask some voice to come up to my apartment, right, past the doorman, maybe past the superintendent, maybe on the one night my parents would decide to drop in unexpectedly—and when this model got up to my apartment, I would take out my finger paints and my red crayon, right, and start to draw him in the nude. I was almost certain those models were never drawn or photographed, that they would come expecting to have sex. But there were an awful lot of people I didn’t want to have sex with, so what if this happened to be one of them? Or what if he happened to be in the business of recording names and addresses and sending you little bills each month? Or of just coming over with a couple of friends and rolling you, for kicks? I would listen to the voice saying “Hello” and try to perform some kind of audio holography by picturing the whole person from just a voice fragment. It didn’t work.
I finally decided to go down to the address listed in one of the personals—just show up and see what happened. I brought my wallet with plenty of cash and no ID.
It was a bright April day. I walked up the stairs of a warehouse-type building in the West Teens somewhere, into a room whose door was partially open. There was no sign on the door, but it was all so dingy and dark, with my pupils just beginning to adjust from the bright outdoors—I knew this was the place.
As I walked in, something in the stale air reminded me of a traveling fair that had passed through Lewiston, Maine, when I was a junior counselor at camp. Another counselor and I had gone to check it out, bet on the wheel and throw baseballs through tires, but when we got there, a barker was calling to us—it was a very small fair—“Come on, boys, show’s about to start, last call to see Darlene do her world-famous tease, last call….” I’m sure his patter was much raunchier than that; I had all but entirely repressed the whole experience, it was so awful. My companion, of course, was dying to see Darlene do her thing, and only a homo would have held back. The air inside the tent was nauseating. There were only a few other people inside gathered around a small elevated wooden stage. For twenty minutes more nothing happened as the barker kept exhorting others to hurry, hurry, hurry, the show was about to begin, and for twenty minutes I had to pretend that I couldn’t wait.
The Best Little Boy in the World Page 9