At the end of the day I went home and called Brook in New Haven with a progress report. Then I called to talk with Dick and to make plans to get together the next night. Someone else answered and said that Mike was not around. “No, the Mike whose real name is Dick Warren is out, but I’ll take a message for him if you like.” I left my name and number and went to sleep. He must have been out on a job, because he didn’t call.
It took me a couple of days to get him. I couldn’t tell whether he was calling me back when I was out or whether he just wasn’t calling back. I began to feel as though I were being betrayed or at least mistreated, and then I finally caught him in and asked him to go out for a cheeseburger with me after work. He was hesitant, and I, neither then nor now much for subtlety, asked him why—didn’t he want to see me again? Weren’t we friends? I mean, you’re not going to leave me now, are you?
That last little feeling-sorry-for-myself thought I kept to myself as he reassured me. I just didn’t understand, he said: He did like me; but he had to earn some bread, and he couldn’t afford to spend another night with me, because he didn’t want to take my money.
I fell over myself with understanding and relief, saying for Christ’s sake I would be glad to help him out because I would still be getting by far the better end of things—and as the subject of money was awkward for both of us, let’s just not think about it, and please meet me for a goddamn cheeseburger.
He did, wearing the same clothes as before. Maybe he couldn’t afford much of a wardrobe, I thought. We had a relaxed, pleasant meal, cheeseburgers and beer. I gave him a check for $50 and said let’s not even talk about it, just leave it at this: I liked him a lot, and he had done me a world of good, for which I was very grateful.
We went back to the Americana and played a rerun, only, as you would guess, slightly less “passionate,” if you can use that word when nothing is happening, because it was less of an adventure. But I liked it, I thanked Dick and said I hoped I would see him again, and I left to go to work.
It might be a while before I saw him again, Dick told me, because he was going down to Haiti with someone; he wouldn’t tell me exactly why, and he didn’t know when he would be back.
I can’t say I was crushed when I sensed I would likely not see Dick again. I did like him a lot; but the hustler thing bothered me, and I realized that if the second time wasn’t quite as good as the first, the third time might not quite equal the second. I was beginning to feel a little more confident, also. To my amazement, Dick had said I was real good sex—but I didn’t do anything!—and he said he didn’t believe I’d never been to bed with anyone before. (Since then, I should quickly add, I have gotten only mixed reviews.) There was no stopping the kid now. Hell, I was good sex! Dick, himself as good-looking as they come, liked me and said I had a dynamite body (but maybe I should buy a pair of jeans). I was on my way.
CHAPTER 8
I decided I had had it with New York, I had had it with working fourteen-hour days, and I could not come out in the city in which my parents lived. I told IBM I wanted to take the summer off and then to be assigned to a job I knew was coming open in the Boston area. IBM raised a corporate eyebrow, but went along with it.
Guess who was living in Boston. Hank! Hank was entering Harvard Law School, which neatly fit my plan for him to become a Senator. He was living with his girlfriend in Cambridge. And Brook! Brook had finished Yale and was starting work in Roxbury as some kind of community organizer.
I took an apartment not far from Hank’s and spent a lot of time helping to usher in the summer, walking all over Cambridge and Boston, looking up old friends from Yale, digging in.
Within two weeks, Hank had introduced me to a friend of his who ran a coffeehouse in Harvard Square, an old high school friend from St. Louis who I thought just might be gay. My in. Hank said, no, so far as he knew, his friend wasn’t gay. Well, then, what about Hank’s friend’s friend, whom we had met in the coffeehouse, one Oscar Lipschitz? Oscar was gay, no? Hank didn’t know but promised to try to find out.
And here’s to Mr. and Mrs. Lipschitz, wherever they are, for naming their only son Oscar. What’s short for Oscar, who, now that I think of it, was quite short himself? Had they not done it, Oscar might have been out poking little girls at the very time I needed him to show me the scene.
The last thing I mean to do is to make fun of Oscar, a terribly nice guy who teaches underprivileged kids English: His students love him. I highlight his name and height because I presume these two factors had something to do with his turning out gay. (“Life ain’t easy for a boy named Sue,” goes the song.) And I am naturally intrigued by the general subject of what makes people gay. Of course, no one knows for sure and different people are gay for different reasons—but some patterns do seem to emerge.
Not that any short person named Oscar Lipschitz would grow up gay. Like “the boy named Sue” in the song, he could have grown up tough and ornery and mean—except that there must have been other circumstances, such as, perhaps, his height, that caused him to develop differently. Perhaps because he was small, he couldn’t fight back when kids teased him, and he began to feel inferior and to idolize the same kids I idolized, if for different reasons.
There is nothing predictive in this, except perhaps to the extent that there may be a greater probability, if still a fairly small one, that short people with funny names, or tall people without fathers, or medium people who were overly sheltered, will turn out gay.
Anyway, Hank ascertained from his friend at the coffeehouse that Oscar was indeed gay. The next time I ran into Oscar I let it be known that, well, that I thought I probably wanted to meet some, uh, gay people, and, well … Oscar took it from there. He put me more or less at ease as we walked back to my apartment and he there spent several hours telling me all about Boston’s gay scene and about his own way of handling it. He said he would be glad to show me around to all the places and to introduce me to some other people.
He also blew me—or tried to. He worked at it for an incredibly long time, reassuring me, entreating me to relax, telling me how good it would feel. But the more he sucked, the more upset I became, partly at the picture of the situation in general, and that I could be party to such a thing; more specifically, because I couldn’t come. I realized then that I hadn’t come with Dick, either. I was vaguely aware that everyone came when he had sex. Not only was I abnormal in liking guys—maybe I was even abnormal at doing that! I was supposed to like this, but I didn’t. And, as usual, I was still too uptight to come out and say what I was feeling—to be completely honest and admit my fears. If I had, Oscar might have told me all kinds of stories about how it’s hard for everyone at first (a harmless exaggeration), about how it might take me three or four weeks or even months of practice before I could relax enough to enjoy it and come, and that some of his best friends didn’t like blow jobs anyway.
Oscar finally faced reality and bicycled home. I ran for the shower. If everyone showered the way I did that day, the Dial Soap people would rule the world. In my family we didn’t believe in God, so cleanliness had top billing.
Oscar took me to Sporters, only a few hundred yards from the Statehouse, at the foot of Beacon Hill. He told me I should take off my glasses. Except for occasional wire frames, which look good on the right people, you don’t see glasses in gay bars. I would have taken them off anyway—I only wear them when I drive—but that helpful instruction made me self-conscious. I get it: The idea is to saunter in there cool and attractive and masculine, like a gunslinger coming into a saloon in a strange town. I walked into Sporters as confidently as a man walking up to a podium to address a hostile audience on a subject he knows nothing about.
Having never before walked through a door like that, I would now walk through them on and off for the rest of my life.
Despite myself, I was a hit. I was a “new face,” a young face, a face that was attached to a sweater instead of a body shirt—possibly not because it was attached to a lousy body, b
ut possibly because—joy of joys—I was still fresh and innocent in the ways of gay dress and genuinely collegiate, not make-believe collegiate.
It was a Friday night. We had purposely come early, around ten, so the bar would not be too crowded. Later it would get so you had to push and press your way through bottlenecks of people, brushing away occasional stray hands, to find a few feet of space to yourself.
Why did everything get started so late, I wanted to know. What of the people in the bar on a Tuesday night who had to get up at seven the next morning? Oscar told me that the bar wasn’t nearly as crowded on weekdays. Some of the weekday crowd were unemployed, were students, or worked odd hours, like waiters. Others had fallen into the routine of napping for a few hours after work, going to the bar, and then napping for a few hours before work. Those were the people who seemed to have lost control of their lives, he said. Sporters was open from noon to two in the morning, 365¼ days a year (except Saturday nights until one—blue laws), but Oscar suggested that I not bother with it before ten thirty or eleven any night but Sunday. Sunday it gets crowded early. (Everyone knows it does, so they come, so it does.) A lot of people come in Sunday afternoon because a brunch is served free.
Oscar offered three explanations for the lateness of gay life (late the world over). First, he said, by cavorting when all “decent” people were at home asleep, gay people were not likely to be discovered by their decent friends. They had the city largely to themselves. Second, the late hours permitted you to take your girlfriend to dinner and a movie, if you were into throwing your friends off the scent, and then run down to the bar for what you really wanted. Both these explanations would have pertained more to gay life some years ago, when people were even more uptight about being “discovered” and when society was even less tolerant. But having developed this way, there was no reason for custom to change—particularly because of Oscar’s third explanation: It doesn’t do to be one of the first ones at the bar. You look too eager. And if you are looking for a lot of people, why bother to go until it gets crowded, which everyone knows is late?
And there is still a fourth reason: Many people go to gay bars with the idea somewhere in their minds of taking someone home for the night. And many of those agreements are made as the bar is closing, at two. Sure, if two people really hit it off, they can hit it off at any time, anywhere. But more often, it’s not so clear-cut. Neither party is anxious to be shot down by the other, and each thinks that maybe, just maybe, someone even more attractive is going to come over later on and slay some dragons for him—so, as in labor negotiations, it’s harder to make a deal while there is still some time left. And it’s harder to come up with good lines. A good line is handed to you on a silver platter at two when they close the bar. You have to leave; it’s just a question of whether you leave alone or with someone. “Wanna come back to my place for a cup of coffee?”
Sporters had a drab exterior, no windows, and a tiny sign. That much I liked. Inside, it was dimly lit, with walls of mirrors and brick, and a red Formica counter running around the periphery. The place was basically rectangular, with the bar itself in the middle, and three bartenders in the middle of that. Once inside, you could walk all the way around the bar and come back to where you started. There was another rectangle, an open space, off to one side of the first rectangle, with a men’s room and a ladies’ room off that. (Use either, which I needn’t tell you is a funny feeling.)
The first thing Oscar did as we entered was to buy me a beer (Carling Black Label, drink from the bottle) to give me something to do with my hands, something to look at, something to relax me. Like a barracuda attacking one of Goldfinger’s victims, I scraped the label off in seconds. Had I been given a napkin with the bottle, it too would have been in little shreds and knots and crumbly balls. The beer was soon gone, and Oscar thrust me another. We were now halfway around the bar, Occupancy Not More Than 366 Persons—but the police who come in two nights a week for a beer and whatever, and who never ticket cars parked out in front in the bus stop, can overlook a little overcrowding. The last thing they want to do is to have to count a crowd of queers.
That early there were no more than 100 people in the bar, and every one of them, except for Mary, the octogenarian coat check lady (“fag hag”), stared at me as I walked by. Most of them were older than me (twenty-five to forty), and none was a cowboy. Well, there was one older guy dressed up like a cowboy, cowboy hat, buckles and all, but you know that is not what I had in mind.
I was sitting on one of the red-topped soda fountain stools in the other rectangular room, facing what I came to think of as the hippie area. This area ran from the jukebox on the right past the entrance to the men’s and ladies’ rooms in the middle of that wall, to the auxiliary bar on the left. It was as far from the entrance to the bar as you could get. Young men with shoulder-length hair, often bearded, a little spaced out like as not, stood in this area, not drinking much because 65 cents for a beer is a ripoff, man, when you can buy a six-pack for 99 cents or a tab of sunshine for $2.
As you moved away from that wall and into the center of this auxiliary rectangle, toward me, you tended to have a layer of people who liked hip types, but who were only a little hip themselves. Their hair was not as long; they were drinking. Or else they were people trying to make their way to the jukebox, which never ran out, ever, or to the men’s and ladies’ rooms. (Talk about Scylla and Charybdis! The men’s room had no private places; the ladies’ room had lockable stalls. I was too Pee Shy to use the men’s room; too uptight to use the ladies’ room.)
In the other rectangle, with the main bar, the average age of the crowd rose gradually on either side as you moved toward the door. Around St. Patrick’s Day you even had some men in their forties and fifties getting smashed and dancing Irish jigs—but always on the left side as you entered near the door. You never saw these men in the back where I was sitting. Little neighborhoods were established by custom and maintained by a subtle pattern of smiles, frowns, glances, icy stares.
The lighting in the bar was uneven. Generally, the best-looking people chose to sit in the best-lit areas, though all the hippies, regardless of looks, preferred the darker corners in the back.
Nearly half the bar-goers were sitters who stayed put the whole night, either talking with friends or just watching as people walked by. A few sat facing the bar, backs to the crowds, drinking cosmic drinks with themselves. The other half, perhaps more, were cruisers, walking around most of the time and occasionally sitting down for a minute when a stool happened to come free, saying a few words to friends they passed, sending a glance or two at someone they would like to meet, engaged in the continuous effort to find that elusive White Knight—or at least some elbowroom.
The wall against which I was sitting was a good vantage point. It bordered a major traffic flow, and sooner or later everyone in the bar had to pass by. A lot of people looked as they passed, but very few came up to talk. Most didn’t try to make conversation because when someone looked, I looked the other way. If two people were looking from different sides, I would look down at my beer. A few asked me whether I was from around here—oh, Cambridge? I used to live in Cambridge! But I was so icily indifferent to the fact that they used to live in Cambridge that none pursued it very far.
I wasn’t playing hard to get; I was just nervous, shy, and turned off by all these unattractive people wanting me. I was getting ready to give up hope, around midnight, when I spotted a guy who looked just the way I thought a guy should look. Now the only trick would be to get his attention in that crowd of hundreds and somehow let him know that I wanted to be his friend and somehow convince him that, among all these people, and the friends he no doubt already had, I was worth becoming friends with.
What I did not think of at the time, and what took me a while to adjust to, was that by gay standards I was something of a hot shit. No one in the bar had been to bed with me, or even seen me before, and new young faces are at a premium at Sporters. No one was compa
ring me with the guys my own age, but with the whole group, of whom I’d guess I was in the youngest quintile. And then, too, I think it is a fair, though unfortunate, generalization that a smaller proportion of gay people than straight people are attractive. I had proportionately less competition. This is not to deny that many of the world’s best-looking movie stars and athletes—and perhaps a majority of the world’s best-looking models—are gay. It is rather to acknowledge two facts:
First, abnormal-looking people are less likely to have normal childhoods, less likely to have the self-confidence to make it with girls, and more likely to idolize the Tommys of the world, as I did. You have to think that the very short, very tall, very frail, very unfortunate-looking people you see in gay bars are gay in part as a consequence of their looks.
Second, gay people, however attractive their physical features and for whatever reason they are gay, live in a society which by and large shits all over gay people and tends to isolate them. Isolated, they have developed a subculture whose fashions and mannerisms and codes of behavior are different from straight ones. Shat upon, they may desperately wish they were different, they may lose their selfrespect and with it their “manly” self-confidence. As a result, many fail to fulfill their potential by failing to pursue any sort of career. And many play roles they think they are supposed to play, lisps and all. Meanwhile, some overcompensate for being gay by dressing and acting super-masculine, to the point of attracting just as much attention and scorn as if they were in drag.
While there is little that can be done to make short people taller or gay people straight, there is much that could be done to change society’s view of homosexuality. Understanding and acceptance would relieve much of the pressure that makes so many homosexuals miserable—pressure that causes the stereotypical behavior that causes the intolerance to begin with.
The Best Little Boy in the World Page 11