I think the reasons society is intolerant of homosexuality are not hard to imagine. Homosexuality threatens two things: propagation of the species and “masculinity.”
Until recently, man always found it in his interest to multiply. The more sons a man had, the more likely they would have the strength to support him when he could no longer do so. The more sons in a tribe (and the more daughters, the more grandsons), the better chance the tribe had to defend itself or to conquer other tribes. Just a few years ago China was rewarding people for producing babies, a national goal. The process of evolution, by definition, favors heterosexuality and would, if anything, tend to discourage homosexuality. The simple fact that we now have too many people on the earth—that, in fact, the population explosion is suddenly at the root of most of the world’s problems—does not abruptly change the attitudes and instincts we have developed over tens of thousands of years.
As for “masculinity,” evolution favored those individuals who stayed with the tribe. Evolution favored the tribes whose members cooperated. In order to cooperate, you have to have some guidelines, a little law and order, and the order was provided by dominance. The pecking order. Until recently, the animal that was dominant was the strongest, toughest, most threatening animal around. The more threatening you were, the more likely you were to get the prime cuts of beef, the more females you could have. Now it wasn’t just how strong and tall and quick you were in a fight; it was how threatening you were, which is to say, how tough you pretended to be. (If it actually had had to come to a physical test each time, the tribe would have killed itself off in no time.) One ideal way to pretend to be tough was to dump on Jon Martin. Another was to deny your wife the right to a career or an equal say in the relationship. Another was to bully or at least disparage small, frail, “sensitive,” or, generally speaking, feminine types. (What kind of credible threat to mobsters and Commies would the FBI be if the late J. Edgar Hoover and his lifelong friend Clyde had allowed women or avowed homosexuals to work for them?) You wanted the best for your sons, so you made sure they felt the same way, and dumped on Jon Martin, too.
I don’t mean to suggest that all homosexuals are physically weak or feminine. That isn’t true. The homosexual corporation president or drill sergeant is only shat upon if he “admits” he is a homosexual. (So he doesn’t, so the stereotype is not changed.)
The women’s liberation and gay liberation movements are saying—Look! Things have changed: A woman’s primary function need no longer be to have the most possible babies. Look! Order should no longer be provided to the tribe by a baboonlike dominance hierarchy based on toughness, the threat of violence.
Anyway, there I sat at Sporters, not realizing the plusses I had going for me, and staring holes through the fellow I wanted to meet. That was, more or less, what Oscar had told me to do, only I realize now that he meant for me to be considerably more subtle. I just kept staring, feeling terribly pent-up and awkward, helpless, average-looking. It worked.
Rob said hi and I said I had been out (of the closet) for two hours. He asked me if I wanted to go home with him, and we pushed our way through the crowd to the door. On the way to his apartment in Back Bay he explained that he was, of all things, a computer operator on the graveyard shift of an all-night insurance-company computer installation. He was twenty, he had been out for about five years if you count his first parochial school experience, and he was planning to take a course in programming, which would pay a lot better and allow him to work daylight hours.
He shared his Back Bay apartment with a waiter, whose only distinction was a wig he had bought that day—a woman’s wig—which made me exceedingly uncomfortable. How could Rob live with a moron like that?
I was already having visions of his moving out of such an unhealthy situation and into my Cambridge apartment, which was more than adequate for two people. I had known Rob all of an hour when I first suggested the possibility. I lacked perspective. Rob was the only one out of hundreds in the bar that night that I had liked. Surely I would have to take him away from there fast before someone else came over and horned in. If Rob was foolish enough to be attracted to someone like me, well, I wasn’t going to steer him away.
I would say Rob, twenty, was three to five years older than I was at twenty-three. He knew where my head was; his had been there years before. He knew it would be safe to say, “Sure, maybe I’ll move in—let’s see what happens,” because he knew I would change my mind within days, if not within hours.
As it happened, it was hours. The sex we had was not all I’d hoped it would be. It was upsetting. He wanted to do all the things gay kids do. He wanted to kiss (germs!); he wanted to put our respective things in our respective mouths (I had always counted: sixty-seven, sixty-eight, seventy, seventy-one …); and he even tried to, well, rob me of my virginity. That last was not only disgusting to think about, but was also, judging from what little progress he was able to make before I resisted, likely to be excruciating.
God damn it! Why can’t I be like everyone else and like to do those things? What are people going to think of me? Is this what the Lone Ranger and Tonto did during the Quaker Oats commercials?
Rob didn’t come right out and say that he was pissed off at me for being so stiff in bed; but I knew he was thinking it, and I felt sorry for myself. He said that I would get used to all those things real fast and that I would soon love them.
Now, I am by no means going to describe every tiny step I took on the way to lowering my inhibitions and having normal, uninhibited sex. I will say, however, that if the road to good sex extends from Lisbon to Leningrad, I am at the time of this writing lost somewhere in the Pyrenees, but hopeful.
There was a second reason I didn’t ask Rob to move in with me in Cambridge. In addition to his making me feel sexually inadequate, his verbal aptitudes were not equal to his math aptitudes.
I mean that quite literally. Remember, I went to a highly competitive high school and was supercompetitive myself, in the days when there were no pass-fail courses and when the stigma of asking a fellow student “Whaddya get?” was second in pain only to not knowing—so we asked. That is a must for anyone who is trained to be the best little boy in the world, for here is an objective, accurate measure of a boy’s worth. Surely you wouldn’t question the relationship between grades and personal worth? And in case you are one of those strange rebellious people who tended to pooh-pooh the importance of grades and to call them arbitrary and meaningless—that is, in case you are one of those miserable people who refused to play the game by my rules—well, I have an answer for you. The Educational Testing Service in Princeton, New Jersey. Its tests are scientifically designed and scored by computers! ETS is the Great Scorekeeper in the Sky’s agent on earth.
Therefore, as I was a lousy judge of people—people were never my long suit—I relied on their test scores to tell me just how smart or how dumb they were. I had this thing about what do you do, how smart are you—“are you acceptable?” I am not proud of the fact that I steered Rob’s conversation around to the Scholastic Aptitude Tests, which are scored from 200 to 800 and anyone under 650 is at Yale because he plays good football, and I had never known anyone (but Brian, with whom I went to Moby Dick) under 500. Without having any idea of the importance I placed on it, Rob told me he had scored 705 on his math SAT, and 321 on his verbal.
This remarkable disparity, which I had never before encountered in anywhere near the same degree, was clearly borne out at our after-sex pizza. You could sense that Rob was intelligent (well, you knew he got 705 on his math boards, right?)—but he didn’t say anything. What would be the point of living with an attractive twenty-year-old kid with whom you could neither sleep nor talk? Not even sleep with in the literal sense. Put me in a double bed with a shared sheet and the possibility of touching, and the inevitability that my half of the sheet will move when the other half moves—and you have one grumpy, groggy boy in the morning who has been up all night trying to fall asleep. Given all t
hat, need I even mention that in a single bed, entwined in someone’s arms and legs, I am no more likely to fall asleep than General Custer was when he saw the first million Indians coming?
CHAPTER 9
Rob did not move in, but he introduced me to Peter. Peter had a big smile, was a little on the cherubic side, twenty years old, and a tour guide. He was so much more gentle and understanding in bed, plus the strange things he did with ice cubes, that I made it with him several times before I lost interest. I even went on his tour of City Hall. Peter introduced me to Eric, who was going around the bar inviting people he knew to a party in Cambridge. “Cambridge! I live in Cambridge!” I said. Eric professed astonishment and delight at the coincidence—of all places for someone in the Boston area to live, Cambridge!—which just goes to show that it is the actor and not the line that makes the show, and I was invited.
There were probably a few nights in between Peter and Eric that I don’t remember. Well, I was on vacation, and after my initial hesitation, I was coming out with a vengeance. It is enough to say that I was ready to have sex with anybody who turned me on, and as I was a new face, they were ready in return.
Why so promiscuous? Well, of course, there is the making-up-for-lost-time aspect. If I had taken five years to learn five years’ worth of life, I would have been twenty-eight by the time I was, emotionally, twenty-three. And besides, why not?
All the taboos against sex that straight kids used to have, and some still have, no doubt have a lot to do with not making babies by mistake. The Pill was supposed to have revolutionized morals; well, I had something far more effective than the Pill.
Did the taboo against promiscuity have something to do with the danger of catching VD? But now VD is more easily cured than the flu, so “Even Nice People Get VD,” as the ads say.
Also, what difference whether you have the stigma of being a homosexual or the stigma of being a promiscuous homosexual? If you’re going to be stigmatized, the least you can do is enjoy it.
What I could never figure out in college, hornier than a rhinocerous, was why my friends didn’t have sex every night. And in between classes. Why didn’t a straight guy, when he saw a chick he dug on the street, simply say, “Wanna do it?” And why wouldn’t she, if she dug him, say, “You betcha sweet ass”? Naturally, I was more than a little grateful for this prudishness, which protected me from impossible tests of my normality, but I just couldn’t understand it.
In college I didn’t know sex wasn’t always the blissful, wildly pleasurable experience it was cracked up to be. That with the wrong person it could even get boring or distasteful. That there were other things in life. I had the other things, so I knew their limitations. It was only toward the end of that first summer in Boston that I began to understand and that my desire to be done by someone every night diminished (somewhat). It was only then that I began to form some strong relationships, to become emotionally involved.
I didn’t become awfully emotionally involved with Eric, but a little. He lived right up the street from me. It turned out that he had gotten an economics degree from Boston College a couple of years earlier, so we had some common areas of interest. One reason I liked Eric was that he didn’t go to the bar much. Instead, he was an organizer of Boston’s Student Homophile League, which met at Boston University once a week, and he would organize gay touch football games on the Esplanade by the Hatch Shell, where he managed to reassure the hesitant ballplayers, like me, that we were all equally inept. Of course, we were not all equally inept, but everyone felt comfortable.
I got so I could talk intimately with Eric. I told him kissing made me feel awkward—“Cowboys don’t kiss,” I told him—and I told him how in my family, we didn’t even put Goliath’s spoon in my mouth—so how could I allow a strange tongue? Or worse? I told him about Hilda Goldbaum’s French kisses with their Italian dressing. Just telling him these things helped relax me. He didn’t get impatient or make me feel I was weird; he just thought I was funny—ha-ha likable funny, that is. Because I could relax with Eric, because I liked him and wanted to show it, and because the inside of his mouth always tasted like peppermint candy, I managed to lose some of my distaste for kissing.
As Eric was the first gay person I had ever spent much time talking with, he was the first one who made me formulate verbal expressions for what I had always felt. One common thing gay people do is to give each other girl’s names—Eric would be Erica—and to call them “she” and “her” instead of “he” and “him.” Among other things, this subculture habit helps avoid being found out: If your gay conversations are overheard, it is better to be saying you love “her” than “him.” Whenever Eric referred to someone that way, I would punch him in the arm and tell him to talk right. So he only did it when he wanted to get a rise out of me. He knew I didn’t like those of his friends who were noticeably feminine. He knew I didn’t like it when any of his friends, including some of the most masculine, “camped it up,” falsetto, where the s’s sounded like a radio that wasn’t tuned in quite right: “Oh, my dear, how niecce your shirt looksss! I found one jusst like it in my grandmother’ss attic!”
When people did that around me, I turned icy. But why? One day Eric wanted to get a real rise out of me—I think I was falling asleep too soon—and he called me Trixie. He got a rise, all right. I told him, Look, schmuck: if femininity were what turned me on, I would be straight. I like masculinity, so cut it out.
Well, that was one way to put it, I suppose—and I have since put it that way on several occasions. But what I think I was really saying was: “Look, God damn it, I don’t think I’m feminine myself, even though I like guys. Yet that’s the stereotype—that deep down all faggots really want to be girls. Well, there is no way I ever want to look or act feminine. When you call me Trixie, you are threatening, even insulting. I have to demonstrate my masculinity by objecting. I am not willing to relax or to admit I am not just the tiniest bit superior, anyway, to all you queers who give in to looking and talking and acting a little queer, even if it’s only in private among yourselves.” My public relations department took all that and made it tough and simple-sounding: If I liked femininity, I wouldn’t be gay. By now I have gotten used to my friends’ camping. I just don’t participate.
Eric took me a lot of places as part of my continuing education. He showed me “the block.” The block is in a fashionable area, right by Boston Common, where a single guy leaning against a car, thumbing a ride, or just walking slowly is probably looking for you. Or he may be out earning a little spending money after school. If so, he may not even be gay, as such. Today’s high school kids are a lot more sophisticated than they were just a few years ago. Many of them—the ones who drive cross country in VW campers and have long hair and smoke dope—simply are not inhibited by the traditional social taboos. If a guy wants to pay $5 or $25 to blow him—why not? It feels good, the guy is grateful, and it’s bread.
Naturally, that reasoning would sit uneasily with most parents. I’m not sure I buy it myself. But if that is all the significance the boy places on the experience, what’s wrong with his logic? Not every kid is going to grow up to be President or a doctor or lawyer. So if he has a good body and likes to get blown and plans a career as an auto mechanic—and thank God for auto mechanics—why not? Is the FBI going to investigate his early years before they give him a license to fix your Mustang?
Eric and I leaned against a parked car and watched circling cars slow down as they went by. He explained that most cities have “blocks” or similar cruisy places. He said you could either find the places by flying over the city in a helicopter just after the bars close and looking for the only traffic jam in town or by asking any gay resident of the city. There are no signs, but everyone knows.
While we were on the subject of finding places, Eric showed me his gay bar guide, available at most neighborhood pornographic bookstores. It listed the gay bars, restaurants, steam baths, and outdoor cruising spots, all over the world. Most bars (not S
porters) come and go so fast that even a fresh edition of any guide is outdated, but at the very least you get phone numbers of several places which, though they may no longer be “in” spots, can easily direct you to the kind of place you are looking for. Leafing through my own book, I see two places in Fort Smith, Arkansas, one in Alexandria, Louisiana, four in Blackpool, England, six in Tampa, eighteen in Atlantic City, seventy-two in Paris, two in Varna, Bulgaria, four in Butte, Montana, and one hundred twenty-five in San Francisco. Generally, even in a large city, there are only a few popular places at any given time. In Washington, for example, which has about thirty listings in the book, almost all the young people at the time of this writing go to the Lost and Found or to Pier 9. Everyone wants to be where everyone else is. The in spots shift frequently because everyone tends to be dissatisfied with everyone else and to think the grass just might be greener across town. (And because the police periodically bust gay bars, for one reason or another.) I would guess that the four bars in Butte, Montana, or even the one that is popular today, are not likely to be much to shout about, even on Saturday night. Still, if they are listed, there must be something going on. The same holds for those places the guide lists and labels “mixed.” Granted, any place I have ever been has been “mixed,” just by virtue of my gay presence. However, these mixed places would presumably not be listed if there weren’t a fair amount of gay activity.
Eric and I didn’t go to Sporters much. He knew that the more often I went, the faster I would find someone else. But we did go to a couple of other bars, just to see what they would be like.
Bars vary over at least three dimensions, the first being popularity. Next is age. No one stands at the door of younger bars turning away the over-thirty-five set (except in California, where they have some “under-twenty-one” bars); but few older men want to go where they will feel unwelcome. And then there is what you might call a bar’s “degree of masculinity.”
The Best Little Boy in the World Page 12