Clearly, it would be difficult to form a good long-term relationship with a cool, trashy young kid whom I wanted to have humiliate me.
That all fits neatly into the “homosexual self-hate” chapter of psychoanalysis. Yet I don’t believe it really does fit. I’m not sure that feelings like that are by any means exclusively gay. And I know I don’t really hate myself. If I believe, as I obviously do, that I’m about the neatest thing since integrated circuits, is it meaningful for someone else to come along and look at my file and say, “Well, no, I am sorry to inform you that, really, you are not happy with yourself as you seem to have convinced yourself you are. Actually, you do hate yourself—so much that you can’t stand to admit it. For forty-five dollars an hour for the rest of your life, I will gladly try to help you face up to the fact. Perhaps if we can get you that far, we can even get to the root of your unconscious unhappiness and build you all over again a true happiness.”
Then there is the other side of me, probably the larger half. I am aggressive, egotistical, competitive, and dominating, as I hold my trick down in a half nelson, one arm tightly around his waist so he can’t struggle, and hoping, frankly, that he will struggle while I ram into him and feel my muscles flexing and tensing, in complete control of him, and then, finally sweating, panting, shoot into his helpless body.
So you see, it works both ways with me, as I guess it does with many people, straight or gay.
Beyond the fact that many of the people who turned me on most were not likely to be the kind I would want to share a home with, there was the problem that roles, in and out of bed, are more easily assigned between a dominating man and a submissive woman than between two men, though perhaps this is changing with the women’s liberation movement. (Uneasy as I admittedly am with women where sex is involved, on a rational level I am, of course, all for them. One of my closest friends is a straight woman. Gloria Steinem is my hero.)
And yet another obstacle seemed to stand in the way of my forming a lover relationship. I seemed to have been conditioned to fall for the kind of guy who wouldn’t fall for me in return. I was turned on as long as someone was, for whatever reason, unattainable; but as soon as he showed affection for me or—God forbid!—needed me more than I needed him, I knew he wasn’t truly Brian or Tommy or Hank. I realized that part of this was simply the universal hard-to-get syndrome, part the anticipation-is-better-than-the-attainment syndrome. Yet it seemed to go further.
That has made truly satisfying, lose-yourself-in-it sex hard to come by, as you might imagine. It is tantamount to saying, “I don’t want to have sex. Cowboys don’t kiss, cowboys have fistfights.” Yet my body wants to have sex; it wants to be touched and tickled and rubbed and hugged and kneaded and warmed. And I am not about to have fist-fights, because pain hurts. Not in fantasies it doesn’t; it’s fine in fantasies. But it provides no pleasure whatever in fact. It hurts. I’ve checked.
This being the case, I simply grin at the idea of having truly superb sex night after night with the same guy. Sure, I would like it to happen, and I will welcome the gradual lowering of some of these obstacles, should they start to lower with time.* But the last thing I am going to do is let myself take them too seriously, let them make me unhappy, dedicate my life to what may well be the impossible task of changing around what appears to be the core of my sexuality. I can remember having had some of these feelings, some of the same fantasies nearly twenty years ago, when I was five! This is me, Great Scorekeeper, and I have learned to love it. If it changes, fine; when it does, I will love the changes, too.
Anyway, I had come to know more about myself that summer, and I had decided quite definitely that there was nothing “wrong” with the way I was, nothing to feel guilty about. I was tired of feeling guilty, and I was just a little pissed off that society had made me feel guilty so long.
I began to feel indignant, instead. And I began to feel as though I wanted to change things if I could. I acknowledged that there were other more pressing world problems than the social stigma of homosexuality, but this happened to be the “cause” I was most interested in.
Yet what could I do without making my parents miserable? What if they saw me on TV marching for gay lib? Lots of gay kids either have no parents or hate them. I have them and love them. My mother would understand, I think, if I told her. My father would, too; only it would be much harder. Men find male homosexuality harder to accept than women. It is more threatening; they have been trained to find it repulsive. No doubt my father would feel he had not projected the proper image for me to identify with. Nonsense. Look at Goliath. As normal and heterosexual a giant as you would ever find. Yet how can my father be expected to be objective about a thing like this?
As for all the employers who would regretfully pass up my résumé if I were openly gay, and black résumés, and women’s résumés—fuck ’em. There are already too many career choices for the average college graduate to choose between. A little discrimination would just narrow things down conveniently. My present boss does know I am gay, does know about the book. I wanted it that way, because I am spoiled now: I have told all my straight friends I am gay, I have told Goliath and Goliath-in-Law, and the only people for whom I am willing to keep my guard up are my parents. Now, you may surely say that I have no more business telling my boss I am gay than you have telling yours you are straight. That’s a private matter. No one should care who you sleep with.
Exactly! When the unlikely day comes that no one does care that I sleep with guys, there will indeed be nothing to tell anyone about.
Feeling self-righteous this way and feeling so happy about the whole summer, I decided to tell my parents everything.
I drove down to Brewster to spend a weekend with them and went over and over my speech as I drove. Naturally, I would have to check that no company had been invited over for that night or Sunday; I would have to get a couple of drinks down my father. Mainly, I would have to somehow impress upon him the importance of keeping his mouth shut until I had said all I wanted to say. My father is no less impatient than I am, and after my first sentence he would be interrupting, telling me to get to the point. Well, to be understood properly, it just couldn’t all be said in a sentence. So please, trust me and listen:
“I have some good news that will take you a little getting used to, but I very much want you to share it with me. Why don’t you sit—”
“You’re getting married!” my father would say.
“Oh, dear, who is she? Why haven’t you told us about her before!” my mother would say.
“Wait! It’s not what you think and you are absolutely going to have to just sit for ten minutes and hear me out, all of it, until I finish. Please.”
“All right, bun,” my father would say to my mother, “let him get to the point.”
“But you were the one who inter—”
“Mom, listen. For the longest time I had a problem. Do you remember how serious and sullen I always used to look when I came back from school? Well, I had a personal problem that bothered me for a long time. I would have told you all about it, only it was just not the kind of problem you could possibly have helped me work out, and I knew it would make you upset. The good news is that this summer I have worked things out. This has been a very happy summer for me, and I think the future is going to be very happy, and now that—”
“For crying out loud, will you come to the point!”
“—and now that I have solved it, I feel the only way we can really be close is if I share it with you. The reason I am taking so long to get to it is that it is quite complicated and it’s going to be very hard for you to understand.”
My parents are silent now, running through the worst fears they have ever had for their son, possibly considering this one, but, I would guess, probably not. Maybe—but I just don’t think they would have allowed themselves to think such things about their son. They look worried, sympathetic, and they wish I would come to the point.
“Ever since I was ele
ven”—I am looking at the floor now to spare them (me) the embarrassment of having to show (see) their initial shock and, perhaps, revulsion, when I say it—none of this would be so bad if they didn’t love me so much—“I have known that I liked boys instead of girls. You can imagine that that was an upsetting kind of thing to know, as I’m sure you feel upset now hearing about it”—I am talking very quickly now, not about to brook interruption—“but this summer I have come to terms with myself, and I am very happy.”
“Oh, my God,” says my father, who, for all his quickness of wit, is still back where I said the part about having always liked boys instead of girls.
“Thank God,” says my mother, crying, assuming that what I mean about having come to terms with myself is that I have finally started making it with chicks and that I have gotten myself on the right track.
“I forgot something in my preface. I forgot to say how I know that the one thing you want more than anything is for me to be happy—isn’t it?”
“Of course,” says my mother, responding to a very old sales technique: Get them committed to your position. Nod your head and smile; the prospect will nod her head and smile.
“Well, I know we will have to spend hours talking about it so you can understand why I am really happy, but—”
“Oh, my God,” whispers my mother as she realizes that I still like boys instead of girls. She is flashing to what she did wrong, to how unhappy I must be, to statistics she has heard about psychiatric cures, to what my father must be thinking.
My father is flashing to what his father did to him when he heard he had a gay teacher, to swishy types who had occasionally approached him in his youth, to fleeting images of unthinkable sexual perversions which are instantly pushed from his mind, but which keep fleeting, flitting back, to what he did wrong, to what my mother must be thinking.
The trick, I know, would be to keep talking and make them listen, not let them think. “I know we have to spend a lot of time talking about it, but if what you really want is for me to be happy, I know you will come to understand it and be happy for me.”
And on we would no doubt go for some time, my recounting many of the stories now recounted here, my naming all the famous, important, wholesome citizens I could possibly think of, all the way from Alexander the Great and Leonardo da Vinci to the present, who I knew were gay, so they would have lots of new images to identify their son with, not just the effeminate types that even people as naïve and wholesome as my parents recognize on the street and consider, a priori, “pathetic.”
And, I think, because my parents are awfully bright and loving and because there really is nothing to be ashamed of, they could gradually come to accept it, more or less. Probably, my father would simply never want to talk about it. My mother might even become rather enthusiastic, with time, though always expecting me to see the light one day and pop off a few grandchildren.
Lots of my friends have told their parents and have either formed a tacit agreement that it is okay but not to be talked about and we love you no matter what you do, or else have a real, genuine, talking acceptance of the whole thing. More power to them.
Unfortunately, far more of my friends would never dream of telling straight friends, let alone their parents. Many of those who have tell horror stories. Jon Martin (of course I met him in a bar after I came out; all was forgiven) told me about one of our Yale classmates whose parents were told by a third party that their son was gay (a hell of a thing for a third party to do, of course), and they never talked to him again. Disowned.
I knew that my parents would react relatively well. I could probably even keep them from sending me to an analyst three times a week, although that would be their first impulse: “If only you had told us! But no matter what it costs, we will cure you!”
And there is always the chance that I underestimate their savvy, which would be fine with me. I certainly have not tried much lately to put up a front, and I keep changing the subject, raised less frequently now, of who I’m dating. Views are changing fast, and they live in New York, for crying out loud. So maybe they have a very good idea what’s going on but have not cared to acknowledge it or have their suspicions confirmed. Maybe.
Whichever scenario it would have been, I chickened out when I reached Brewster. I decided that telling them was almost certain to make them unhappy, and I doubted whether the new closeness and honesty in our relationship would be sufficient compensation for the hurt. Nor did I relish the idea that they might, conceivably, no longer look upon me as perfect. Well, how could they? Was I ready to live without their thinking I was perfect? Every week I call and tell them my latest accomplishments, and they say to themselves, and I hear it: “That’s our boy—the best little boy in the world.” Why shatter all that for them or for me?
In fact, to date, two happy years later, I haven’t shattered it, but again I am drawing close. I told myself then that I would only tell them when there was reason to, when I thought there was a chance they might otherwise hear it first from someone else. Now with this book is that time, and I don’t know what I will do.
How could I write a book that might cause my parents so much pain? I am writing it because I want to, because like everyone, I want to try to do something meaningful with my life, because I do want to be the BLBITW, and because I think they will understand.
Very heavy. For me anyway. But there was still a week left in my Summer of ’42, and, as these things sometimes happen, the most important event of the summer was not to occur until that last weekend, the weekend after Eric and I went down to Provincetown, when I went back alone.
It didn’t seem so all-fired important at the time. I can’t even remember whether Golden Boy was around—I think he was and that I got in another “hello” or two, little investments in the relationship he didn’t know I was building with him.
All that happened of significance that weekend is that as Piggy’s was closing, having found no one to go home with—and home was an extravagant $20 motel room that I was loath to waste, not to speak of the blow to my ego of sleeping alone on a Saturday night in Provincetown—as I walked toward the door, I saw Chris, the Harvard Business School student Eric had introduced me to, one of Golden Boy’s friends, looking a little drunk, a little dejected by the door. Not really my type, but better this than nothing.
“You’re Chris, aren’t you? Eric’s friend?”
“Say, how’s it goin’?”
“Not bad—you?”
“Oh, not too bad.” (Harvard and Yale were in rare form.)
“Look, I’m staying down the street—would you like to come back with me?”
“Sure.”
It would be nice to romanticize that first night together or the next day on the beach. Roberta Flack tears me apart when she sings about “the first time ever I saw your face.” When I hear that song, I go misty immediately, and a cosmic—no, I think a genuinely painful—expression washes across my face. When I hear that song, I immediately think of Chris, and tears well up in my eyes. The tears don’t well up because I saw the sun rise in Chris’s eyes that night. I didn’t. They well up because I wish I had seen the sun rise in Chris’s eyes, because I wish I were the kind of person to whom beautiful romantic things like that could happen, because I wish there were a way Chris and I, or maybe anyone and I, could really make it.
*They have.
CHAPTER 12
Chris and I fell in love.
Well, Chris fell in love with me, and I sort of pushed myself in love with him.
That last weekend in August, just before I was to start work again, Chris and I left Piggy’s together. In the morning, he said he knew a great beach in Truro, nearby. Most Eastern beaches run into water on one side and asphalt parking lots on the other. This beach had the water, of course, but instead of the parking lot, this beach ran into a hundred-foot sand cliff. The cliff was so nearly vertical that you could bound down in exuberant free-fall ten-foot moon leaps, forming steep right triangles as you went
: Left leg pushes out two feet from the cliff, fall eight feet, right foot rejoins the hypotenuse. Down you bound, a dozen steps to the beach below. There was also something nice about its not being a “gay” beach. Chris had been out longer than I had, for just over a year, and he may have had his fill of gay beaches.
I was excited about making friends with someone who would be in Boston in the fall, whom I wouldn’t feel embarrassed to introduce to Hank and Brook. Chris was starting out at Harvard Business School, for crying out loud. We could “relate” to each other.
Chris’s job was ending the following week, just as mine would be beginning. He would be moving into Chase Hall at Harvard Business School, a mile’s walk from my apartment in Cambridge. Very convenient. We agreed to get together back in Boston.
As it happened, we spent almost every evening together that fall. Although my new responsibilities at work kept me occupied, we generally talked on the phone once a day, or even twice, and I never stayed at the office past six or seven or on weekends the way I had before coming out.
After a few weeks we came to the realization that we were not just “doing a thing.” We were “lovers.” Two gay men who spend most of their time together and who are supposed to feel guilty if they have sex with someone else are lovers. That was, after all, the object of the game I had been playing for three months. That was the point of going to the bar night after night, looking. To the gay bar or, I suppose for that matter, to the straight dating bar. That was what all the movies and the songs were about, and I was ready to get in on the fun. Enough of humming “What Kind of Fool Am I?” It was about time I had a lover, particularly inasmuch as I wouldn’t have much time, now that work had started again, to go around looking. I am very practical about these things, as you can see.
The Best Little Boy in the World Page 15