What I am saying is that Chris was my lover because he fell in love with me; I was his lover because I liked him a lot and wanted to “have a lover.”
One of the reasons we managed to stay together as long as we did, from September to April, is that he loved me in a strong, silent sort of way. He didn’t tell me over and over that he loved me or bring me gifts or anything. If he had been effusive or had tried to make me more affectionate or had told me the true extent to which my looking at other people hurt his feelings, he would have turned me off.
We were not 100 percent sexually compatible. I couldn’t fulfill my cowboy fantasies with him. Playing out fantasies is childish and embarrassing, and if you are embarrassed, you can’t get into it. So when we had sex, quite frequently at first, I would just shut my eyes and fantasize. Compatibility, I think, is in some part measured by the ability of the partners to climax at the same time. Well, I could never do that with Chris (or anyone else) because that kind of precision timing required an awareness of the other person; I was concentrating largely on my fantasies in order to be able to come. So any orgasmic simultaneity became the full responsibility of my partner. Go ahead and come when I come, that’s okay by me; oniy don’t make too much noise or move around too much, or you will make me lose my train of thought, and I won’t be able to come. And if it’s all the same to you, try not to get it on me.
I was apologetic about all this, and Chris was understanding. We got to know each other awfully well, and I managed to tell him about my squeamishness and weaknesses and insecurities. I even managed to force myself to describe those famous fantasies in some lurid detail, embarrassing as they were to own up to. Telling him did not improve our sex, but it made him the undisputed closest friend I had—I mean no one had gotten that far into my head—and he was willing to put up with my inhibitions and hangups.
One thing we tried was putting Smucker’s old-fashioned raspberry jam, my absolute favorite, all over Chris’s cock. Like grinding up a child’s medicine in a bowl of Jell-O. Very Skinnerian. It took me several months to reacquire my taste for Smucker’s raspberry jam.
Our sex wasn’t sufficiently satisfying for either of us, so we decided, as some gay lovers do, to go out on our own and do it with other people every so often. Two rules: Always tell you did it (after the fact), and never do it with someone we both really care about. Telling assured each of us that we really knew what was going on. Telling after the fact was the least painful way: “Chris, I did it with some trashy number from the bar, but there was nothing to it. I got him out of my system. You’re still my main man.” That was all there was to it, although I guess Chris didn’t like my doing it with other people, even though we had agreed. Rule two was touchy. We wouldn’t do it with each other’s friends, because that could get very painful and complicated. But it required considerable self-restraint, inasmuch as we both tended to have attractive friends. Well, Golden Boy for example.
Golden Boy and Chris were very close. I don’t know why they had never had sex—their relationship just never developed that way. But they spent so much time together that lots of people at the bar thought they were lovers.
I got to see a lot of Golden Boy, and we became friends. The three of us would often go do things together, although three can be an uncomfortable number. Even where sex isn’t involved, someone usually feels left out. My freshman year at Yale I had a second roommate besides Roger-with-the-Kleenex-by-his-bed-every-morning, but he was so left out I even forgot to mention him earlier. Well, if it’s bad with three “straight” freshmen, it’s much worse when there are little streaks of love and envy and jealousy and whatnot flashing around the room. Chris wanted Golden Boy and me to be friendly, but not too friendly. I felt left out when they started talking about things they had done together before I had appeared on the scene. I didn’t like it when people thought Golden Boy was Chris’s lover—not because I loved Chris so much, but because it wounded my pride and made me feel all the more left out. And I was jealous of Chris’s relationship with Golden Boy.
This area of friends can get quite sticky, more so in gay life than straight, because two gay lovers are likely to be attracted by a third gay guy, where with a straight couple, only the girl would be attracted by another guy and only the guy would be attracted by another girl. The two lovers naturally find themselves competing for the third party. Maybe not competing to get into bed with the third party. Maybe just competing for the biggest smile and the warmest handshake on parting. Egos are involved. Naturally, a gay lover relationship based on love, not looks, holds up under the strain—and many do. But it’s a strain nonetheless.
Not only are there more combinations and permutations of emotion in gay life, because everyone can be attracted by everyone else, but there are also fewer restrictions imposed by society to help you avoid temptation. Far from being a sacred institution in society, it is illegal for two men to marry. Thus there is no legal affirmation of a lover relationship, no crowd of well-wishers to witness the ceremony, no kids, natural or adopted, to bind the marriage. You are already outside the moral code, so you can forget about “doing the right thing for appearance’s sake.” Moreover, being outside the moral code, you don’t have its discipline to help you order your life and to help you cope with temptation. Certainly, one can form his own moral code and be true to himself. But creating one’s own—and sticking to it—is harder than conforming to preexisting, pervasive social norms.
Other problems gays have remaining faithful to their lovers are: The career problem, which is beginning to appear in straight life also with the feminist movement. How will gay lovers stay together if their careers conflict geographically? And the dominance problem. Who will do the dishes if both guys happen to be rather aggressive and masculine and unwilling to take on the “feminine role,” circa 1955?
Three is a complicated number. Seven is ludicrous, but wait.
Golden Boy was hopelessly hung up on a young attorney named Dennis Moyer. Dennis had recently graduated from Harvard Law School and worked for one of Boston’s stodgier firms, in the corporate taxation department. I was surprised when I first met him at Sporters. Here was Golden Boy, who could have had anyone he wanted, choosing a decent but unspectacular-looking guy in his late twenties. Now I know there is much more to life than looks, but in gay life most of the people you meet you meet on the basis of their looks, and you find out what’s inside them only later.
As I got to know Dennis and as I got to know Golden Boy better, I began to understand. Dennis appears to be stability personified. He smokes a pipe; he speaks in carefully considered, deep tones. He is solid and masculine. Someone to lean on. Someone to complement a less stable personality. Dennis is the mature breadwinner type. Golden Boy, I learned first to my instinctive dismay and now to my amusement, likes to keep house.
I was startled to realize that Golden Boy, who had the world around his finger, was not as happy as I was—I who didn’t even enjoy kissing. Golden Boy was handsome; Golden Boy had no hangups in bed; Golden Boy was president of his class; and Golden Boy was in the depths of despair over Dennis Moyer.
If that sounds a mite melodramatic, it’s the way GB would want it. I think he is a little like me in the way he enjoys his cosmic depression. He is a romantic and was determined that his woe-begotten relationship with Dennis should be the world’s saddest love story.
Whenever Chris and I saw GB, we heard another episode. I never heard them from Dennis’s end, so I can’t say exactly who was being cruel to whom, who was being unfair. All I know is that Dennis was an all-consuming passion for GB.
One day, after GB and I had become rather close friends, he called me (I think Chris was not in at the time, or else he would have called Chris first) and announced, after I asked him why he sounded so terrible, that he had tried to kill himself the night before. He had just given up on life. If he couldn’t have things work out with Dennis—and he couldn’t—then he had no reason to go on living.
You what?
Well, he had swallowed a whole bottle full of sleeping pills up on the fourth floor of the library around midnight, in one of those rooms that was sure to be deserted until morning. He would have done it back at the dorm, but, of course, he might have been discovered—and, even if not, he wanted to spare his neighbors the horror of finding his corpse. So he went up to that deserted room and, naturally, fell asleep. But apparently some girl he knew went up there to study for an exam. She tried to wake him up, and then she tried harder, and then she got frightened and called the campus police and they called an ambulance and took him to Mass. General where the emergency staff pumped his stomach, and now he was home.
Can I reconstruct my feelings as Golden Boy described his attempted suicide? There was the pleasure you feel, but do not admit, when you hear another person’s problems. You are instinctively glad that you don’t have that problem—that it’s your buddy who was hit, not you, out there in that foxhole. And there is the excitement. You want the two-alarm blaze to be put out with a minimum of damage to the building—but part of you wants the flames to go spectacularly out of control escalating the blaze to a major five-alarm disaster. Then there is the feeling of superiority as someone lets down his guard and tells you his problems. There is pleasure in feeling superior to a Golden Boy. You may not be as good-looking, but you can cope, and that makes you feel good. Then, too, it was pleasurably flattering to be the first of Golden Boy’s inner circle to hear this dreadful news. Hadn’t I always wanted someone like him to need me? (Of course the very act of needing changed his image—made him seem weaker.) What could make us closer friends than sharing a secret like this? That thought was pleasing. It was a secret, of course. I love secrets. The only people who would know would be the girl who found him, the people at the hospital, me, Chris, and Dennis Moyer. (Well, what was the point of the suicide if you didn’t let Dennis Moyer know about it?) And it appeared that I would be the first to tell Chris the awful news, as GB had been unable to reach him and I was meeting him later that day for dinner. Everyone sort of likes to be the bearer of important news, even bad news.
Understand, such selfish feelings can only be written with a red crayon. If the Great Scorekeeper ever got hold of them—well, I would just have to deny ever having felt them. Like you, I despise people who delight in the misfortunes of others—and I loathe people who delight in my own misfortunes. I know exactly what feelings an attempted suicide should evoke, and I either had them, too, or pretended I had them. Sometimes in situations like this, with all the confusing conflicting emotions, it’s hard to tell whether feelings are real or pretended.
I left work immediately, canceling appointments, and went over to GB’s to spend the afternoon talking. I didn’t really know what to do, so I just listened and talked and said lots of stupid philosophical things and lots of even more stupid love-of-life sentimental things. He seemed depressed but not irrational—not that much different from usual. It was hard to believe that less than twenty-four hours before he was having his stomach pumped, on the verge of death. It was impossible to believe that he had really wanted to die—that he hadn’t picked a place in the library where he was sure to be discovered in time. It had clearly been a grand cosmic gesture directed at Dennis Moyer. But even so, how could anyone as intelligent and fortunate as GB do such a thing? How could he even risk not being discovered in the library? The story didn’t make sense to me; but I kept my doubts to myself, and we became a little closer because of the sleeping pill episode.
Somehow, that episode was over almost as fast as it had started. It wasn’t talked about much; GB was not forced into analysis or a mental institution by the state, or whatever I somehow assumed they did to people who tried to kill themselves. Dennis, of course, had been very upset, but had determined not to lead GB on, under any circumstances. He felt that if he responded, he would keep the relationship alive and GB would keep torturing himself. If Dennis simply ceased to exist, GB would get over him. That’s more or less the way it worked out. Dennis was the cross GB chose to bear, but GB managed to keep his romanticism in check and didn’t eat any more sleeping pills.
Around Christmas, having been out of Yale now for two and a half years and out of the closet for six months, I slept with GB. Chris was on vacation from school, down in Alabama. There was no reason why GB and I shouldn’t get together for dinner and a movie. But if Chris ever found out what we did afterward, he would be terribly upset.
To me, Chris’s love was a mixed blessing. I liked having a handsome lover whom everyone else wanted. I liked having someone to call whenever I wanted to brag about my latest little coup at the office, whenever I wanted to describe this unbelievably hunky kid I saw pumping gas. But I am impatient by nature, and I was getting tired of driving Chris back and forth to Chase Hall through Harvard Square traffic or waiting for him to pick out the shirt he wanted to wear—hell, waiting for him to finish a sentence! That slow, easy drawl was beginning to get on my nerves. All that keeping-things-to-myself when I was a kid made me a private kind of individual. I couldn’t take so much intimacy.
So when Golden Boy put his hand on my knee in his Maverick, with big snowflakes falling onto his windshield and onto the Christmas trees on the Common, I felt not the slightest compunction about making it with him. I didn’t want to hurt Chris, but he would never know about it. If I could keep being gay a secret for a dozen years, surely I could keep quiet about a single night with GB. For his part, GB assured me he would never tell either—and how could he? It would wreck his friendship with Chris. So we were safe and Chris would not be hurt, and it didn’t bother me to fool Chris, because really I was beginning to hope he would come back from Alabama with a crush on someone else.
As a matter of fact, that night Chris was in a gay bar in Atlanta. In the morning he was to interview Coke for a summer job, but that night he was out exploring the town. I know, because after the Coke interview he called to tell me what had happened at the bar. He had met this fellow. Rick, who was also just passing through Atlanta and doing some exploring. Nice-looking guy, Chris said, and I knew he was leading up to the confession that they had made it that night, and Chris just wanted to let me know that there was nothing to it and that he was looking forward to getting back to Boston … but no, that’s not what had happened at all.
What happened was that Chris was telling Rick about Boston and about his lover John (me) who was a junior exec at IBM and—
“John what?” Rick apparently interrupted, suddenly showing real interest.
Chris told him my last name. “Holy shit! You’re kidding! We used to work together in New York. You mean he was gay all that time?”
Meanwhile, of course, I was Holy shitting too as Chris told the story. You mean Rick Swidler, the kid who used to talk about the Italian women he had had…. You mean he was gay then?
Not only was he gay then, Chris told me, he had had a lover the whole time.
Anyhow, that was Rick, and the Coke interview went fine—how are things in Boston?
GB and I had a good time. Evidently, to my amazement, GB had wanted to do it with me for almost as long as I had wanted to do it with him, though I’m sure I hadn’t loomed as large in his mind as he had in mine. The best-looking boy in the world and the best little boy in the world were beginning to open up to each other. He thought he was too tall, and he preferred dark hair to blond hair. He kind of wished he could be like me, with my job and all. Can you imagine? I told him how struck I had been when I first met him and how I had never dreamed we would become good friends. We agreed to go to the hospital to have a height transplant, bringing him down to six one and me up to five eleven.
The one thing he told me that I didn’t like at all was that the whole suicide story had been nothing more than that—a story. He had just been feeling very depressed, he said, and had made up the whole thing. It was an attempted suicide without the attempt, the risk or the pain.
No one likes people who try to have their cake and eat it, too,
and that’s what this brand of attempted suicide seemed like to me. I felt duped. Used rather than needed. And it didn’t do much for my impression of GB’s stability. But then, he was only twenty-one, and he had never claimed to be the world’s most stable class president. He was too romantic and imaginative to be entirely predictable and rational about everything—and perhaps that was the reason he was attracted by Dennis Moyer’s pipe, his cool-headedness, his reliability, and his established manner. Perhaps that’s what he liked about my career at IBM. What could be more logical and rational and established than IBM, for crying out loud?
Anyway, I was past the idolizing stage with GB, and was now getting to know him on a realistic, good-with-the-bad, mortal basis.
Christmas came, and I went home to Brewster. I told Goliath that I wanted to talk with him about something and that we ought to go out back, out of earshot of the house, and build a snowman or something. Once Goliath had gone off to college, our relationship had improved immensely. I had been proud of my big brother at Yale, and he of his little brother, who would surely be admitted to Yale. We didn’t see each other long enough to get on each other’s nerves. So for the last ten years or so Goliath and I had been getting along famously, and I wanted to tell him what I had told all my other straight friends. I also wanted to know how he thought the Supreme Court would react if I told them.
Goliath was shocked. Coming from the same sheltered family I did, he knew as little about homosexuals as I would have if I hadn’t happened to be one. Kind of like sickle-cell anemia—surely not the kind of disease that would strike anyone he knew. And here was his little brother, the one who had won all the varsity letters in high school which he, Goliath, had never been able to do, telling him that he was gay. Somewhere in the back of his mind he remembered a story his father had told him about what his father had done when he found out he had a homosexual history teacher.
The Best Little Boy in the World Page 16