The Best Little Boy in the World

by Andrew Tobias

  Another time in Sporters—I spent a lot of time in Sporters those first two years—I met Hank’s Harvard Law School roommate, Parker Martinson III. (Later Hank moved off-campus with a really super girl, but his first year he shared a room with Parker Martinson III.) Parker, Hank, and I had been friends back at Yale.

  Parker is an emotional, excitable type. You’d say, “Parker! Look at that giant carrot behind your left ear!” and invariably he would turn to look. When he turned back to find his butterscotch pudding gone, he would make a big thing about it: “Jeez, why do you always pick on me?” If he came into the room wearing an expensive new sport coat and said, “Don’t I look great?” and you said, obviously fooling, that it looked just like the one they buried Charlemagne in, he would take great offense and start whining. Parker wanted attention; he wanted to have his feelings hurt. And now here he was in Sporters.

  “Parker!” I said loudly, slapping him on the shoulder from behind, feeling sure I would evoke one of his more classic reactions. It’s not often you meet someone you know from “the real world” in the bar.

  “Oh, my God!” Parker sort of yelped, wide-eyed. He was pale. “John, you’ve got to promise me you will never tell anyone about this. Promise me.”

  “Okay. I promise. But tell me, Parker—this is great!—how long have you been doing this? Tell me everything.” I was beaming again, sure that Parker would quickly overcome his initial fright and start to beam, too. Well, it’s like being alone in Tokyo and running across an old friend. We could speak the same language. Super.

  “First promise me.”

  “I promise! Tell me!”

  Apparently, Parker had been going to gay bars, and other places, for four years now—“Parker! You’re a pro! If only I had been out at Yale!”—and he had never met anyone from the real world before. He had dreaded this moment for four years. All his work dating girls and making up alibis, shattered.

  “Promise me you will never tell Hank!”

  “Tell Hank what?” I grinned.

  “Come on, John, you know what!” he said in his why-were-we-always-picking-on-him tone of voice.

  “What? That you’re gay? He wouldn’t care. I told him about me and—”

  “You what!” Parker moved forward a little, and his hands went out to the sides, the way you would move if you were opening a double door, only he forgot there was a drink in his right hand, and half of it sloshed out of the glass, narrowly missing a piano-tuner friend of mine.

  “Relax, Parker! I promise I won’t tell Hank about you, but when I told him about me, it just made us closer.”

  “Promise me you will never tell a soul you met me here!” Well, I had no intention of exposing or blackmailing Parker Martinson, but I was getting just a trifle miffed that he had so litde faith in my discretion. I mean, I had already promised him three times now, and he was still asking me to promise him. I decided to show him how ridiculous he was beginning to sound, by being sarcastic:

  “No, Parker, I am going over to that pay phone there—oh! look at that knock-out by the phone! Maybe I can kill two birds with one phone”—I was on my third beer, so excuse me—“and I’m going to call your mother. Is there more than one Martinson in the Baltimore phone directory? Oh, that doesn’t matter, I forgot. If you’re the third, then your father’s name must be Parker, too.”

  Parker was aghast and at least pretended that he took me seriously. He kept imploring me not to call. I kept asking him to lend me a dime.

  But this was too ridiculous. How could anyone as bright as Parker, who had been out for four years, for crying out loud, not pick up on my sarcasm and just shut up? How could he be so paranoid?

  “Parker. Shut up! In the first place, I haven’t the slightest reason to tell anyone I met you in here, and I’ve promised three times that I won’t. In the second place, you should be delighted you met me. Stop being so paranoid and start being delighted.” I sounded very authoritative. Parker calmed down.

  Parker had been dealing with his homosexuality—rather, his bisexuality, as he was quick to define it—differently from me. Not only had he never told any of his straight friends he was gay, but he also went by a phony name in the bar and never brought anyone home to his place or gave out his phone number. He almost never saw anyone twice. He would just sit at home, his horniness for a guy building up and hating himself for that, and finally he would give in and go out hunting. After he had had sex with a guy, generally under the raunchiest, most impersonal conditions, he would invariably resolve to go straight from that moment on. To paraphrase the stale cigarette-quitting joke: He had gone straight a hundred times in the last four years.

  I thought Parker should have been delighted to see me because after four years he had finally found someone to talk to. I knew what it was like to go for years without having anyone to talk with about Topic No. 1, and I assumed he was bursting.

  I was right. Parker and I have talked almost every day over the last year and a half since I met him in the bar. I guess I’m his closest friend. Our friendship is special for me, too. My close straight friends and my close gay friends tend to be handsome. Parker is not. My customary rationalization for having mosdy attractive friends is: There are more good people around than you’ll ever have time to get to know, anyway, so you may as well choose the ones who are attractive. But a world in which looks are so important is a pretty lousy, terribly inequitable world. I find myself a little more palatable for my friendship with Parker.

  So Parker Martinson was gay. What do you know? I told you Hank was attractive. Not that Parker had any more idea of making it with Hank than I had. I had to smile when I reflected that not only had two of Hank’s several roommates over the years been gay without his knowing it (he still doesn’t know about Parker) but so was his boss at the part-time job he held down. Hank was surrounded by us and didn’t know it.

  I don’t mention this to make you feel uncomfortable, as though there were this creepy, insidious plot to surround good-looking all-American boys with unwholesome perverts who plan to corrupt the world when the time is right. This coincidence is worth mentioning simply for what it says about a lot of gay people: They are just like everybody else; you wouldn’t know they were gay unless they told you. (Some, I’m told, are even very well behaved.)

  To readers who resent my spelling out such an obvious and trite message, I can only plead the Sophistication Gap. On one side of the gap you have gay people and some straight people, mainly Spiro’s effete snobs, I think, who know all about homosexuality and couldn’t care less. Of course, they would rather their own sons didn’t grow up gay, because that strikes some sensitive intimate chords, but they enjoy the company of their gay friends. On this side of the gap myself, I keep having to remind myself of the other side—of all the people George McGovern had in mind when he asked the Democratic Convention not to commit political suicide by endorsing “The Right to Be Different.” On this other side of the gap are Jon Martin’s friend’s parents, who disowned their son the Yale graduate because he was gay. Hell, my Playboy-Club-Key project-worker friend went to Arizona State and to Stanford B-School and reads the New York Times every day, but when I mentioned to him recently that a guy we had just passed on the street was “in drag,” he said: “What’s ‘drag’?” (It’s a guy dressing up like a girl—but can there really be people who don’t know that?)

  One rainy Saturday afternoon I went to see the double bill at the Harvard Square Cinema. I like going to movies alone, curling up in a nearsighted row with no one around me and becoming totally absorbed in the picture. I found myself standing in line next to a boy in a Harvard crew sweat shirt and track shoes, whose name was probably something like Doug Decathlon. My knees went a trifle wobbly.

  There was nobody with him, and I wanted to think of something to say to make conversation. Yet anything I said to this guy would be motivated by my attraction to him, and, even if he didn’t, I would know it was a despicable “approach.” He turned to me, smiled, and said
, “Hi. Howya doin’?”

  I was fine, and I wondered whether he really rowed for the Harvard crew, as his sweat shirt suggested, because a friend of mine had been on the crew at Yale. (Such an astounding coincidence.) Pete (it was Pete, not Doug) did row for Harvard and had narrowly missed going to the Olympics.

  The first sentence you hear someone say often tells you 90 percent of all you will ever know about that person. How many years of school did he sit through, where is he from, where on the scale from formal to flipped-out, where on the scale from self-confident to insecure, where on the scale from genuine to affected. Sometimes at Sporters you go up to someone of apparent cowboy potential and the first words out of his mouth say: “I’m from Queents, New Yawuk, and my life’ss ambition iss to go to Porto Rico and find some gorgeouss number to fuck me.” In contrast, Pete sounded as all-American as you please.

  As he was buying his ticket, my palms began to sweat. I could think of absolutely no way to ask another guy to sit next to me in a movie without sounding queer. He waited for me to buy my ticket and asked me where I liked to sit. “Ya-ha-ha,” I gurgled.

  The first movie was Women in Love, which all my friends had told me to see and all the critics loved. I am too impatient and businesslike to enjoy a movie like that. The photography was beautiful, but nothing happened. I was bored with Women in Love. Even the famous nude wrestling scene left me cold.

  While we were waiting for the next movie to start, a good one, I thought it would be safe to talk with him about homosexuality. Not mine, needless to say; the homosexuality in Women in Love. Pete seemed to know a good bit about the subject, but not enough to incriminate himself.

  The next movie was The Great Escape, starring Steve McQueen in lots of implausible action. I gobbled it up, middle-brow all the way, and then tried to get Pete back to our interrupted discussion as we were filing out. I said it was amazing how many people were gay—I had even heard a rumor that Steve McQueen was gay. (I hadn’t, but Pete couldn’t know that, and it fit the conversation because we had just spent two hours watching him being masculine.) Pete, who I was beginning wishfully to think just might be about where I had been when I was twenty, said he hadn’t heard that rumor and hoped it wasn’t true—it would ruin his image of Steve McQueen, he said.

  As we were leaving the theater, the sun down by now and faint claps of distant thunder in my stomach, I decided to invite him back for dinner. Why not? Why should I feel guilty about asking him over, so long as I planned to do nothing improper? But before I could ask him, he asked me.

  What’s going on? He is thinking all the things I’m thinking, I think, but he isn’t really, is he? Or is he?

  We had dinner at his off-campus apartment. A little white wine, talk about Harvard and Yale, talk about the stadiums he had to run, up and down those steps twenty times, to keep in shape; talk about WBCN and the Firesign Theatre, about the draft, about how he was coming with his thesis. “Well, look, thanks a lot,” I said. “I hope you’ll come over to my place for dinner sometime.” (Or, as the young man in the American Museum of Natural History once put it, “Now let me show you what interests me.”)

  He called a couple of nights later to see whether I wanted to hear Pete McCloskey talk about the war, and I said sure, why didn’t he come over first since we had a couple of hours before it started? When he came over, after a little preliminary talk, I told him I was gay. He perked up. “I’m glad you told me that,” he said, because he was sometimes attracted to guys. Well, he was attracted to me. But whenever he had tried to talk about the general subject with any of his friends, they put him down and wouldn’t talk, about it.

  Well, I would talk about it until I got cramps in my jaw if he wanted. Attracted to me! Hot dog. Of course he had a steady girlfriend and would surely marry and have kids, but he had always thought it was a shame that guys couldn’t express what they felt for other guys.

  We missed the McCloskey talk and rambled on for hours about our respective hangups and inclinations and backgrounds and life-styles. I was a very good boy. I liked Pete too much, wanted him to like me too much, to ruin it with any horny ideas. If it was going to happen, it would happen, but I wanted our friendship to be more than just a means to get him into bed. Or was I such a gendeman because I sensed the only way to make it with him was to pretend I didn’t care about that, only about our friendship? How much of “love,” particularly early in a relationship, is based on sex? How much on friendship? Of friendship between two guys who are eight or nine on my scale? Of charisma? More than the romantic in us would care to admit, I think.

  It happened.

  Once it did, my burning, romantic desire to be Pete’s close friend abated a good bit.

  I’m surprised I went home with Ernie. He lived at Radcliffe, which was strange enough. Who would ever have thought I would be screwing around at Radcliffe? Well, who would ever have thought Harvard guys would be living there, and Radcliffe girls living in Harvard dorms? But stranger still, Ernie is black. Well chocolate. Growing up in New York made me a guilty liberal, anxious to see blacks get their fair share—and it made me nervous. I see a black guy coming toward me late at night, I get nervous. I see four black guys coming toward me, I get very nervous. This despite the fact that throughout my entire sheltered existence my only “mugging,” and a nonviolent one at that, occurred when I was five, with Goliath in the park—and the mugger was white and about ten years old.

  Objectively, I see many handsome black guys. Subjectively, they register low on my preppie dial, my cowboy dial, my wish-I-could-be-like-him dial. I don’t wish I were black. Nor am I into the black-master-white-slave trip some people are. Or even the white-master-black-slave trip. (I do have one friend, married with kids, whose sole homosexual experience was in college, where he had this craving to be debased at the feet of a big black classmate. He felt so guilty being a rich young WASP, or at least that had something to do with it.)

  Anyway, Ernie is such a handsome guy I always think of him as a model for one of those four-color Jamaican rum ads in Playboy or Esquire. He’s just under six feet tall, or just over if you don’t press down the Afro when you measure, and he is the picture of health and proper proportion. His father is a doctor in California, where Ernie was the token black in his suburban high school class. The prep school tradition isn’t as big on the West Coast as the Andover-Exeter tradition is back East, but the kind of school he went to was a close equivalent. I guess it might be likened to Scarsdale High. He was a shoo-in to Harvard, the kind of applicant who brings a moment of tranquillity and joy to the consciences on the besieged admissions committee: “No question, boys: We’d want this man for the class of ’77 if he were white, green or purple.”

  I have an idea I know why Ernie was gay. Rather similar, really, to the situation that I think made me gay. There he was, black, in the library doing his homework when all his “brothers” were out shooting hoops. He was learning trigonometry while they were learning to kick ass in the street. Not that he knew any of his “brothers” personally—his parents didn’t want him mixing with hooligan elements—but everyone knows that the brothers are tough street fighters and that they do naughty things. Well, Ernie became as frightened as I did when he saw four blacks walking toward him. His special fear was that he knew he wasn’t really a man. He wasn’t a black, and he wasn’t a white. He was a phony.

  One way to compensate, of course, was for Ernie to work out with weights and go out for sports; he didn’t look weaker than his brothers, by any means. But inside, he felt less tough. He felt different. He wished he could be Leroy Stud.

  Straight blacks and gay whites have much in common. Harlem and Roxbury are analogous to Greenwich Village and Beacon Hill. The black subculture has its jive, the gay subculture its camping and dishing. Some blacks overcompensate with Cadillacs; some gays overcompensate with motorcycles. Blacks are consciously trying to promote black pride, gays, gay pride. Most of society, perhaps despite itself, just doesn’t feel comfortable wi
th either group. They’re okay if they stay in their place, but not running the Department of Defense, say, or dating my son. Even “liberals” feel uncomfortable just talking with blacks or gays: having to think carefully about everything they say, so as not to offend inadvertently, but not so carefully as to be obvious, which is offensive in itself. And there are those blacks and gays with chips on their shoulders who want to take offense and who can find reason to in almost anything.

  Just as blacks in a predominantly white society are inordinately conscious of their color, gays in a predominantly straight society are inordinately conscious of their sexuality. Constant awareness of a socially undesirable trait can be debilitating, alienating, embittering. It can make you paranoid or just plain bitchy. In any case, it will have a profound effect. Not the skin color itself—that will determine only the degree to which you reflect light and can hide in dark corners. It is the “wrongness” of the color that will get you. Not the sexual orientation itself—that will determine only whom you want to sleep with. It is the wrongness of the orientation that will get you. In both cases, it is the prejudice, not the condition, that does the harm. It may be, as some would have it, that blacks are inherently inferior to whites or that homosexuals are all, by definition, sick. So what? Even if either condition truly is inherently undesirable, no manner of social pressure will turn blacks into whites or gays into straights. Social pressure will only exaggerate the handicap. It is still the prejudice, more than the condition, that does the harm.

  Two differences between gays and blacks are worth noting, too. Some people may not like blacks, but they can hardly argue that blackness is immoral, that blacks should be painted white. By contrast, many still feel that homosexuality is “bad,” that homosexuals should be treated to make them heterosexuals. And, if you are black, everyone knows it. It’s just a physical property, though it has its effect on the mind as the mind develops. But if you are gay, it can be (must be) hidden. It is all in your mind. Tangible manifestations may follow, as in manner of dress or speech—but conceivably there could be five or ten or twenty million men and women walking around this country whom everybody assumes are straight, but who are actually gay.