The Best Little Boy in the World

by Andrew Tobias

  Given the social and career costs of being gay, most of those who are not obvious are not going to wave any flags. A white newsman or politician can join the fight for racial equality without any fear that people will suspect he is black. Can a straight male do the same for the gay cause?

  I met Charlie on the second floor of the Doubleday Bookstore where they filmed those scenes in The Owl and the Pussycat. I was in New York on business. My friend Freddie (of the oral virus) had met Charlie some time back in the Boston Public Library and thought he was a terrific guy I should meet. So I called Charlie, who said something about any friend of Freddie’s being a friend of his, and why didn’t we meet up there by the New Titles rack?

  Charlie is refreshingly conservative. Besides his natural, rugged appearance (no hair dryers and Guccis for him, even if he does live in New York), he never goes to bars, never blows dope, never talks about how he is dying to go to bed with so-and-so. He is not promiscuous. Instead, his energies go into a hundred enterprises, from painting the hallway of his building to cutting some ivy from City Hall for his friends (it grows back), to going for a bike ride, to baking banana bread. He runs on just a few hours’ sleep, never complains about anything, even about New York. He loves New York. He is always busy and happy. I run on like this because I stand amused and awed by his marvelous good spirits. He is what I think they call “well adjusted.”

  Freddie was right, we did hit it off well. Charlie was so different from most of the people I met who would have taken me to the bars, or maybe a movie, and then back to their place to have sex. Charlie had me drive around the city and showed me where all the notable buildings were with little stories about their architecture and all—boring, but different—and then at one in the morning he said, “You know what we should do now? You may not want to, but I hope so.” Well, I knew what he had in mind, and I wanted to. “We should drive to the tip of Manhattan and take the Staten Island Ferry for a nickel.” What?

  That was typically Charlie. He is gay with straight, old-fashioned ideas. It was only later that I realized one reason for Charlie’s self-control was that he had a lover, an executive at Bristol Myers with whom he shared a townhouse. Still, sex seems less on Charlie’s mind than on most, and that is appealing.

  “Imagine my surprise,” therefore, when one evening visiting Charlie, after dinner and a bottle of wine, he said he wanted to show me something he had only shown a few of his closest friends. I thought maybe he was going to drop his pants or something, which never does as much for me as it’s supposed to—but then he reached behind a cabinet and pulled out a manilla envelope. Inside was a magazine of gay pornography.

  Really, Charles, you are too much. I mean, prudishness is one thing, but to be secretive about a silly porno mag. I mean everybody has them or has seen them. I was thinking this as I looked through the thirty-two pages of color photographs of two nude males doing various things—I prefer pictures with pants, like in Sports Illustrated or the back of Esquire, but I look through the hard-core stuff when it is offered—and even Charlie shouldn’t make such a big deal out of a magazine like that.

  “One of my odd jobs,” he said. “I’d rather you didn’t mention it to people, but I thought you’d get a—”

  “Wait a minute! Is that you?”

  He grinned half-sheepishly, half-proudly as I looked back and forth between him and the better-looking of the two guys doing all those disgusting things in full unairbrushed color.

  “How much did they pay you for that?” I had to ask.

  “A hundred bucks.”

  I could describe lots of other people I met that first gay winter in Boston, but to do so would be stalling. It’s just that it is difficult to write about breaking up with Chris that April; when I think about it, I still wince.

  That month Chris met Hunter, a divinity student who was in the throes of breaking up with his lover of the last four years, a naval ensign stationed in Newport, Rhode Island. I first heard about Hunter from Golden Boy, who described him as the kind of guy Chris might easily get hung up on if he were not already hung up on me. Fine. By now Chris and I were talking every day, but getting together for dinner only once or twice a week and not always staying overnight. No doubt, as he saw more of Hunter, he would see less of me, and gradually, painlessly, he would have a new lover, and I would still be his good friend.

  Instead, Golden Boy decided to speed things up. He thought I was being unfair stringing Chris along the way I was and not simply cutting off our relationship so he would feel free to get deeply involved with Hunter.

  I went down to the bar one evening and saw Chris looking darkly at his bottle of beer. Hi! He was cool to me. What’s wrong? “Maybe there’s been a lot wrong for a long time that I didn’t know about.” What do you mean? I had a feeling I knew what he meant, but it was inconceivable that Golden Boy could have told him. “If you don’t know what I mean, maybe we should just forget it.” I was beginning to feel knots inside. “We’ll still talk every day, won’t we?” Tears had come to my eyes. “Maybe we’d better not.” I looked into his eyes and put my fists to my own eyes to keep anyone from seeing the tears as I ran out to my car.

  I know this won’t do much for the Joe College image I want you to have of me, but it’s what happened. Usually I was in good control of myself. But I suddenly felt such an overwhelming sadness for having hurt Chris and at the thought that I might lose his love. Not his body, his love.

  I called Golden Boy and asked him why he had done it, why he had told Chris. He said he had hated seeing Chris torn between Hunter and me when I didn’t really love him. He was sorry, but he thought it was for the best.

  What a crazy thing to do! It would have to ruin the friendship he had with Chris, mine with Chris, mine with Golden Boy.

  The next few weeks were painful for all of us, as painful as any I’ve ever experienced. All the cold analysis in the world, with which I could ordinarily manipulate my emotions, wouldn’t make the unhappiness go away. I felt dreadful that I had hurt Chris so badly. I felt awfully lonely without talking with him every day. I had to make up for it somehow, I had to make him understand what it was about me that made me the way I was, I had to get him to forgive me, and we had to stay best friends.

  I knew I was not ready, if I ever would be, for a full-time kind of relationship. Sometimes the romantic in me tried to fool me into thinking I could handle it—but I knew the moment I had managed to persuade Chris to lower his defenses again and need me, I would again want to be free.

  I spent hours writing to Chris, talking with Chris, trying to make him see why I couldn’t be his lover but had to be his best friend. Whether or not it fit the textbook definition of why, how, and when to love someone, I loved Chris now. Would he forgive me? Could we count on each other for good?

  Chris said he couldn’t just turn off his love for me. He said he had built up defenses to ward off the hurt, and he agreed that we would never be full-time exclusive partners in life. But he said he would always love me.

  Good things don’t come easily. I think the intense pain the three of us felt soldered a bond that really will last a long, long time.

  More than a year has passed since that April, and Chris and I have talked or seen each other almost every day. Hunter, while he was around, understood. Hunter was number one, of course, but there could be other people in Chris’s life, like me and Golden Boy. Golden Boy, too, was forgiven. The crisis was over, and now I loved Chris.

  Sex has nothing to do with this love; it may be only the fear of loneliness. What I think this love is, is a fabric of shared experiences and feelings, woven only with great effort over time. That’s why I think it will only grow stronger. There is no “right guy” or “right girl” out there waiting to be discovered. There is only the hard work of building and investing in a relationship—and I have invested in Chris.

  CHAPTER 14

  More than a year has passed since Chris and Golden Boy and I had our minor catastrophe, and I am abou
t to move down to Washington. One of the “two proposals that would knock their eyes out” at IBM, which I alluded to earlier, did. I got a fat raise and was asked to move to Washington to supervise fulfillment of the accepted proposal. First, though, I was to take the vacation time I had accumulated, which I’ve spent writing this.

  This past year has been a good one, and a little less frantic than the one before. I have lost much of my compulsion to make up for lost time: I’ve caught up with myself. Having packed several years’ growing up into just a couple, all I have to do now is grow up a year at a time, which should, relatively speaking, be a snap.

  Like anyone, I think a lot about what my life will be like in the future. How can I best take advantage of being gay and minimize the disadvantages? I’ve met a variety of people whose life-styles have helped me see some of the alternatives open to me for “later life.”

  I met Bob Knight the first summer I came out. Peter-who-does-the-thing-with-the-ice and I were walking along the river toward one of the Boston Pops outdoor concerts, when we ran into Rob-the-mute-math-whiz and this very handsome guy, Bob Knight. He had his shirt off, draped over his back with just the sleeves hanging down the front.

  I tried to be cool about it. I sensed that looking at Bob while talking with Rob or Peter was no way to score points with anyone, but I couldn’t help myself. I came on too strong. I don’t remember all the things I said to Bob, but I remember asking for his phone number and calling him several times, only to hear that he was busy. Some weeks later I asked Peter what I had done wrong. He told me that if the Germans had employed my subtle approach in World War I, they could have pushed through the Maginot Line in a week and a half.

  A year later, which is to say a year ago, I met Bob at a party. He was dressed differently, verging on “piss elegant,” and he sounded more affected than he had the summer before. I could swear he had lost some of his “masculinity.” Why was he letting it slip away? Surely he noticed the difference in himself, no?

  Three months ago someone walked into Sporters who was beautiful in a way too “graceful” to interest me—until I realized that it was Bob wrapped up in that silk ascot, with something very like a handbag slung over his shoulder. It was the same body, softened somewhat and carried differently. It was the same face, only the expression was somehow less natural, facial muscles “just so.” And the voice—“My dear, was Miss Knight affected!”

  Why do so many people follow this progression? Is it really that we all wish we were women and that we simply follow the logical path as fast as we can lower our inhibitions? Does the logical path lead to gowns, lipstick, and Scandinavian surgery?

  For some it seems to. Yet I think much of the apparent femininity in the gay world is attributable to subcultural style rather than to an inner desire to be feminine. For example:

  When I first came out, I noticed, disapprovingly, that most gays call each other by their formal first names. In a straight football huddle you would hear, “All right, Joe, you go long; McMicking, you go wide; Albie, you …”—not “Joseph, you go long; Martin, you go wide; Albert, you …” So when I made friends with a guy introduced as Raymond, I called him Ray. Everyone else called him Raymond, and at least at first, I would wince imperceptibly when they did, and maybe feel a bit superior. But gradually, over many months of hearing him called nothing but Raymond, it began to sound more and more like his name. Ray sounded wrong. Somewhere along the line I started calling him Raymond. Was that a loss of masculinity? Was it caused by an inner desire to be a woman? Or isn’t it natural to conform to the styles around you unless you make a conscious effort not to? In fact, because I do worry about silly things like this, I have reverted to calling him Ray. But if I worked in a largely gay environment, rather than at IBM, and if I weren’t so hung up on my Brooks Brothers self-image, mightn’t I call people by their formal first names? Mightn’t I laugh when friends camped and in turn camp to make them laugh? Would I be doing it because deep down I wish I were a woman? Would my doing it make me somehow inferior?

  I doubt that I will go the way of Bob Knight as I get older. Not because I think there is anything “wrong” with carrying a pocketbook—or a chain, for that matter. Just wrong for me, for the image I want of myself.

  My lawyer is forty-three. He grew up in New Jersey, the only child of a powerful mother. He went to the University of Wisconsin, to U.Va. Law School, to Korea, and to the law firm that represents IBM. I say “my lawyer,” though I have never had reason to engage him. I just worked with him occasionally in the course of my first years at IBM in New York. We became friendly enough that if anyone had ever decided to sue me for playing my stereo too loud and demanded the name of “my lawyer,” I would have felt comfortable giving him the name of this man, Something Something, Esq., hereinafter referred to as Esquire.

  Esquire carries a Samsonite attaché, or did until recently; lives on the twenty-third floor of a swank East Side apartment building (the kind without elevator men, but with TV cameras in the elevators to keep you from raping fellow tenants); wears a wedding band, though he is separated from his wife; and is remarkably dapper and trim for someone his age.

  About a year and a half ago I was back down in New York on business, and I called Esquire to see if he wanted to have dinner. With his wife gone he had a lot of evenings free and had told me to call him for lunch or dinner any time I was in the city. I should come up to his place, and we would go from there, he said.

  His $500-a-month (I’m guessing) one-bedroom apartment sent gay bleeps into my radar, bleeps that would probably not show up on a straight screen, like the tube of K-Y in the medicine chest or the Barbra Streisand albums among his record collection. I wondered: Could Esquire be gay? I remembered the time we had played handball on his membership at the New York Athletic Club (no blacks and only twelve Jews allowed, but some faggots and lots of closet cases) and what remarkably good shape he was in. I wondered why he had separated from his wife and why they had had no children.

  At the restaurant, I thought I noticed him noticing the same busboy I was noticing as my herring and his vichyssoise were delivered. What a pleasant coincidence, I thought, as I made up my mind to try to spill a spoonful of vichyssoise into his well-tailored lap. “Esquire,” I said, “I think you should be cognizant of the kinds of matters you might have to defend me against. So I think”—the timing was important here so I paused long enough in the count down for him to dip his spoon into the soup—“I should tell you”—head was bending a little and spoon emerging with its payload—“that I am”—eyes beginning to widen as mission control prepared for docking of the silver soup shuttle—“gay.” Contact!

  Damn. I could see the spoon rattle around a little as it began to enter his mouth, but surface tension, which if I remember my high school chemistry right increases with viscosity, and so is stronger in vichyssoise than in water, kept any from spilling.

  “You are?” he asked, upon swallowing. He sounded disapproving.

  “I am.” Maybe I was wrong about Esquire, though as far as I was concerned, he could know in any case.

  “Why are you telling me?”

  “Well, I thought as my lawyer you should know. That’s all. No big thing, just file it away somewhere in your head so when I get busted for dancing with a plainclothesman I won’t have to waste my one-phone-call dime giving you the background.”

  He must have decided I wasn’t trying to trap him. “All right then,” he said, “would you like to go to a party with me after dinner?” He still wasn’t smiling, and I could tell he was worried and upset that I had apparently assumed he was gay. What was wrong with his cover? Could others tell? Was it too much aftershave, or what?

  “A party? What do you mean?” I asked, thinking it would be only considerate to let him make his revelation to me. He told me he was gay, also, but wondered whether I could tell. I said that I am always suspicious of guys his age who were so good-looking and living alone—but that’s not why I had told him I was gay. A par
ty? Sure, let’s go.

  Esquire is an independent, aggressive, private kind of individual. He has had one two-year lover relationship, and has done “things” from time to time, but hasn’t the temperament to settle down with anyone. To provide a more stable social base than nightly tricks, Esquire has had a group of close gay friends he has known since his first years out, almost twenty-five years ago. The three men he shares the house with on Fire Island—one in advertising, one a banker, one who hasn’t done much of anything since the inheritance—are a family of sorts. He also had his career. He became a partner of his firm in record time and did more than a creditable job. That was satisfying. He liked the people he worked with and the respect he commanded. Only one of his colleagues knew he was gay. The others, if they suspected, never mentioned it.

  Esquire had never told his parents he was gay. Once at a large cocktail party in their home, his parents and a circle of friends were selling him on this beautiful, sensitive, wonderful girl he just had to meet—and in the midst of all the gracious adjectives that were being heaped on this young girl, whoever she was, Esquire asked loudly, “Sure, sure—but does she fuck?”

  From then on, apparently, his mother was careful to skirt any issue, particularly in public, that might set off her all-too-healthy heterosexual son.

  In sixteen years as a lawyer in New York Esquire maintained more than a comfortable standard of living, while contributing generously to his various alumni funds, causes, and campaigns (he is a director of one charity and a trustee of his old private school). He “retired” last year. In those sixteen years, with no life insurance bills to pay, no pediatricians, orthodontists, or gynecologists to pay, no Little Red School House tuition or Camp Winnipesaukee fee, Esquire had saved enough money to support himself modestly for the rest of his life. That had been his goal, to have the freedom to do anything he wanted, and now he has it. He plans to spend a couple of years going around the world, and then he will see what he feels like doing.