The Best Little Boy in the World

by Andrew Tobias

  I don’t expect you to remember that for Tuesday’s quiz; but I have read it over, and it is accurate—even if it leaves out a few characters along the way. The “they all lived happily ever after” part I just threw in to try to regain control of the sentence. Whether that part is accurate remains to be seen. Give it a military background and you might turn that one incestuous sentence into a gay War and Peace. You might, that is, if you were a novelist. But even if I were a novelist, I’m not sure there is anything awfully “novel” in what we were doing. Isn’t this what many kids were doing in the tenth grade? Billy and Janey just broke up because Janey told Mike she would go to the dance with him. But when Herbie heard what Mike had done to his best friend Billy, Herbie tackled Mike extra hard in the scrimmage and broke Mike’s ankle. Now Mike can’t take Janey to the dance, but now Billy won’t take her either: Billy doesn’t ever want to have anything to do with Janey and is in the depths of despair, but is taking little Mary Ann out behind the greenhouse, anyway, just to keep in practice.

  The difference between the movies Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice and Bob and Daryl and Ted and Alex, besides the difference in their Motion Pictures Guild ratings, is that more combinations and permutations of relationships are likely to occur in the latter. The mathematical sign for permutations is “!”. I begin to understand why when I think of Chris and GB and Hunter and Dennis and me!

  I don’t mean to make light of all the “intrigue” and emotion of the last two years. At times I was entirely caught up in it. Certainly, whenever I knew GB and Chris were together without me, I felt left out and, despite myself, jealous. But even if I had time to detail all our comings and goings, I am sure it would be of interest only to our little group.

  Now the group is being broken up geographically. Chris was graduated from Harvard Business School in June and has left for a management training program with his new employer in Atlanta. I am going to Washington, $38 from Atlanta by Eastern night coach and 20 cents a minute by phone.

  Golden Boy won a Rotary fellowship to study for a year at the London School of Economics and will be leaving shortly for England, if he can tear himself away from one of the pro football players I’ve alluded to. Golden Boy finally got over Dennis Moyer, at least partially, with the rationalization that he was too good for Dennis and that Dennis wasn’t even perceptive enough to realize it. Dennis will be in Boston next year, and for the indefinite future, with his law firm.

  Hunter is back with his pre-Chris lover, Craig, perhaps for another four years or another forty. Probably for another four months. But that unkind prediction just reflects my innate hostility toward Hunter for having diverted some of Chris’s attention from me to himself and for having hurt Chris. Randy, who wasn’t really part of our group, but who found himself in my War and Peace paragraph anyway, is looking for modeling jobs in New York. His last job was an Army recruiting ad. You know: Join the Action Army and be a real man like me.

  Parker Martinson, Mr. Paranoia, came over yesterday to say good-bye. I will miss our daily telephone conversations. My daily therapy for him was at least as much therapy for me: There is perhaps no better way to make someone conscious of his own good fortune—to make him happy—than to give him the task of cheering up someone else.

  Parker’s “problem” is that he is about five on my scale from one to ten. I think being five has the most potential for pleasure and the most for pain. If you can master and feel comfortable with bisexuality, you can love everyone and have everyone love you. You can see beauty in twice as many faces; you can live a richer, fuller life. If, like Parker, you can’t master it, it can bug you no end. Parker won’t allow himself to enjoy guys; his sexual appetite for guys distracts him from enjoying girls. He has built “his problem” into a veritable institution in his mind, even if he does take some consolation from his cosmic miserableness, as I used to.

  Relax, Parker. Tell Hank, Parker. Tell everyone. Enjoy it. You can’t possibly be happy if you hate yourself, if you don’t like the image you have of yourself. I think happiness is being satisfied with what you are. Shock treatments aren’t going to change you, Parker. You are always going to like guys as well as girls. It will be easier for you to change your opinion of yourself than for you to change your fundamental sexual orientation. You should be proud and delighted that you have the best of both worlds.

  Just the other day, Parker, I was asking Chris whether if science came up with a pill to make gays straight, he would take it. He asked, “Could I still like boys?” You see? To him the best deal would be the deal you have: to be able to make it with chicks the way you do, to have sex with them, to have dinner with them, to marry them and have a family with them, the way you will—but to like boys, too. I envy you, too, Parker. I wish I liked girls, too. Maybe I wish it only in an abstract way, since the whole thought really kind of turns me off; but it’s still a nice idea in theory.

  “Would you take that pill and make yourself straight?” Parker asked me. No, I wouldn’t. That would make me an entirely different person. That would be like killing myself. I have learned to love my array of quaint fuck-ups. That’s the trick, Parker: If you just make up your mind to like yourself, you will be happy. Once happy, you will have all the more reason to like yourself. It’s as much a self-fulfilling prophecy as anything else: To like yourself, you have to think you’re nifty. To be nifty, you have to be happy. To be happy, you have to like yourself. To like yourself, you have to think you’re nifty. To be nifty, you have to be happy. To be happy, you have to like—

  “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” said Parker.

  I know. It’s very much like a religion: I define myself as happy. I take it on faith. It may sound irrational, this defining myself as happy—but what religion is rational? What rational purpose is there for living? What rationality underlies society’s prejudice against homosexuals? Hmmmm, Parker?

  “Well, that may work out for you, but whatever you do, don’t you ever tell anyone about me. Promise me that.”

  “Okay, Parker, I promise. Don’t forget to visit me. I hear ‘the bushes’ in Washington are out of sight.”

  I haven’t managed to say all I wanted to or to say it properly or in a way that would inspire the indignation I wanted you to feel. Throughout the book I have felt like adding footnoted apologies to gay readers for sounding simpleminded, naïve, and supercilious. It should go without saying that having tried so hard for years to remain ignorant of it and having been out a relatively short time, I don’t know that much about homosexuality. I only know what it was like for me to come to terms—or to begin to, anyway—with my own.

  Dr. David Reuben, on the other hand, purports to know a great deal about homosexuality. Indeed, Dr. David Reuben, a psychiatrist, claims to know Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask. Since his book has sold some 8,000,000 copies to date, it is likely that his chapter on homosexuality has been more widely read than any other.

  Dr. Reuben explains that homosexual encounters are generally impersonal. A guy goes down to a bowling alley, sits on a toilet in the men’s room, plays footsie with the guy in the next stall. They exchange notes on pieces of toilet paper, then suck each other’s penises, then leave. “No feeling, no sentiment, no nothing,” explains Dr. Reuben. “Are all homosexual contacts as impersonal as that? No. Most are much more impersonal.” Dr. Reuben explains that most of us don’t even have time to write notes or even to close the bathroom stall door for a measure of privacy. “A masturbation machine might do it better,” he explains. “But all homosexuals aren’t like that, are they? Unfortunately, they are just like that,” he says.

  Last night I went down to Sporters to say good-bye to some friends. The only notable occurrence was my meeting an Air Force sergeant who was passing through Boston. He was originally from Albuquerque, New Mexico. He had been engaged to be married for three years, but kept putting off the marriage. Last year he broke off the engagement and came out. Aged twenty
-six. Aged twenty-six. I wonder how many people there are on the earth, this instant, who are ostensibly straight, but who have this terrible shameful secret gnawing out their insides, making them miserable. How many are there like that—aged eleven? Sixteen? Twenty-two? Twenty-six? Thirty-four? Forty-seven? Eighty-three?

  CHAPTER 16

  I told them. They said that so far as they were concerned, I was still the best little boy in the world.

  AFTERWORD

  I was twenty-five when the foregoing was written; I am twenty-nine now. Look how the world has changed—and not changed. Imagine: a six-part series on the sports pages of newspapers around the country about pro athletes who are gay; a front-page Wall Street Journal story about The Advocate (whose own circulation has doubled in the past year); a lead piece in The Sunday New York Times travel section on an all-gay cruise; a Time cover story on a much-decorated gay Army sergeant. Doubtless, a lot of eyes have been opened to “the silent minority.” Paul Newman, in The Front Runner, if that film ever gets made, could open a lot more.

  But not that much has changed. At a party in Beverly Hills recently, “Adam Smith,” author of The Money Game and Powers of Mind, confided with disdain: “This is really fag city!” It was even worse than he thought, I told him—I was gay, too. Would he have called it “nigger city” if there had been a lot of blacks at the party? He said he saw my point—but I doubt he changed his mind. A week or two later, the Supreme Court (not mine, the real one) refused even to consider overturning state laws which ban consenting adults from doing what they want behind closed doors. And in Italy, a seventeen-year-old hustler was becoming a national hero for having brutally murdered filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini. The hustler had willingly drilled Pasolini for thirty dollars and a ride in his Alfa Romeo; but when Pasolini wanted to reverse positions, the hustler killed him. His father exuded a sort of confused pride when interviewed on Italian TV, hoping that in a similar situation he would have acted with equal courage.

  I have changed and not changed, also. I am no longer lost in the Pyrenees (if the road to good sex runs from Lisbon to Leningrad, as postulated earlier); I am slogging through snowdrifts in the Italian Alps. Substantially further along, in other words, but still a little off course. I have not let my gayness control my life, which I think is important. But neither have I come fully to terms with it nor managed to set up the kind of loving long-term relationship I think I want.

  I came close. To my astonishment, I found myself unrestrainedly in love with someone—a dentist, not a cowboy—who was also unrestrainedly in love with me. At the same time, no less! I was never happier than the nearly a year we were lovers—nor unhappier than the nearly a year it has taken me to adjust, more or less, to being best friends instead. Having seen how good it can be, I’ll admit life seems much emptier without it.

  Chris, meanwhile, remains a close friend, as do Parker Martinson and Golden Boy. Chris has been with a new friend for two years now and is doing well professionally. Golden Boy has been with his new lover nearly four years, more power to him, and is himself an up-and-coming executive. Parker Martinson, Mr. Paranoia, is as neurotic as ever, but coming into his own.

  In reading my own book, four years later, I naturally found quite a bit that made me uncomfortable. I have made two kinds of changes from the original: first, minor changes of English to make it read better or clearer; second, cuts, particularly in the second half, to make it read faster. Having heard from four million people that they liked the first half but that the second half dragged, I began to get the feeling that maybe the second half did drag. So I made a few cuts—and probably should have made more.

  One change I would have liked to make but didn’t was the pen name. Besides spoiling the book for many a gay activist, the pen name is slightly ludicrous since just about everyone who knows me knows who John Reid is. But it still comes down to the same thing: Would the pain and embarrassment using my own name would cause my parents be worth whatever good it would do? If I were Joe Namath or Johnny Carson or someone, there would be more of a point to it. As it is, it would be the wrong thing to do. For now, anyway.

  John Reid

  August 1, 1976

  AFTERWORD—1993

  I’m fine. A lot of my friends are not. I think it’s time to write another book. I never seem to get around to it, but maybe now I will.

  Don’t miss the sequel to The Best Little Boy in the World

  by Andrew Tobias

  THE BEST LITTLE BOY IN THE WORLD GROWS UP

  Available in bookstores everywhere

  A Ballantine Book

  Published by The Random House Publishing Group

  Copyright © 1973, 1976 by John Reid All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1973.

  All selections from the rock opera Tommy by The Who, copyrighted © 1969 by Fabulous Music Ltd. Reprinted with permission of Track Music, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction prohibited.

  Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 92-90410

  eISBN: 978-0-307-76477-5

  First Ballantine Books Edition: May 1977

  Fifteen Printings

  First Ballantine Books Trade Edition: June 1993

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