Best Gay Romance 2015

by Felice Picano

  Dr. Stein, with her prominent gray streak, was very familiar with the alternate service that conscientious objectors were required to perform, and told me about several COs currently working at the hospital. Although her words were comforting, she perplexed me when she stated, “There are a lot of homosexuals in Boston.”

  I didn’t tell Dr. Stein that I was homosexual, nor did I say anything that would cause her to think that. I was not effeminate, at least as far as I could tell, so her labeling me as such was a mystery. In an odd way her comment also managed to reassure me that I’d made the right decision in choosing Boston. Sadly, the prescient Dr. Stein, who was fairly advanced in years when she gave me the physical, dropped out of sight once I began my employment, though I looked for her often in the hospital hallways.

  My search for a friend had to wait till after my eight-hour shift as well as the two hours I spent writing every night.

  It was the writing that led me down my first false path. While I was in the rooming house’s communal kitchen one night, a handsome Serbian student, Mark, asked me, “Who does all that typing?” Mark lived in a room not close to mine by any means, so it was hard for me to comprehend how the noise from my typewriter could travel such a distance.

  “That’s me,” I confessed, happy that I could finally say that I was a writer besides being a CO hospital worker. I told Mark that I was trying to write a book, even as the thought occurred to me: Was Mark one of Dr. Stein’s homosexuals? Mark was in grad school part-time but worked during the week and was often dressed in a shirt and tie. He had a lithe, appealing body but he generally offered no hints as to his sexuality despite his elfin manner. One night he mentioned that his big passion in life was collecting icons. In time he would suggest that sometime I should come to his room and have a look at them, but since the invitation was halfhearted, the visit never happened.

  One evening, feeling lonely, I visited the communal kitchen in the sister rooming house, Manor II, just across the driveway. That’s where I met Edwin, a handsome artist enrolled in art school. Edwin told me that he’d come to the Boston area from Wisconsin. I discovered that we had read many of the same books. It also intrigued me that we were both quiet types. He must be one of Dr. Stein’s people, I said to myself. With this in mind, I was already creating a fantasy of a great writer-artist association along the lines of Isherwood and Bachardy and Auden and Kallman….

  “I’d like to see your etchings,” I told him. Today that cliché is a joke, but for me at that time it was heartfelt. Most artists like to show their work. But when an invitation was not forthcoming, I wondered if I’d gone too far in my mention of the relationship between Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, or had dropped too many hints concerning the bond between Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky. I’d also been laying it on thick about artists and writers being iconoclasts and experiencing “the new—and the raw…” But this was Harvard Square, after all, not cheesy Wisconsin, where he said he was from.

  “We can hang out in the kitchen,” he said, seeming to read my mind with uncanny accuracy. At that point our conversation was over anyway because our privacy was interrupted by the entrance of other students, although I managed to get him to tell me his room number. This came in handy the next day, when I wrote him a note and slid it under his door. The note simply said, Corydon 13. Corydon, of course, was the title of Andre Gide’s defense of homosexuality, and 13 was my room number in Manor House I. I liked the idea of a cryptic puzzle; the name Corydon seemed a good choice because the art student had told me that he was also a fan of French literature. He also made it known to me that he was friends with Deena, who lived in my house.

  Deena was a charming woman from a wealthy New Jersey family, a Harvard French studies scholar and PhD candidate in her late twenties. She did her red hair up in a Victorian swirl, a cross between Agnes Repplier and Edith Wharton. She could recite Baudelaire in French as well as whole sections from Proust. When I first met her she wanted to know how a nonacademic like me knew so much about French literature. She then asked if I spoke French or had ever traveled to Paris. When I said no to both questions, she seemed deeply puzzled although I confessed that I was led to French literature through the work of Henry Miller and Sartre, and that I had read all of Camus in high school.

  “I love French literature, especially the work of Gide, and his scandalous autobiography, If It Die,” I told her. She told me that she loved Gide. In the coming months, Deena would invite me to her room for tea. She liked the fact that I was a conscientious objector doing alternate service, and on more than one occasion she asked to hear the story of my leaving home and coming to the Square. She refrained from asking about my private life. In fact, she would not know that I was gay until some time later when she left Manor I for a real apartment house in another part of the Square. At that time, when I went to visit her in her new digs, I told her that I was gay—a logical extension of all our Gide talk—but the news hit her hard. Facing me on the sofa, she blinked and didn’t answer for a moment.

  “Like Gide,” I said, “I am a homosexual.”

  She continued to look at me as her eyes slowly filled with tears. The fact that she was crying was shocking to me. Did she see me as a pathetic young man who would never be happy? The romance and adventure of Gide’s life suddenly went up in smoke: another Deena seemed to be emerging.

  “A lot of writers were gay: Proust, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Genet,” I countered, reacting to her tears and hoping that a literary approach would get her out of this salty soup and into Dr. Stein’s world. But Deena, I am afraid, was feeling something beyond the pale of literature. When I stood up to leave, she gave me a heartfelt hug, her eyes filling up again as she walked me to the elevator.

  When Edwin read my note, he took it to Deena and asked for her help in deciphering it. Why he just didn’t throw the note away is a mystery, but somehow he tapped into the word Corydon as having a French literature link, and figured that because Deena was the French expert, she would know. She did know, in fact, and told him right away that Corydon was a book authored by Gide and that 13 was possibly a room number. Since there was no room 13 in Manor II, it had to be Manor I.

  Edwin knocked on my door sometime in the early evening hours. When I saw that it was him I told him to come in and take a seat. He held the note in his right hand; it was exactly as I had written it, with Corydon spelled out in block letters and the number 13 circled like a symbol from an Aleister Crowley manuscript. I was very excited to see him and flashed him a winning smile but he was as dour as a New England winter.

  “Did you write this?” He held the note up to my face like the remnants of a mortal sin or a dirty plate I’d left under his door.

  I didn’t say anything at first, but there was no way I could stay silent. The idea, of course, was for him to respond to the note but only if he was feeling sexy, not in this corrective way which put me on the defensive. I felt what was coming.

  “Yes, I put that under your door. Is anything wrong?”

  “The thing is cryptic. I didn’t know what it meant but Deena said Corydon was a book and that 13 is probably a room so it had to be your room number. Can you tell me what this means?”

  “You’ve never heard of Corydon? She didn’t tell you?”

  “She only said it was a book by Andre Gide…”

  “Would you like to sit down?” I offered him a place on my bed but before he could refuse, I pulled out the desk chair and let him sit on that. I explained to him that Corydon was Gide’s defense of homosexuality based on the early Greek models of Plato and Socrates. He was a good listener and for a while I thought I was getting somewhere, especially when I mentioned Alexander the Great and then did a time lapse to include the relationship between Rimbaud and Verlaine. He continued to listen with a detached interest but it soon became obvious that I wasn’t making any headway at all. I stopped myself from telling him that it was not necessary to fall in love or French kiss in order to have an experience.

 
“I am not a homosexual, so why would this interest me? Your note suggests that I’m homosexual. Are you a homosexual?”

  I told him that I did not think that he was really homosexual. He had a hard time understanding this. “I know you’re not homosexual,” I repeated. “I wanted to send you a signal. There are heterosexuals who do not follow party lines. They cross-pollinate.”

  The tortured look on his face expanded into a full-brow sweat. He was not a patient etherized upon a table but a constipated guy sitting on the john. “Look, if it offended you, I’m sorry, but I thought as an artist, you being an artist, you’d be interested in expanding your consciousness. The poet Rimbaud says that an artist should experience everything, everything as in pushing outside the circle. I thought you were that kind of artist.”

  “I am an artist but I like women.”

  I told him that the poet Verlaine liked women as well but that this fact did not steer him away from Rimbaud. I also reminded him that only a few days ago he told me that he did not have a girlfriend. “If you like women but don’t have a woman, where is that getting you?” I wanted to say the last part, but held back. The fact is, I didn’t want to say anything too outrageous because I knew it would get back to Deena.

  Our parting was civil, although after shaking his hand and seeing him to the door, it would be the last time I’d ever speak to him. Throughout that first year in Cambridge I would sometimes see him in the predawn hours on my way to the MBTA. He’d be walking in the opposite direction en route from his all night job, while I was on my way to Tufts. We never said hello to each other or even glanced each other’s way, not even during one of New England’s biggest blizzards when we both struggled to walk through walls of early morning snow drifts. We were the only ones on the street at that hour, and not saying anything struck me as sad. His coming to Harvard Square from Wisconsin to work as an artist, as well as working all night to support himself, didn’t seem too different from my own story.

  For me, however, the big question became: Where the hell were Dr. Stein’s homosexuals?

  Homosexuals were everywhere, of course, but the trouble was finding them. I did a lot of walking around Boston on weekend nights trying to spot one. I figured I would know once I happened upon an effeminate man, a so-called queen, who would then lead me to a popular watering hole or outdoor cruising area. I had read about these cruising areas in the novels of John Rechy, and so knew that they were often near public parks. I headed for the Boston Common and the Public Gardens where I watched and waited and walked in circles.

  I spotted my first homosexual near the Public Gardens. It was a foggy night, one of those New England autumn evenings full of fresh breezes from the bay. The park area was nearly deserted, but there he was, a tall blond guy in a cape. The cape took me by surprise. I’d never seen anyone wear a cape in Philadelphia, but here was a definite throwback to the nineteenth century, only it was not worn by a paunchy Victorian gentleman with sideburns but by an attractive man who had just left an exclusive social event like an opera.

  My heart skipped a beat when I remembered stories of the Boston Strangler, very much in the news just a few years before my coming here. This was gothic glamour at its height: I was being led to the homosexuals by a figure out of Dracula.

  I knew he was homosexual because of his flaming blond hair, so I followed him at a distance for what seemed like a long time until he led me to a city block where I saw young men standing or sitting in front of a row of townhouses. Then he seemed to disappear, as if he’d been a spirit guide sent to show me the place, though I later looked for him among the lineup of young, masculine men in leather jackets and tight-fitting white trousers.

  I hadn’t made it halfway around the block before a car pulled up beside me. I watched as the driver leaned across the passenger side and asked, “How much are you?”

  “What do you mean?” I said, the truth dawning on me as soon as the words left my mouth.

  “Everyone’s either buying or selling. You’re on the wrong block,” he said, speeding off.

  I knew this wasn’t what Dr. Stein had in mind. I called it a night but the following weekend, I left Manor I after dinner and took the MBTA to Washington Street where I resolved to follow through with my plan: go to the adult theater district and ask an adult bookstore clerk where the nearest gay bar was. Adult theater people are used to every variety of sex and would not be shocked or angered by the question, whereas someone on the street might see it as you thinking they were homosexual. Boston’s Combat Zone in 1969 was a raw slice of neon with loud honky-tonk bars, large porno-movie palaces and many adult peep shows. The Zone was always crowded with revelers, sailors, obvious prostitutes and rowdy groups of barhoppers. There were strip bars with long presentation runways where topless women in cheap chiffon gowns would strut back and forth among cheering patrons. This was a far cry from sedate Philadelphia, with its much smaller (and tamer) porno district.

  The peep-show clerk directed me to the Punch Bowl, and so I found myself, ironically, in the vicinity of the bus station where I had arrived from Philadelphia only a few weeks earlier. Scully Square was less honky-tonk than the Zone but the ground there had a 42nd Street vibration. On the way to the Punch Bowl I spotted a guy about my age in men’s casual clothing but wearing a long-haired woman’s wig styled like one of the Andrews Sisters. I knew he had to be headed to the Bowl.

  At the Bowl I bought a beer and went downstairs to inspect the room that was sometimes used as a dance floor, then walked upstairs where I took in the clientele, many of them stereotypical types I’d read so much about, especially in Life magazine: the soft, womanly voices, the feminine mannerisms, not to mention their heavy use of cologne. Among the queens there were many quiet masculine types in V-neck sweaters and tight white Levi’s, and a few men in black leather jackets.

  A woman with a change pouch went around taking orders and then came back and delivered the drinks. I was on my second beer, thinking this must be the place Dr. Stein had in mind, when a man in an opera cape came up to me.

  “My name is Pierre Paul,” he said in a thick French accent. He was a little older than me, but not much, somewhat good looking with a slender body and well-defined facial features. The cape put me in mind of the caped stranger I’d followed by the Public Gardens. At this point I was thinking that capes were an important part of the Boston mystique. I introduced myself, and Pierre toasted me with his beer. Because he did not hear a Boston accent, he asked where I was from.

  “Philadelphia,” I said. “I’ve been in Boston one month.” I told Pierre about my alternative service assignment at Tufts and he told me about his transfer to Harvard from a university in Paris to do graduate work in philosophy. The French connection worked its magic—here was my Corydon 13 at last! I couldn’t get the names Rimbaud, Verlaine and Gide out fast enough, confessing to him my love for all things French and even telling him that I was working on a “Gide-like” autobiography. After twenty minutes of conversation, he asked me if I wanted to catch a cab with him back to his place in Harvard Square. “We can ride together and go to my place,” he said.

  The prospect of riding in a cab with a caped Frenchman was a thrilling start to my two years of alternate service. Once out on the curb, however, he took me aside before hailing a cab.

  “Look,” he said, dropping the accent, “I am not from France. I am American. I’m from Stamford, Connecticut and I am a Harvard law student. I live in the dorms. I’m sorry for misleading you…it’s just that one has to be careful when going to these kinds of places.”

  “Oh…you’re not from Paris at all?”

  “That’s what I am saying.” He smiled nervously as a cab pulled up alongside us and he asked if I still wanted to go back with him. I said yes though I did not tell him how disappointed I was. I was not going to have an affair with a Frenchman after all, but with an ordinary American, although the location of his dorm gave me hope. It was just a few blocks from the Manor, which meant that we could
see one another easily and often. The duplicity made me consider the cape’s second purpose: would it protect him in a police raid? If the police had raided the Punch Bowl, could he say—in his heavy bogus accent—that he was from Paris and didn’t realize he was in a bar of this type? The blond near the Public Gardens might also tell police that he was coming from a classical music concert and was not cruising or loitering like those mannequin boys selling their bodies.

  In the cab I felt glad that I’d found my first homosexual, and that experiences such as I had had with Edwin could now be relegated to the past.

  “You cannot spend the night,” Pierre Paul, who was now Richard, told me.

  “My roommate will show up in the morning….”

  “Hey Reds, how’s it going?”

  Greetings like this came from some of the early morning workers waiting for buses or rides along Washington Street. My daily trek to Tufts took me through the Combat Zone in the predawn hours, where I’d often stop at the Hayes Bickford cafeteria for a poached egg. I was never quite sure why these rough worker types said hello. While I always hated the name Reds—to me it had a baseball connotation—I often wondered what these same workers would have thought if they had known that I was a pacifist and a homosexual. For them, seeing me everyday going to work must have put them in mind of themselves when they were young. I’d answer “Fine,” or smile, although the greetings never went beyond, “Hey Reds!”

  My boss at Tufts, Miss Dowling, was a short woman with red hair and a series of pronounced lines on her forehead, no doubt the result of too many summers without sunblock on the Massachusetts coast. Miss Dowling was constantly giving orderlies, nurses’ aides and scrub nurses random orders and reprimands. She impressed me as a workaholic with boundless energy who expected those under her charge to have a similar work ethic.

  “This is an operating-room theater,” she told me the day I was hired. “We deal with life and death issues on a daily basis. Your job is crucial. If you foul up, that goes up the chain of command. The operations are on a strict schedule. We cannot keep the surgeons waiting. It’s imperative that you stop whatever you’re doing and go for a patient when you are told to. Wear your lab coat when you leave the theater.”