Not So Good a Gay Man

by Frank M. Robinson

  At PDC Hefner was in promotion and drew cartoons on the side. Hamling bought a few for Imagination but strictly as a favor; he had no intention of publishing them.

  When Imagination and Space Travel—formerly Imaginative Tales—started to really fail, Hamling and I had a bull session and I suggested changing the title of Space Travel to Caravan, a digest version of True, Argosy, Stag, and the other men’s adventure magazines, hot sellers at the time. Hefner, by this time very successful with Playboy, gave Hamling an introduction to his distributor. The lunch that followed was a disaster. Hamling talked about his plans for Caravan, at which point the distributor put down his cigar and asked acidly, “What’s it going to be about—camels?”

  Hamling immediately changed his approach, saying he also had an idea for a sophisticated men’s magazine to be titled Rogue, something like another Playboy. He was a very fast man on his feet or had intended to suggest it all along.

  The distributor okayed it, which came as a shock to Hefner. He had thought he was helping Hamling change one of his science fiction digests to a men’s book and find a distributor for it. He’d had no intention of setting Hamling up as a possible competitor. He immediately set restrictions on the new Rogue. Hamling could not print the magazine on slick stock, use four-color reproduction, full-page cartoons, and definitely no centerfold.

  Hamling had no choice—Hefner could have killed the project immediately. Hamling went ahead with a crippled Rogue. He was editor and publisher; I was managing editor; and Henry Bott, a friend of Hamling’s, was associate editor.

  Hamling’s feelings toward Hefner were now somewhat mixed. He owed Hefner for the help so far given but was irritated by the restrictions. Rumors were that Hefner had offered Hamling a piece of the action in his projected Playboy and Hamling had turned him down. If true, Hamling was probably also somewhat jealous. (The rumors never suggested where Hamling, nearly broke at the time, would have found the money.)

  Rogue was now anything but a class publication—Hefner had killed that possibility—and after three issues I left, looking for another job.

  First stop was Iron Age magazine, a publication for the steel industry that was looking to beef up its midwestern office. I thought I was admirably suited—I had a degree in physics and had actually worked in the steel mills. The one-year gap didn’t seem to bother the senior editor, Keith Bennett. “I used to write science fiction,” he mused.

  All the tumblers suddenly fell into place. “You wrote ‘The Rocketeers Have Shaggy Ears’ in the Spring 1950 issue of Planet Stories,” I blurted.

  We science fiction fans never forgot a cover, a title, or an author. I was one of the very few people in the entire United States who would have remembered his story (actually a poem).

  I didn’t get the job. The midwestern office had three people—one senior editor and two advertising men. The admen thought my $1 sport coat and my tennis shoes that flapped when I walked would give the wrong impression of Iron Age and blackballed me. All of that could have been fixed with my first paycheck, but I wasn’t given the chance.

  The next stop was a Sunday supplement titled Family Weekly, which circulated to small-town newspapers. I had checked out the editor—Ben Kartman, a hard-bitten type who had once been a makeup editor for the Chicago Daily News and an associate editor of Coronet magazine. (He also taught night school at Medill, but I never knew that until much later.) I slid my degree from Northwestern across his desk and he glanced briefly at it, not impressed, then asked, “Can you write?”

  My next offer was the contract for The Power. He spent a little more time looking at that, then said, “When can you start?”

  With my first paycheck I replaced my sport coat and gym shoes, though I don’t think anybody in the office noticed or cared. Regina Gruss and I, both associate editors, became fast friends despite my almost having set her hair on fire demonstrating magician’s flash paper.

  I loved doing interviews for the paper and was good at it. One time Jan Peerce, a leading tenor at the time, showed up in the office surrounded by his retinue of half a dozen. I remarked on this and he motioned me over to a corner and said, “There are two things they cannot do for me—they cannot sing for me and they cannot go to the bathroom for me.”

  It was the greatest one-line quote I ever got, but I couldn’t use it because Family Weekly was a “family” paper.

  Another time I did a piece on “a day in the life of an intern” and got a tour of Cook County Hospital. What I was never to forget was the morgue. The bodies were laid out on individual tables complete with drains. All of them had their head, hands, and feet wrapped with white cloths. I asked why and the guide said, “They’re the most distinctive parts of the human body. When they’re covered, you’re working on an anonymous body. If you took the coverings off, then you’d be working on a human being.”

  I noticed one of the interns eating his lunch on the chest of one of the bodies and hurriedly left.

  After a few months of turning out articles and interviews and acting as fiction editor for the occasional story we ran, I was very full of myself and asked Ben why he’d never complimented me on the obviously sterling pieces I was writing.

  He looked at me as if he couldn’t quite believe what he’d heard, then said with a growl, “I pay you, don’t I?”

  Editors are not in the business of giving out compliments.

  My social life sans any sexual encounters had taken an upturn. Most of my friends at the Hut had graduated, and I changed my hangout to a coffee shop a few blocks north. I was also working out at the Evanston YMCA, managing to add muscle mass without much definition. I had worked up to doing squats with 225 pounds (once) and took off my gym shorts—they bound—and did the squats in my jockstrap. Nobody made any witty comments—hey, 225 was a lot of weight, and if that’s what it took, that’s what it took.

  I had learned some wrestling holds in college and ended up wrestling a kid named John Mallman, who became one of my best friends. I always thought John cheated—he wore about six layers of sweats and I never knew if I were holding him or merely a handful of cloth.

  Most of my spare time I hung out in the coffee shop, run by Joe Moore and his wife a few blocks from campus. It was also a hangout for a group of sports-car racers. Not my interest, but they were nice guys, and at least one was young and drop-dead handsome. He was devoted to racing, which was all he ever talked about. All of his friends were fellow drivers.

  One day he didn’t show up at an event, but it was a few more days before some of the drivers went to his rooming house to see if he was sick.

  He had hanged himself in the closet. There was no note, nothing. Nobody knew if he had any relatives they could notify or girlfriends they should contact. Nobody could remember if he had any.

  A chill settled over the coffeehouse, and I waited for what I knew was coming. It probably ran in the family, somebody said, and everybody shook their heads wisely.

  I knew better.

  Nine months after I had started at Family Weekly, a fraternity brother who worked for Popular Mechanics (then published in Chicago) told me there was an opening at Science Digest, a small companion magazine. It was slanted for high schoolers, and the idea was we would “digest” science articles, carefully taking out all the hard science but leaving in the general thrust of the article.

  It was a dream job, partly because it fit in with my educational background but primarily because I would be working with Fritz Leiber, a fantasy writer who was a literary hero of mine. (J. K. Rowling would match him, but she was generations away.) The interview with Fritz went fine, and I was told to show up in two weeks.

  When I came to work I was shown to Fritz’s office, which would now be my office. I didn’t understand, and they told me Fritz had been a drinker who had gotten drunk once too often and fallen asleep in the john. To interview his successor for the job was a polite gesture on their part.

  For years I thought I had taken Fritz’s job away from him. Intelle
ctually I knew better but emotionally I felt I had stolen it.

  Working at Science Digest was the best job I ever had. The work was easy and interesting and I have dim memories of condensing articles by Isaac Asimov (I might be wrong but I’d like to think that I did) for the high school readers.

  The money was good but there was more involved than that. The magazine had four employees—the chief editor, a makeup man, another associate editor, and myself. H. H. Windsor, the owner of the company, took three-week vacations and felt so energized by them that he decreed all his employees should have three-week vacations.

  Science Digest was already overstaffed by half a man, and a three-week vacation was frosting on the cake. We now had time to put our feet up on the desk and take an afternoon snooze.

  Shortly after I’d come to the Digest I got a call from a secretary at Playboy inviting me to a party at their offices. I was properly impressed and said, “What should I wear?” I could hear her laugh as she said, “Clothes will be enough.” (Dumb question, smart answer.) Their offices were midsize—larger than when I had interviewed Hefner for my master’s thesis, not nearly as large as when they hit their stride, rented a number of floors in the old Palmolive Building on Michigan Avenue, and renamed it the Playboy Building.

  I wandered through the offices, drink in hand, and ended up in their almost empty conference room. Seated in the chair at the head of the table was Hefner’s distributor (he also distributed Rogue, which is where I’d first met him). He waved his hand around the office and said, “You know, if I wanted, all of this could be mine.” Magazines in general, not just Playboy, had hit a serious slump on the newsstands. Hefner apparently needed cash and had gone to his distributor (the banks, of course, were out).

  I stared at him, wondering if, of all the conferences he must have had with Hugh Marston Hefner, he really knew who he was talking to. His chance for a takeover never came. Several months later the “Playmate of the Month” was Jayne Mansfield, and Playboy sold out.

  Once I caught a glimpse of Cathy McGill in the hallway just outside the door to Science Digest and ran out to meet her. She was on her way up to the next floor to apply for a job. I took her to lunch and after that she was a more or less my regular luncheon companion. I introduced her to the other staff members, all of whom were charmed. She was Irish, beautiful, and a Quaker who tithed 10 percent of her salary to the church. She was offbeat in her approach to life—something that always fascinated me in people—and once took her two-week vacation by going to Iceland in the middle of winter. I asked why and the only answer she had was that she was curious.

  It was the kind of answer that made complete sense to me. I started to see more of Cathy, though there was nothing that could be construed as an honest-to-God date.

  That is, until the night she came up to my apartment to sauté some shrimp and fixings. We were both comfortable with each other and she told me about her boyfriend at the University of Chicago who was making her increasingly nervous. He was possessive and there was something about him that was making her wary.

  In the back of my head was the growing thought that maybe I should try to go to bed with a woman whom I genuinely cared about. I was unsure of the physical end of things, but I was also pretty sure that could be worked out. The least that could happen was that I would end up with a very good friend of the opposite sex.

  (This was not all wishful thinking. I was to have close relationships with three or four men who were later to marry and raise families and be perfectly happy—most of them happier than a lot of straight couples I knew. Only one ever called me every few years to ask if I were happy. He’d had to make a choice and made the one that society and the church had dictated for him. Over the phone, at least, he sounded distinctly unhappy and wanted to know if I were also. Misery, apparently, demanded company. But he was the one who had taken the road less traveled.)

  Before Cathy left I suggested that she dump the boyfriend at U of C who made her uncomfortable. On the inside, I was already grooming myself as his replacement.

  There was one more thing in the equation that I wanted to settle. My three-week vacation was due, and I planned on heading out to Los Angeles, where a friend of mine was going to introduce me to the L.A. gay community. If I wanted to choose sides, I owed it to myself to see what the other side had to offer.

  The answer was—not much. Everybody dressed to the nines (preferably in white), called each other “Mary,” and when they went to a film festival it was usually a Betty Grable film festival. Their idea of gay liberation was to have a beer at Barney’s Beanery while sitting underneath his banner that said “No faggots allowed.”

  I was underwhelmed. (Things would change drastically a few years down the road, but we weren’t there yet.)

  I came back to San Francisco filled with plans for things that Cathy and I could do together. Good restaurants, Off-Broadway plays—Chicago was next only to New York when it came to Off-Broadway, and to friendly bars where we could just sit and talk and get to know each other better.

  I still had the apartment above the Hut, and as I was unloading from the airport a friend of mine hollered, “Did you hear what happened to Cathy?”

  I hadn’t, but my friends at Science Digest had saved me the newspaper clippings.

  Cathy had taken my advice and dropped her nutty boyfriend.

  He had returned the next night, dragged her out to the parking lot and shot and killed her.

  Then he’d shot and killed himself.

  VII

  I DIDN’T GO back to work for a week. What I finally did was visit my mother and tell her what had happened.

  She didn’t believe me.

  In years past she had been the typical mother when it came to romance: Who was I dating? When was I going to get married? Who was going to take care of me when I got old? From my answers—or evasions—she probably figured I was growing up gay. She had nothing against gays—if it hadn’t been for her lesbian (she never used the word) friends, her family would not exist.

  Her oldest son had left the family as soon as he could find a job so he could get married. Mark had rejected her in an effort to protect himself emotionally. Dad Knox and his sons had never really been a part of her family.

  I had been the only family confidant she had. I was the one who listened in silence while she told me the details of being brought up and taken care of by her close friends. I was the one to whom she confided her personal tragedies.

  Now I was telling her a tragic story about a woman I had never mentioned before, a woman she had never met. She was convinced I was lying because I was getting ready to leave her emotionally as well.

  She had no sympathy for me; the look on her face was stony. I took the newspaper clippings from my pocket, tore them in two, and dropped the pieces in the wastebasket. If she wanted to piece them together, she could.

  It took me a long time to forgive her.

  I went back to work, and it was business as usual. Nobody said anything about Cathy. There was nothing to say, though I caught the occasional glimpse of sympathy.

  A few weeks later I was shaving before going to work and stopped in midstroke.

  I didn’t know whose face I was shaving. I didn’t really know anything about myself. I knew what I ought to feel, I knew what I ought to do, I knew what was expected of me in life. But I didn’t know what I really felt, I didn’t know what I wanted to do, I didn’t know if anything at all was expected of me in life, and if so, what the hell was it?

  The trouble with the closet was that it had not only kept other people out, it also had kept me in. I’d had no open relationships with people, none of the real-life experiences that formed people, that made them what they were, that made up their lives.

  I didn’t know who I was and neither did anybody else. I finally realized what my swimmer friend and the sports car driver had gone through and exactly what my experiment with the gay kid from the Hut had cost him and what it had cost me.

  I ma
de a few calls and found out that it was possible to enroll as a patient in the psychiatric clinic at the University of Chicago. I would be a guinea pig for a future shrink to work on.

  I went down the next day and ended up in a sparsely furnished room with a desk and chair and a tape recorder on the desk so the would-be psychiatrist’s instructor could monitor the session. There was a box of Kleenex next to it.

  I had been given an instuction sheet on exactly what would happen. The process was called Rogerian therapy, and I would do most of the talking. The future shrink would prompt me from time to time, but he would never tell me what I should do or offer any suggestions. It would be a case of self-analysis, and he would be a sounding board.

  I was disappointed. I thought it would be a two-way conversation and he would tell me where I had gone wrong in life and what I should do about it. But the position of this therapist was to be accepting, nonjudgmental, interested, and yet never cross the line between therapist and friend.

  There was a wooden chair in front of the desk, and I sat down and tried to make myself comfortable.

  After a few minutes the student shrink came in and we shook hands. I had expected an older man, a man with a lot of experience. I was convinced I needed somebody who could disassemble and then reassemble me into a more functional human being.

  He looked in his early thirties (one strike against him) and stared at me with mild curiosity. He settled back in his chair and waited for me to start talking. I had thought he would start by asking me questions, but it was going to be up to me.

  My first question was how many patients he had who were like me. I was still convinced I was unique.

  “None,” he said. “You’re my first patient.”

  I stared at him for a long moment, wondering if I should get up and walk out or what. Then I realized this was the end of the line, I had no place else to go. But I already knew one thing: he would never lie to me.

  For the first three or four sessions I babbled on about my work and what it was like to be a writer. (I learned later that his father owned a newspaper in San Diego—he knew everything there was to know about writers.)