Not So Good a Gay Man

by Frank M. Robinson

  Eventually I told him I was a closeted homosexual but hadn’t really indulged in it much. He showed no reaction and after a few more sessions I told him about the kid who had been my experiment, and eventually about Cathy. I hadn’t cried at the time. This time I did.

  The real breakthrough came about the tenth or fifteenth session, when he finally asked a question that he was curious about.

  “Frank, I know everything about you. How would you react to me if you met me outside this office, on the street?”

  I looked at him blankly and said I didn’t know. A few sessions later I was to find out.

  We were about five minutes into the session and he suddenly held up his hand, frowning. For just a moment he was no longer a therapist but an ordinary human being with something on his mind.

  “I was at the Coronet Theater the other night with my date and we ran into you and a girlfriend. I said ‘hello’ but you didn’t respond. I thought you hadn’t heard me and I repeated it. You still wouldn’t respond. Why?”

  I was totally shocked.

  “I never saw you,” I said. I was absolutely honest and he looked puzzled, then once again he was the therapist. He and his instructor would have a long conversation about me.

  He said nothing more, and it was up to me to figure it out. I had been so desperately afraid that somebody would find out that I was gay, that my mind simply blanked—it wouldn’t accept their presence. They didn’t exist; they weren’t there.

  From then on I was no longer going through the motions; I really needed therapy. No more bullshit about my job or where I worked or anything else that would put off the session.

  It was hard, it tore me apart. I was looking at all those things that had frightened me, that I’d thought separated me from everybody else.

  My sessions with the student therapist lasted for two years. At the end of the last session—I didn’t know it would be the last—he said he wouldn’t be seeing me anymore. We shook hands and he walked out of the room. I don’t remember whether he ever told me his name.

  I was assigned to another student therapist, but this time it didn’t work. He was nervous, uncertain of himself, and there wasn’t the rapport that had existed with the first man.

  I left, not completely happy with myself but a good deal more confident than I had been before. I wasn’t about to “come out” to members of my family, to the people where I worked, nor to strangers. With other gay men, there would be no problems. With close friends—it was worth a try.

  Big George didn’t seem to care one way or the other. He was casual about it. “If I ever go gay, Frank, you’ll be the first person I’ll look up.”

  Big George wasn’t my type, but the realization that I even had a type surprised me.

  The next person I told was something of a setback.

  Jeff, another workout friend, stared at me for a long moment, then said, “It’s not your fault you’re sick, Frank.”

  At one time I would have been crushed. I wasn’t, and a few years later I was glad it turned out that way. Big George had gotten married, it had failed, and his ex-wife ended up in San Francisco dancing topless at a club on Broadway. Jeff was in town for a trade show. I was living in San Francisco then; he looked me up and talked to me about how much he wanted to go to the show and see the “tits” of George’s ex-wife. He was obsessive about it.

  Being “sick” was a matter of interpretation.

  One day Big George said he wanted me to meet somebody—a millionaire he knew on Chicago’s South Side, near the University of Chicago, whom he thought I would like to know. His name was Herb.

  Herb’s mansion was small but it was still a mansion with a huge living room, large kitchen, and a dozen small bedrooms upstairs. Herb himself was about my size and age with fading red hair and with something of the air of a company vice president. I wasn’t that far off—he had his own bond company downtown and was a small-time trader. He owned a Rolls-Royce, complete with a chauffeur who was a stunning blond, and there were two or three other good-looking young men hanging around the house.

  Herb dealt in more than just stocks and bonds, but I was in no position to be judgmental. He liked young men, was what you would call an “A” gay, and knew the other wealthy gay men in Chicago. (One of them was rumored to have bought an entire high school football team. I didn’t believe it.) Another rumor was that being gay would save you from the venereal diseases that were prevalent with straight sex. It didn’t take me long to find out that was a lie, too. Herb also knew the hustlers who hung out around Bughouse Square on the near North Side and sometimes he’d swing by the bus station downtown and wait for the runaways to get off. A friendly man in a Rolls willing to give you a lift, buy you a meal, and put you up for a night or two? There weren’t many runaways who were naive. They knew the payment required and few hesitated to pay it.

  Herb was cynical; his comment on young hustlers was “If you can’t fuck them, what the hell good are they?” My first reaction was why did I want to spend any more time with this guy? Shortly afterward he proved he was at least as complicated as I was. He gave me a tour of his house and on the bureau in his bedroom I noticed a large framed photograph of a young woman in her twenties. She could have been a twin of Cathy’s and in many respects probably was.

  Aside from his chauffeur—whom he set up with a bar when the relationship grew thin—his other love (unwanted) was a young Yugoslavian kid who worshipped the ground Herb walked on. No money was ever exchanged—the kid wouldn’t accept it. He loved Herb for who he was, for his hidden generosity, for his knowledge and general grasp of the workings of the world.

  The kid adored Herb and finally Herb threw him out. He couldn’t stand adoration—it eventually requires that you live up to certain standards, which Herb certainly had no intention of ever doing. In Herb’s world you did things for money, not for love.

  One of Herb’s closest friends, Max, was a stylist on the North Side of Chicago who was Herb’s personal pimp. He knew a lot of the older kids in the neighborhood and sooner or later Max would let some of them know there was an easy way to earn a quick $50 so they could take their girlfriends out on a Sunday date.

  Max was always subtle—there was no way you could legally pin him down. The word spread that the kids wouldn’t have to do much to earn their $50 (sometimes, surprisingly little). These weren’t the type of rent boys you met in bars in New York or posing on Polk Street in San Francisco. They weren’t druggies or alcoholics, and it would have been difficult for a TV show to feature them as kids without a home or with abusive parents or who had been driven into prostitution for a few bucks.

  For the most part, they came from good Irish families on the North Side. A few of them went to night school or college (more common than I might have thought in later years).

  I now knew two types of gays—those who bought and those who sold. I was in no position to make judgments, but for the most part, the sellers seemed to be a better breed.

  In any event, therapy had taught me that this was my world, the one I had to live in.

  A few weeks after meeting Herb, he invited me to a party. I asked Big George if he were going and he laughed and said, “I’m not their type.”

  It didn’t take me long to figure out what kind of party it was going to be.

  Herb had beer and soft drinks set out, and that was about it. His living room was gradually filling up with older men who bought and younger men who played for pay. There was one small group of them who obviously weren’t there to sell themselves. They stayed by themselves and didn’t talk much to anybody.

  I asked Herb about them and he said they were from the Chicago Theological Seminary, a few blocks away. They were there to buy. (I knew about the priest scandal long before it hit the front pages.)

  The master of the revels was Max, who would match up pairs, and if both parties agreed, they’d disappear upstairs to one of the bedrooms.

  He tried to match me up and I shook my head. It was nothing
complicated—I was just shy.

  The party broke up in an hour or so and one of the hustlers gave me a lift home. Neither one of us had much to say. He eyed me once or twice but he’d made his fifty bucks for the evening and wasn’t really eager for any more action. I wasn’t either, for different reasons.

  I didn’t see Herb for a few weeks and I didn’t particularly want to. I hadn’t found my first glimpse of gay life in Chicago that inviting.

  It was the middle of winter and I was getting ready for bed when there was a knock on the door. It was obvious from the whispering that there was more than one person outside. I looked through the glass peephole in the door and was surprised to see Herb looking back. What the hell …

  I opened the door and all three came in. Herb, Max, and the rent boy who had given me a lift a few weeks before.

  “This is on the house,” Max said. He looked for the light switch and flicked it off. I froze. The rent boy started with the buttons on my shirt. He was much better at taking my clothes off than I had been with the kid from the Hut.

  We found the bed and suddenly there was light. Both Herb and Max had brought flashlights to watch the action.

  It didn’t last long—the kid was very professional—and soon they were on their way out. Max had the last line.

  “I told you this was on the house; usually you tip.”

  I sat there in bed, the covers wrapped around me. All I could think of was that I had just lost my virginity before an audience of two guys with flashlights.

  I had wanted it to happen sometime, though not like this. But if I’d had any doubts about being gay, I didn’t have any now.

  VIII

  MY WORLD TURNED upside down a month later. Popular Mechanics and Science Digest were sold to Hearst (based in New York). They actually wanted Popular Mechanics; Science Digest was just part of the package. H. H. Windsor, the original publisher, had printed the magazines on his own presses—editorial was on the fourth floor and we could hear the rumble of the presses all day but now those were sold.

  Science Digest was eventually turned into a glossy science magazine to compete with Omni, a very thick, popular science magazine (with a little science fiction), which sold a million copies as soon as it hit the stands. The newsstands were quickly glutted with pop science magazines, most of which soon died.

  I’d left Science Digest with the New York move and went back to writing science fiction. My fortunes shifted again when Hefner sold his distribution contract of Playboy for a reported $1 million, which left his old distributor with no “sophisticated men’s magazine.”

  Except Rogue. It was successful in its own right but could hardly be called “sophisticated.” The distributor promptly gave Hamling permission to go to slick paper, print color photographs and full-page cartoons, and most important of all, he could print a centerfold.

  Hamling was the editor and publisher; his wife, Frances, was executive editor; and I held down the spot of associate editor. Lead fiction was by a hot science fiction author, Harlan Ellison, who was to become associate editor with the third issue—probably one of the smarter moves Hamling made. Ellison was an offbeat and very prolific writer who “thought outside the box.” (At one point he became the editor of Regency Books—a legitimate paperback imprint published by Hamling.) It was Ellison’s idea to bring Lenny Bruce aboard as a columnist for Rogue and also to publish stories by Charles Beaumont under the pseudonym of “C. B. Lovehill.”

  Beaumont was a frequent contributor to Playboy, and it occurred to Harlan that maybe Beaumont had a few stories lying around that Playboy might have rejected or thought were too unusual for the magazine. I was designated as the one to call up Lovehill to see what the situation was.

  I did, and the voice on the other end of the line said, “Frank, don’t you remember me?” My childhood friend—Charles McNutt.

  After a few months at Rogue and Regency (both as an editor and frequent contributor), Harlan left; the once-friendly relationship between him and Hamling had broken.

  The argument may have been about money, though Harlan was always well paid, but more likely about Ellison’s reluctance to edit more of Hamling’s erotic paperbacks. Ellison also wanted to try his luck in Hollywood and was very successful, writing scripts for Burke’s Law, Route 66, The Outer Limits, and Star Trek, among others. He wrote what was probably the best script for Star Trek: “The City on the Edge of Forever.”

  Rogue went slick about the time that Hamling discovered the answer to something that had bothered him much of his life. At one time, at lunch some years before, Hamling admitted, “If I had one dollar, I’d want ten, and if I had ten, I’d want a hundred, and if I had a hundred, I’d want a million.” He said it as something he didn’t quite understand and didn’t quite approve of.

  It took a while for Hamling to learn a very bitter lesson. Money made the world go around, and despite working his butt off, he had ended up with not much. Despite the restrictions, Rogue had been a minor success, but even going slick was not a sure thing when it came to money.

  One story of how Hamling started his line of stroke books is that he saw some sexy paperbacks out of New York and thought of taking them a step further. The other is that a writer already in the field approached Hamling with the idea of raunchier books. The possibilities that more explicit books offered were obvious. The investment would be cheap, the returns could be … huge. He started two lines of books to be published by the Blake Pharmaceutical Company, at the back of the same building as Rogue.

  Two officers from the local state’s attorney’s office once came looking for Blake and first stumbled into the offices of Rogue. When asked about the Blake Pharmaceutical Company, Patty, our secretary, drew herself up and acidly asked, “Does this look like a drugstore to you?”

  Nightstand Books and Midnight Readers quickly built up an audience. There was no price on them—they were sold to stores and dealers for whatever the traffic would bear, which in turn sold them under the counter for a hefty markup. The books were cheaply printed by a small printer in Ohio owned by two deacons in the local church; their usual product was children’s books with colorful, religious covers. The ladies of the congregation boxed up the stroke books for shipping, apparently unaware of just what the books were about (or more likely were paid well enough not to care).

  One of the books became a million-copy-plus bestseller. Titled Song of the Loon, it was about a love affair between a horny cowboy and an Indian (or maybe a lot of Indians).

  Everybody made money off Loon—except for the author, who was paid the standard price of $800, while Hamling made millions and the store owners who sold them made thousands.

  My job at the new Rogue was to be somewhat varied. Once I was asked to edit one of the stroke books, did so, and then told Hamling that was it. I had enough problems with my sex life outside the office; I didn’t need to work editing books about variations of the old in-and-out as part of my job.

  Aside from that one incident, I didn’t pay much attention to Blake and its sex books, although some of the editors were to become my friends. I was enchanted by the possibility of competing with Playboy, a dream that took years to die (it was doomed from the start but I really did think we could become number two).

  Hamling published the stroke books for money. He never read them, never labored over them as he once had over Stardust (a glossy, printed semipro magazine) or Imagination, his professional science fiction digest magazine), and no longer had much of an interest in science fiction, though every now and then the occasional science fiction story would crop up in Rogue. The stroke books were strictly cash-and-carry and no problems.

  Hefner published Playboy, which had now become a not-so-small gold mine, as a labor of love. He picked the covers, he picked the centerfold girls, he passed judgment on the cartoons, and came up with the ideas for the “Playboy philosophy,” which the editors for the “front of the book” turned into English. Fiction was left largely to Ray Russell and his successor,
Robie Macauley, while articles and interviews were left in the more-than-capable hands of A. C. Spectorsky.

  Hamling became a multimillionaire, though he never did catch up to Hefner nor did he ever receive the satisfaction that Playboy gave to Hefner.

  Hugh Marston Hefner was a respected publisher, even though he published a magazine that was criticized by women’s groups and had an occasional run-in with the law. Hamling never achieved the same level of respectability. Young men—and frequently older men—fell in love with Playboy’s centerfold girl and the model on the cover. And then there were the interviews and the fiction and the fashion tips. Teenagers and lonely men took Hamling’s books to bed with them, but love had nothing to do with it.

  In one case, Hamling was a hero. A clerk was picked up by the police for selling some of the Nightstand books, and Hamling paid his legal bills. The case went to the Supreme Court, and Hamling won on a somewhat curious point. (Stanley Fleischman, legal counsel for most of the sex book and magazine publishers in California, was the lawyer. A badly crippled hunchback who walked with canes, he had the sympathy vote the moment he stepped before the Court.) Those with money and culture could go to museums and admire the nudes by Rubens and others, but the poor and culturally uneducated could not. It was a case of discrimination.

  Afterward, Playboy, which had been denied a mailing permit, applied again and got it with no hassle, quoting Hamling’s case as the precedent. I don’t think Hefner or other publishers of “sophisticated men’s magazines” or stroke books ever thanked Hamling for his efforts.

  IX

  FOR ME, ROGUE became an obsession. I realized it would always live in the shadow of Playboy, but at the same time I thought maybe it could become a runner-up. We carried fiction by Graham Greene and Charles Beaumont (under the pseudonym of C. B. Lovehill), most of which were Playboy rejects, though Ray Russell, fiction editor of Playboy at the time, admitted that some of our best “Lovehill” stories should have appeared in Playboy. And we published a number of offbeat stories by editor Harlan Ellison.