Buddies (7 page)
Why of course?
Yet I wonder what they would have had if they didn’t have the theatre. Musical comedy doesn’t ruin them: it saves them, gives them a topic and a confraternity, even if, at times, that brotherhood consists of a body of strangers enchanted in a darkened auditorium. Their first love became a lifetime obsession; but if it set them strictly apart, it did set them somewhere. How much worse to have nothing to believe in, to be, like many people I have met over the years, utterly devoid of interests. Work detains them. Companionship eludes them. Only the bodily appetites impel them: food, sleep, sex. Absurd as it is to see Gene Caputo the ironworker as an aficionado—once I mentioned Liza Minnelli and he said, “Who’s that? Some bimbo?”—if Gene had had the ability to be enlightened, redeemed, perhaps merely diverted by entertainers, he might not have been so lonely, a homosexual straight who couldn’t touch men and didn’t appreciate women, a truly single man.
This fraternity aspect of the musical comedy life is significant: types tend to cluster. When my father’s hurtling success, my brother’s implacable rivalry, and my own ornate precocity suggested something (respectively) fancy, remote, and advanced in the way of my education, my folks sent me off to Friends Academy in Locust Valley, Long Island. Friends no longer accepted boarding students, so I stayed, through some occult arrangement, with a family that turned out to be shockingly informal; had I been Ralph Bellamy, it would have been a screwball comedy. Their huge house stood a short walk from the Glen Cove railroad station, and I found to my delight that Mrs. Pratt saw nothing objectionable in my spending Saturday afternoons in the metropolis, lunching at the big Automat (now vanished) on Broadway at Forty-sixth Street, catching a matinee of just about anything, and generally nosing around. Here was when my coming of age really began, when theatre trips evolved into trips into city life, into the notion that a people as chosen as gays are must erect a ghetto not so much for segregation as for concentration: to learn what gay is.
True, this side of me was not useful at Friends Academy, where most of the students were sheltered WASP kids of Brookville and Old Westbury who, for one reason or another, didn’t go off to Choate or Deerfield. They were sheltered from notions of race and class and what might be called disopportunity; and from the notion of art as well. I felt like young Lord Greystoke, set down among not apes but talking macaroons. At the end of seventh grade, however, I somehow wangled the lead in the senior class show,
Seventeen,
and this gave me access to the group known as the “pseudos”: short for pseudo-intellectual and meant as a put-down, but in fact describing all the creative people at Friends.
The pseudos were considered radical. In some ways they truly were—Michael Hadden spent his weekend evenings at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem, an unthinkably daring diversion for a birthright member of the white bourgeoisie, and one that perhaps corresponds to my own metropolitan jaunts, for gosh knows the Apollo gave Michael Hadden a feeling for the richness of American civilization he could not have got in Locust Valley. I daresay he was one of the last whites to feel comfortable in Harlem before its politicization (or before its innate politicization became militant), and it certainly spunked up the yearbook, amid the drearily facetious Likes and Dislikes everyone else listed, to see his references to Harlem and the Apollo. He genuinely liked black music; that, for him, was an agent of what you could call straight coming out, learning what there is and what else you are.
But most pseudo-activity consisted of theatricals, assorted acts of arrogance (Sylvia Dawkins marched into English class, told Miss Blade she had set so much English homework Sylvia couldn’t do her geometry, and proceeded to do it, as Miss Blade cried out, “
Sylvia
Dawkins! Sylvia
Dawkins!
), and turning up in bizarre outfits on slave day. More typical of pseudo-style than Mike Hadden was Clodagh Millham, perversely silent with whimsical eyes. On
her
yearbook page, instead of the usual studio portrait and “personality candid” (a jock staring at the field of war; a pre-deb modeling a prom frock in the kitchen as the staff looks on in a bemused manner), Clodagh had nothing—nothing bearing the legend, “Draw your own pictures of Clodagh Millham here.” Given Friends Academy’s value system, Clodagh’s rejection of yearbook glamour was more shocking than Mike Hadden’s disdain for middle-class scruples. Mike Hadden wasn’t really a pseudo, anyway, for he was on the football team and led the debating club, whereas the true pseudo didn’t join things. Pseudos were nonconformists as a rule, and by the time I reached my seniority in this society and became a pseudo myself, I realized how much Being Different had to do with being gay. Half of it is being marked, being
made
different. The other half is acting marked,
accepting
the difference. To be pseudo (straight for “phony”) was to be creative (gay for “vital”). That is: given a drab environment, you either rebel or grow up drab.
Creative is often a euphemism for “neurotic.” But, boys and girls, you can be neurotic without creating anything. And lots of creative people have
not
been neurotic. (Name three, you say? John Updike, Lilo, and Jack Pumpkinhead of Oz. You say some of those on my list are imaginary? Well, who isn’t?) Anyway, I’d say that creativity is the route to travel, for all its awkward poignancy. It can be rough in childhood, but it gives one an intent sense of mission as an adult; and think of all the salons and brunches it makes available.
So, to the housewife in Sheboygan and others who ask why gay men have this vitality, I would say it’s because we steal from and pay back to the intensity of show biz. We adopt its tart glitter, and then, experimenting, develop our opulence, whimsy, intelligibility.
My records, for instance. A pleasantly unsavory amusement arcade halfway on to Wilkes-Barre called Playland had a recording machine. For fifty cents you could make a 45, and I made plenty. If Bernstein and Hellman could dare Voltaire, should I not tackle
The Wizard of Oz, Treasure Island?
The sixty-second side duration limited my scope somewhat, but I was ace in short forms, including parodies of television variety shows. One time I took my younger brothers into the booth with me—Mother had forbidden them some promised trip as a result of the usual contretemps, so I cast them into my cult to cheer them up. They were to play announcer and delicious mystery guest in my show, though Andrew could not bring himself to announce anything but “Here comes Mr. Pickle!” (an arresting footnote in what turned out to be an insistently straight sex life) and mystery guest Tony, sullen with the humiliation of punishment, refused to say even a word. I liked to make multidisc sets, just like the 45 versions of show albums, and by the end of the third side Andrew and I were giggling and capering. Tony, however, remained obdurately silent, despite our prodding and hard looks. At length, he piped up, “I hate Mom.” There the record ended.
But not the story. Years later, the three of us turned up for Christmas at the manse, and stayed up late to reminisce and get into trouble in the kitchen. My mother, who spent most of her parental life starting at the sound of an opening refrigerator door to scream, “Who’s in the kitchen?” from the bedroom, screamed it now.
“Do you remember,” Tony asked, “when that struck terror into our hearts?”
“We should wreck a dish or something,” Andrew urged. “Let’s make something vicious in the toaster-oven.”
It was as if we had never grown up. They were still the moon mice, as capable of smashing up my room as of sharing a pizza; and I am still the theatre kid, throwing the word “satire” around and speaking of “Section Two.” My folks were about to move to Sacramento, and in going through my old chest I found many a souvenir, including some of my old amateur 45s. I took them out now and played the Mr. Pickle show, running lampoon and myth together.
We were bemused, transported back to a time when losing a hat or catching cold was mortal sin. In the silence that followed, Mother came downstairs in her nightgown to expostulate and dither, and, suddenly wrenched by the horror of leaving friends and family for a strange culture, grew tearful. “There won’t be a Fortunoff’s,” she explained. “They put tofu into the water supply.” Tearful is bad enough, but now came nostalgic, not one of her characteristic modes. “I wish your father were here to see the three of you spending Christmas like brothers instead of fighting.”
“He’s just upstairs in bed,” said Andrew. “Shall I get him?”
“Are you talking over old times?” she asked gently. I’d had enough of this. Consulting the phonograph, I replayed the last bit of the Mr. Pickle show:
“Well, Mr. Pickle, what’s new on the Rialto?”
Silence.
(“Say something, you spaz!”)
Silence.
(“Kick his knee.”)
(“No, let’s give him noogies.”)
“Mr. Pickle, won’t you say hello at least?”
Long silence, then:
“I hate Mom.”
Mother regarded us in fury. “You wretches! Who said that?”
I pointed at Tony, Tony pointed at Andrew, Andrew pointed at me. “He did,” we chorused. Lampoon and myth.
Where did we learn our timing, you ask? Broadway taught us. Life is educational, if you know how to choose your college.
After fraternities of siblings and of construction workers, we consider a third brotherhood, neither genetic nor professional but cultural.
Stonewall the event happened very unexpectedly, and Stonewall the culture developed, in response, almost overnight. All those men who had been living alone and quietly suddenly had boyfriends, Oscar parties, leather pants. The gay world took on its themes, conventions, and terms with a ferocious imagination—for these elements of our civilization were not revealed, brought out of hiding: they were invented on the spot. We were leaderless, but then gay had long been, like it or not, a somewhat freelance situation, a field of loners making do. And we began to find each other, trade observations, build up the folklore. Some rather essential items turned out to have been there all along—Fire Island, for instance. Some equally essential items came along a few years later—dancing, for one, officially launched at the Tenth Floor in the early-middle 1970s. Other essential items, however, were simply routined into place then and there.
The Advocate
appeared. Bars opened in revolutionarily central locations. Even the sex changed. As if to renounce the passive stance of the old trade-worshiping oral encounters, men began to insist on the more aggressive attack of all-night screwing. Staying over—especially if you had coffee the next morning and hugged at the door—became a political act.
Most important, trade virtually vanished. Not long before I came to New York, homosexuals had no partners but hustlers. There would still be hustlers; but now most gays only knew of them from books like these. Hired help had become as useful as Victrolas: occult leverage raised by the lunatic fringe. Just as most record-playing people now relied on stereos, so did gays rely on … friendship. In fact, one of the first things you absolutely had to have in New York, fall of 1969, was a best friend.
With best friends, I believe: the older, the better. Long-term relationships weather idiosyncrasies more easily than new ones; and old investments are dearer. Perhaps it’s a matter of simple arithmetic: after ten or twelve years, you’ve already fought about everything potentially available, and can settle back and just get along.
What of preferences, you ask? Who needs what kind of best friend? Boys and girls, there’s no point in having preferences—even nonsmokers can just hold their horses—because it was one of Stonewall’s first rules that you can’t choose your best friend: he chooses you. I got mine at the Met. It was that same Stonewall fall, and the opera season had begun; at the first intermission of a
Tales of Hoffmann
I ran into a vaguely familiar face at the bar, one of those you know well enough to start joking around with but not well enough to name. Finally I placed him. He and I had, so to say, cochaired a sit-down strike on the playing fields of—no, not Eton—the annual Valley Forge Boy Scout Jamboree. Small potatoes, you say. But how many men of your acquaintance ever led a sit-down strike
during
an all-American Capture the Flag? And called a scoutmaster a Nazi? (His assistant, an Eagle scout, was even worse, but he was also somewhat breathtaking, so we didn’t call him anything.) Now it was ten years later, and my fellow rebel and I were men of the world, drinking champagne between the acts of a Met
Hoffmann
and comparing neighborhoods. I was living on the west side in a brownstone, he in the east fifties, in a doorman building with a fancy solarium on the roof. It sounded altogether metropolitan to me, and when some creep pushed my air conditioner in and robbed my apartment, I moved into my old friend’s building. We had a lot in common and lived only two floors apart and thus became rather confidential. Also, we were the only two people we knew who had called a scoutmaster a Nazi and harbored ecstatic feelings for an Eagle scout. This will tend to draw men together. So we became best friends. His name was Dennis Savage, and still is.
Shocking to report, in those days you could live pretty much anywhere you wanted to just by moving in. Buildings were uncrowded and rents low. In such profusion, roommates were actually suspicious—except to gays. Our love lives were forming. Dennis Savage and I marveled as man after man buddied up and the crowd assembled the lists. The Five Most Colorful Couples. The Ten Most Passionate Couples. The Three Most Wonderful But Almost Certainly Temporary Couples. (There were a lot of those.) The Couple of the Month. Then I would say, “Couple of the Day would be more realistic,” and of course everyone would get mad at me.
Part of Stonewall, I eventually realized, was not letting the side down, not admitting errors. But if straights are allowed to mess up their love lives, why can’t we? Besides, as a storyteller I am bound for life to play a kind of devil’s advocate about everything. I may not carry a notebook around, but I don’t miss a move.