In One Person (22 page)

“I just wanted to be able to show my writing to another writer,” I told him. “I’m not a poet,” I admitted. “I’m a fiction writer. I understand if you’re not interested.” I was walking away—I was trying to look hurt—when he stopped me.

“Wait, wait—what is your name, young
fiction
writer?” Larry asked. “I do
read
fiction,” he told me.

I told him my name—I said “Bill,” because Miss Frost owned the
William
name. (I would publish my novels under the name William Abbott, but I let no one else call me William.)

“Well, Bill—let me think about it,” Larry said. I knew then that he was gay, and everything else he was thinking, but I wouldn’t become his student until January 1964, when he offered a creative writing course at the Institute in the winter term.

Larry was the already-distinguished poet—
Lawrence
Upton, to his colleagues and students, but his gay friends (and a coterie of lady admirers) called him Larry. By then, I’d been with a few older men—I’d not lived with them, but they’d been my lovers—and I knew who I was when it came to the top-or-bottom business.

It was not the crudeness of Larry’s top-or-bottom question that
shocked me; even his first-time students knew that Lawrence Upton was a famous snob who could also be notoriously crass. It was simply that my teacher, who was such a renowned literary figure, had hit on me—
that
shocked me. But that was never how Larry told the story, and there was no contradicting him.

According to Larry, he
hadn’t
asked me if I was a top or a bottom. “In the sixties, dear Bill, we did not say ‘top’ and ‘bottom’—we said ‘pitcher’ and ‘catcher,’ though of course you
Vermonters
might have been prescient,” Larry said, “or so far ahead of the rest of us that you were already asking, ‘Plus or minus?’ while we less-progressive types were still stuck with the pitcher-or-catcher question, which soon
would become
the top-or-bottom question. Just not in the sixties, dear Bill. In Vienna, when I picked you up, I
know
I asked you if you were a pitcher or a catcher.”

Then, turning from me to our friends—
his
friends, for the most part; both in Vienna and later, back in New York, most of Larry’s friends were older than I was—Larry would say, “Bill is a
fiction
writer, but he writes in the first-person voice in a style that is tell-all confessional; in fact, his fiction sounds as much like a memoir as he can make it sound.”

Then, turning back to me—just me, as if we were alone—Larry would say, “Yet you insist on anachronisms, dear Bill—in the sixties, the
top
and
bottom
words are anachronisms.”

That was Larry; that was how he talked—he was always right. I learned not to argue about the smaller stuff. I would say, “Yes, Professor,” because if I’d said he was mistaken, that he had absolutely used the
top
and
bottom
words, Larry would have made another crack about my being from Vermont, or he would have shot the breeze about my saying I was a pitcher when, all along, I’d looked like a catcher to him. (Didn’t everyone think I looked like a catcher? Larry would usually ask his friends.)

The poet Lawrence Upton was of that generation of older gay men who basically believed that most gay men were bottoms, no matter what they said—or that those of us who
said
we were tops would eventually be bottoms. Since Larry and I met in Vienna, our enduring disagreement concerning exactly what was said on our first “date” was further clouded by what many Europeans felt in the sixties, and still feel today—namely, that we Americans make entirely too much of the top-or-bottom business. The Europeans have always believed we were too rigid about these distinctions, as if everyone gay is either one or the other—as some young, cocksure types tell me nowadays.

Larry—who was a bottom, if I ever knew one—could be both petulant and coy about how misunderstood he was. “I’m more versatile than you are!” he once said to me, in tears. “You may say you also like women, or you pretend that you do, but I’m not the truly inflexible one in this relationship!”

By the late seventies, in New York, when we were still seeing each other but no longer living together—Larry called the seventies the “Blissful Age of Promiscuity”—you could only be absolutely sure of someone’s sexual role in those overobvious leather bars, where a hankie in the back left pocket meant you were a top, and a hankie in the back right pocket signified that you were a bottom. A blue hankie was for fucking, a red one was for fist-fucking—well, what does it matter anymore? There was also that utterly annoying signal concerning where you clipped your keys—to the belt loop to the right or left of the belt buckle on your jeans. In New York, I paid no attention to where I clipped my keys; I was always getting hit on by some signal-conscious top, and I was a top! (It could be irritating.)

Even in the late seventies, almost a decade after gay liberation, the older gays—I mean not only older than me but also older than Larry—would complain about the top-or-bottom advertising. (“Why do you guys want to take all the mystery away? Isn’t the mystery an exciting part of sex?”)

I liked to look like a gay boy—or enough like one to make other gay boys, and men, look twice at me. But I wanted the girls and women to wonder about me—to make them look twice at me, too. I wanted to retain something provocatively masculine in my appearance. (“Are you trying to look
toppish
tonight?” Larry once asked me. Yes, maybe I was.)

I remembered, when we were rehearsing
The Tempest,
how Richard had said that Ariel’s gender was “mutable”; he’d said the sex of angels was mutable, too.

“Director’s choice?” Kittredge had asked Richard, about Ariel’s mutability.

I suppose I was trying to look sexually
mutable,
to capture something of Ariel’s unresolved sexuality. I knew I was small but good-looking. I could also be invisible when I wanted to be—like Ariel, I could be “an airy Spirit.” There is no one way to
look
bisexual, but that was the look I sought.

Larry liked to make fun of me for having what he called a “Utopian
notion of androgyny”; for his generation, I think that so-called liberated gays were no longer supposed to be “sissies.” I know that Larry thought I looked (and dressed) like a sissy—that was probably why I looked like a bottom to him, not a top.

But I saw myself as an almost regular guy; by “regular,” I mean only that I was never into leather or the bullshit hankie code. In New York—as in most cities, through the seventies—there was a lot of street cruising. Then, and now, I liked the androgynous look—nor were
androgynous
and
androgyny
ever words that gave me pronunciation problems.

“You’re a pretty boy, Bill,” Larry often said to me, “but don’t think you can stay ultra-thin forever. Don’t imagine that you can dress like a razor blade, or even in drag, and have any real effect on the macho codes you’re rebelling against. You won’t change what real men are like, nor will you ever be one!”

“Yes, Professor,” was all I usually said.

In the fabulous seventies, when I picked up a guy, or I let myself be picked up, there was always that moment when my hand got hold of his butt; if he liked to be fucked, he would start moaning and writhing around—just to let me know I’d hit the magic spot. But if he turned out to be a top, we would settle for a super-fast 69 and call it a night; sometimes, this would turn into a super-
rough
69. (The “macho codes,” as Larry called them, might prevail. My “Utopian notion of androgyny” might not.)

It was Larry’s formidable jealousy that eventually drove me away from him; even when you’re as young as I was, there’s a limit to enduring admiration being a substitute for love. When Larry thought I’d been with someone else, he would try to touch my asshole—to feel if I was wet, or at least lubricated. “I’m a top, remember?” I used to tell him. “You should be sniffing my cock instead.” But Larry’s jealousy was insanely illogical; even knowing me as well as he did, he actually believed I was capable of being a bottom with someone else.

When I met Larry in Vienna, he was making himself a student of opera there—the opera was why he’d come. The opera was partly why I’d chosen Vienna, too. After all, Miss Frost had made me a devoted reader of nineteenth-century novels. The operas I loved
were
nineteenth-century novels!

Lawrence Upton was a well-established poet, but he’d always wanted to write a libretto. (“After all, Bill, I know how to
rhyme
.”) Larry had
this wish to write a gay opera. He was very strict with himself as a poet; maybe he imagined he could be more relaxed as a librettist. He may have wanted to write a gay opera, but Lawrence Upton never wrote an openly gay poem—that used to piss me off, more than a little.

In Larry’s opera, some cynical queen—someone a lot like Larry—is the narrator. The narrator sings a lament—it’s deliberately foolish, and I forget how it rhymes. “Too many Indians, not enough chiefs,” the narrator laments. “Too many chickens, not enough roosters.” It was very relaxed, all right.

There is a chorus of bottoms—
numerous
bottoms, naturally—and a comically much-smaller chorus of tops. If Larry had continued his opera, it’s possible he would have added a medium-size chorus of bears, but the bear movement didn’t begin until the mid-eighties—those big hairy guys, consciously sloppy, rebelling against the chiseled, neat-and-trim men, with their shaved balls and gym bodies. (Those bears were so refreshing, at first.)

Needless to say, Larry’s libretto was never made as an opera; his career as a librettist was abandoned in-progress. Larry would be remembered only as a poet, though I remember his gay-opera idea—and those many nights at the Staatsoper, the vast Vienna State Opera, when I was still so young.

It was a valuable lesson for the young would-be writer that I was: to see a great man, an accomplished poet, fail. You must be careful when you stray from an acquired discipline—when I first hooked up with Larry, I was still learning that writing is such a discipline. Opera may be a flamboyant form of storytelling, but a librettist also follows some rules; good writing isn’t “relaxed.”

To Larry’s credit, he was the first to acknowledge his failure as a librettist. That was a valuable lesson, too. “When you compromise your standards, Bill, don’t blame the form. Opera is not at fault. I’m not the victim of this failure, Bill—I’m the perpetrator.”

You can learn a lot from your lovers, but—for the most part—you get to keep your friends longer, and you learn more from them. (At least I have.) I would even say that my friend Elaine’s mother, Martha Hadley, had a greater influence on me than Lawrence Upton truly had.

In fact, at Favorite River Academy, where I was a junior in the winter of 1960—and, Vermont boy that I was, given my naïveté—I had never heard the
top
or
bottom
words used in that way Larry (or any number of
my gay friends and lovers) would later use them, but I knew I was a top before I’d ever had sex with anyone.

That day I made my partial confession to Martha Hadley, when Mrs. Hadley’s obvious dominance made such a strong but bewildering impression on me, I absolutely knew that I ceaselessly desired fucking other boys and men, but always with my penis in their bottoms; I never desired the penis of another boy or man penetrating me. (In my mouth, yes—in my asshole, no.)

Even as I desired Kittredge, I knew this much about myself: I wanted to fuck him, and to take his penis in my mouth, but I didn’t want him to fuck me. Knowing Kittredge, how utterly crazy I was, because if Kittredge were ever to entertain the possibility of a gay relationship, it was painfully clear to me what he would be. If Kittredge was gay, he sure looked like a top to me.

I
T’S REVEALING HOW
I have skipped ahead to my junior year abroad in Vienna, choosing to begin that interlude in my future life by telling you about Larry. You might think I should have begun that Vienna interlude by telling you about my first actual girlfriend, Esmeralda Soler, because I met Esmeralda shortly after I arrived in Vienna (in September of 1963), and I’d been living with Esmeralda for several months before I became Larry’s writing student—and, not long after that, Larry’s lover.

But I believe I know why I have waited to tell you about Esmeralda. It’s all too common for gay men of my generation to say how much easier it is today to “come out” as a teenager. What I want to tell you is: At that age, it’s never easy.

In my case, I had felt ashamed of my sexual longings for other boys and men; I’d fought against those feelings. Perhaps you think I’ve overemphasized my attraction to Miss Frost and Mrs. Hadley in a desperate effort to be “normal”; maybe you have the idea that I was never really attracted to women. But I
was
—I
am
attracted to women. It was just that—at Favorite River Academy, especially, no doubt because it was an all-boys’ school—I had to suppress my attraction to other boys and men.

After that summer in Europe with Tom, when I’d graduated from Favorite River, and later, when I was on my own—in college, in New York—I was finally able to acknowledge the homosexual side of myself. (Yes, I
will
say more about Tom; it’s just that Tom is so difficult.) And after Tom, I had
many
relationships with men. When I was nineteen and
twenty—I turned twenty-one in March of ’63, shortly before I learned I’d been accepted to the Institute for European Studies in Vienna—I had already “come out.” When I went to Vienna, I’d been living in New York City as a young gay guy for two years.