My Husband and My Wives: A Gay Man's Odyssey (2 page)

Who was I? The first time I heard “cocksucker” shouted at me, I was shocked. It was so dramatic and reckless a word, the idea of defining me somehow by the use I made of my mouth on someone else’s penis. It was something I did, not somebody I was. It lacked the distance, using the French sense of the word, that “queer” or “fairy,” for instance, possessed. Were we talking about the act, or a depraved person? It was never clear to me or to those who used the term. They tried to define me with the words, and I resisted. Then we graduated to “homosexual.” That made the matter much clearer; my sexual orientation (not that I understood the term in 1946) was a condition like my damaged back. There were two sets of name-callers, those who were heterosexual and defining me, and those who were homosexual and defining me. And then I became “gay”; this was in the seventies, as I remember. It was a relief not to have an affliction any longer and not to be described by acts that carried the speaker’s condemnation in the definition, but “gay” was not exactly right for me either. I didn’t think I could live up to it, nor was I sure that I wanted to. It was what they used to call a “lifestyle,” and made me feel just as much the country rube that coming from Iowa had branded me in Manhattan. It wasn’t quite clear what “gay” implied and what were my responsibilities to the title. I’d never been to Fire Island; Provincetown bored me; San Francisco’s Castro overwhelmed and alienated me. The bar scene for someone over twenty, well, it was not for me, at least. I loved opera off and on, but rarely noticed vocal technique. Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand—could not stand either one of them. True enough, once I had my own house, I took to decorating it nonstop, and if push comes to shove I can talk about hairstyling with at least a semblance of enthusiasm—lucky too, because one of my sons married a stylist at Vidal Sassoon.

When I used to find myself in a gay ghetto I always felt like one of those women in a Helen Hokinson cartoon—the heavyset body, bad hairdo, shapeless dress, bulky thick purse, sensible shoes with thick legs thrust into them; in short, a matron from the Midwest. Just not enough chic for a gay ghetto, that’s my problem. I don’t see myself in Lycra on Rollerblades flashing through South Beach; I have been there, seen the gorgeous young men wheeling down Collins Avenue, and I always say to myself,
I just can’t do gay.

I may not wake up every morning to the thought that I am gay, but I know that I am something else than the other guys on the block. Straight men I pass on the street, straight men with whom I talk at work or at the gym, every day, everywhere, seem to me to be different; I may not be able to define it, but I know it, always. Or is it that I have accepted the verdict leveled at me from my early teens, that I am different? On the other hand, because I have tried so hard to resist gayness, to refuse a category, I have alienated myself from a lot of the gay population. Well, where am I, then? If I were to talk like the academic I once was, I might say this is about negotiating difference.

This is a personal memoir, but much of what I describe is commonplace experience for homosexual males. I have written for a general audience because everyone has gay people in their lives even if they do not know this. There are gay friends, relatives, students, employees, even spouses whom the straight world does not identify as such, though now, of course, less so than a half century ago. I would be gratified if the reader took from this book a better understanding of the obstacles and shoals the gay male must navigate just to grow up and assume the responsibilities of adulthood.

Readers must know that I mention the sex act frequently and perhaps with more detail than they would like. Sexual activity per se usually doesn’t amount to a hill of beans and is not worth talking about, but when it happens in a repressive, hostile, and dangerous environment, then it becomes worth mentioning, not for the act itself but for what it means, like two people exchanging eye contact, or maybe a crust of bread, maybe just a murmured phrase beneath the cruel gaze of their Nazi captors as one has seen so often in those decades-old gritty black-and-white films. The act, whatever it is, becomes worth noting. Sexual acts that I describe are here to show me coming to understand myself as a sexual person, but more than that they demonstrate the chance to exist for a moment, express oneself, know that life is worth living, that there is hope and freedom and dignity perhaps in some world where the Church, where evil homophobic do-gooders, where desperate cruel and empty people with no real life or dreams or hope for themselves find their pleasure in inflicting cruelties on defenseless victims, are momentarily silenced. That is why in this memoir when I often record encounters between myself and some other man, it is not to titillate my reader, nor for the erotics of the memory, but to remind myself of the many wonderful males, straight and gay, I met this way, and to keep alive the fact that even in the darkest hours of my youth and later in other repressed times, there were extraordinary moments of self-expression, joy, and happiness. I mention a sex act only because it reflects in some way on the psychology or life circumstances of one of the two people involved. When old King Nestor in the
Iliad
calls out to the Achaean troops to “go to bed with the wife of a Trojan in revenge for Helen and to make them cry,” he is talking about violence, destruction of property, assault on manliness, he is not really talking about sex at all. If he cared the least bit about women he would know he was talking about rape as well.

I was not cruelly used as a teenager, and only once driven to contemplate suicide, and that was by something my mother said to me, not by a bullying classmate. I never stifled my desire for other males, I never deceived a woman about who I was, never used marriage as a cover. There were plenty of miseries that came my way, but where do they not? As it says in
Ecclesiastes
, “The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.” I would hate to be other than I am, that is, gay, even though it has caused me conflict and misery, because fundamentally I like being me. I value the perspective on life that gayness affords me, the interactions it creates for me with both men and women. Experts deride as simpleminded the slogan “Men are from Mars, women are from Venus,” and maybe it is nothing more than acculturation, but I do sense it in my relations with men and women from the peculiar perspective of my gender sensitivity. I am a male, of course, but though I sense the commonality of that line of guys at the urinals in the interstate rest stops, I sense that I am not one of them, no way.

It is distressing to hear talk of searching for the gene that determines homosexual behavior in the human male or female with the correlative idea that it would then be possible to eliminate this trait in human reproduction. The twentieth century’s history of “cleansing” populations comes to mind. Nowadays, when gays seem to be better accepted in the United States, they would do well to keep somewhere in the back of their minds the experience of the assimilated Jews of Germany, who thought they were safe until it was too late. One should never underestimate the power of the Abrahamic religions to fuel a hatred of gays.

ONE

1930–1945

Ruth Beye with her baby boy, Charles, July 1930
(Courtesy of the author)

I was born March 19, 1930, the fifth child, second boy, of six children carried to term. (There were six miscarriages.) An older sister often reminds me resentfully of hearing our father on the phone shouting in joy, “It’s a boy, thank God, it’s a boy, it’s a boy.” My father is more myth to me than flesh-and-blood reality. Since at the time of his death I was a small boy whose life was spent in the nursery, I had seen little of him. In fact, my memory of Daddy is little more than the sight of his body in the coffin that the servants took us to view. It reposed in the front hall of our home, since our father, being an atheist, was given a nonreligious funeral there. Although he died only a few days after his fiftieth birthday, he was already head of surgery at the State University of Iowa Hospital, and a distinguished thoracic surgeon. Whatever else I know of him comes largely from Mother, who loved nothing more than to reminisce over cocktails at the end of the day, even if, in the loneliness of her widowhood, her companion was just her teenage son.

Over the years I was to learn that my father was an admirer of Theodore Roosevelt, that he too spent his summer holidays hunting and fishing. I well remember my mother showing me the box in which he kept the trout flies he had made; it was like viewing the crown jewels. He was an acolyte at the altar of the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant hegemony in the United States, fearful and disgusted, if my mother is to be believed, at the invasion of these shores by the Irish and Italian Catholic immigrants, and determined to match their prodigious birth rate with his own efforts, however my mother might have felt about it. (That she did not like children all that much she managed to convey to us in her magisterial indirection.) Needless to say, he was equally affronted by Jews, not because they were superstitious and feckless, as he imagined the Catholics to be, but because he considered them so extremely sharp and grasping. When a parent dies young, there are so many questions a son has not had answered. What, I often wonder, had my father, who was a doctor in the U.S. Army in the First World War, thought about shooting at German soldiers, who must have included his blood relatives, or at least the descendants of fellow townsmen of his father, Wilhelm? How could it be, as Mother often told me, that he was planning a year’s sabbatical in Germany for the academic year 1937–38, so as to get to know the Germans better, when as a reader of newspapers he must have noticed the dire turn of events since Hitler’s accession to power in 1933? How was it that he admired so very much the Viennese Jew who headed the Orthopedic Surgery Department while always pleased that he and my mother found accommodations in hotels that stated “Gentiles Only”? Again, if I can go by Mother’s testimony, this orthopedic surgeon was to be valued because he was a repository of European tradition and learning, but, more than that, because he was a Jew, one of a people who, in my father’s opinion, had a more profound sense of high culture, were more refined, than the rest of mankind.

I have always thought that I would not have liked my father very much, but then I remember a favorite family anecdote about Daddy. It happened that when his first four children were very young, he entertained the Roman Catholic priest who had been the chaplain in his unit at the front. This very jolly young man and my father enjoyed sitting about, drinking wine and reminiscing. During his stay, the family dog, Jiggs, died, and, of course, the children were inconsolable. My father hired a carpenter to make the dog a wooden coffin; then my father and his friend contrived that the latter would don his robes of priestly office to lead a procession down to the back of the garden where a grave had been dug. In the presence of the children and the household staff something appropriate was said, and Daddy took the shovel to fling in the first load of earth, and signaled to the grieving little tykes waiting with their toy shovels to take their turn. Mother loved to tell this story, laughing all the while at the kitchen staff, all of them first-generation Irish or German Catholics, who marveled that someone so atheistic and impious as Dr. Beye could yet manage to hold a kind of Catholic burial, including even a priest, for his dog.

My small hometown was distinctive in being both the commercial center for the surrounding farms and the site of the State University of Iowa, which even in the thirties was renowned for its departments of art, theater, creative writing, and music. On Saturday nights there were pickup trucks parked in rows outside J. C. Penney on College Street, where farmers in clean overalls with their wives, dressed in homemade cotton dresses, were shopping. Over at the university another, different crowd was gathering for a performance of the symphony orchestra or on their way to the university theater to see a play. The streets, which were paved in brick, were shaded over in summertime by giant American elms that gave the effect of so many naves of Gothic cathedrals. Where the town ended began open fields as far as the eye could see. This was not the Iowa City of today; large-scale construction after the war turned a village into a city, brought housing developments to the surrounding farmlands, and the tragic invasion of Dutch Elm disease took out the shade. But I don’t really see those changes. Maybe I have just looked at too many Grant Wood paintings. He was, after all, a resident of the town.

We lived in a large house, large enough to be renovated into apartments in later years. The property stretched from the street back as much as the length of an average city block, with a steep terraced hill in the front, climbing beyond the house to a level where there was a formal lawn surrounded by flower beds. Then the property sloped gently down to the back boundary, beyond which were open hilly fields and one could see miles into the distance. As a small child my existence was confined to the nursery on the top floor, where I was given meals, and my bedroom on the second floor, and the back, or “servants’,” staircase down to the side door, which we children were meant to use. Apart from a swing that stood on the crest of the land, a sandbox underneath a shady tree on the gentle slope rising to it, and the flat lawn for croquet by the kitchen door, we children were sent to play way out in back of the house beyond the formal lawn, and beyond the formal garden, where there was a miniature house built for us. Beyond that, past a cherry orchard, there was a two-story small barn, the upstairs loft of which had been converted into a “clubhouse,” and to the side of it was a chicken coop. We were seriously discouraged from entering the kitchen or pantry except by invitation. There were four or five women who worked for my parents doing all the household chores and we were not to get in their way. The living room, front hall, and vestibule that led to the front door were also out of bounds. There was one man who did the gardening, the heavy lifting, and drove my father to work (since, if Mother is to be believed, my father did not think a surgeon should strain his hands before morning surgery by handling the wheel of a car). The gardener would sometimes help us with our little garden, but we were reminded that he was also busy, and not to be bothered. Only the upstairs maids, who had also functioned as our nursemaids when we were smaller, were part of our world.