Stonewall (7 page)

Foster Jr. was, in his phrase, “a. victim of well-intended overmanagement”—a charitable interpretation of what seems on his father's side to have been essentially a driven determination to shape his offspring into an acceptable image. Foster Jr. would later ruefully
claim that “my father put me on a pedestal way beyond anything that I merited.” But that assessment, too, seems dubious, seems to reflect a combination of wish fulfillment (the pedestal) and a habit of self-deprecation (“beyond anything that I merited”) that his father's hectoring reproofs had helped to engender. Much closer to the mark is Junior's suggestion later in life that his abilities had “always been underestimated”—the negative appraisal of his gifts having been early internalized, and thereafter communicated to others.

His mother was far worse at nurturance. Like her husband, Caroline was a charming, popular companion to her peers, but a cold, endlessly critical, domineering parent. She was obsessed with being liked and with being socially correct, and was far too self-centered to give a child sustained affection. When alone with Foster Jr. she would, far more than her husband, castigate the boy for his imperfections. She was not above recounting the “terrible time” she had had giving birth to him (two other pregnancies had ended in miscarriages), or repeating how much she had hoped for a nice little girl. Caroline always kept her word, paid her debts like clockwork, and was generally admired for her honesty and reliability. But she was also a volcano of buried resentment: She menaced Foster Jr. with a knife several times; suggested (when he was six) a double suicide pact; and periodically threatened to call the police and have him taken away.

Not surprisingly, Foster Jr. had frequent illnesses that confined him to bed, and when he was four or five, he developed a severe case of asthma. The family first tried sending him to Bermuda, where he got worse, and then to Richmond, Massachusetts, where he got no better. Finally, when he was nine and so underweight that serious doubts about his survival arose, the doctor suggested he be sent to board at the recently opened Thomas School in Arizona, a place that catered to children from well-to-do families. Most of the children at Thomas suffered from psychological or physical problems—it was an upper-class version of the combined school-and-orphanage that Craig Rodwell was to attend near Chicago a decade later.

The school was set in a beautiful, barren stretch of desert on the eastern outskirts of Tucson, surrounded by the distant Santa Catalina hills, with the nearest structure, the picturesque adobe ruins of old Fort Lowell, nearly two miles away. Foster Jr. was accompanied out West by his parents, but when school started in late September 1934, they left. Foster was assailed by homesickness throughout much of his first year. But he soon fell in love with the desert, and gradually became acclimated to being away from home.

The Thomas School had only forty students, divided between day students and boarders, and its young male teaching staff had been recruited almost entirely from Ivy League colleges. The school also kept a stable of horses (and a stablemaster). Foster quickly learned how to ride, and went out nearly every afternoon after classes to explore the desert terrain, chasing jackrabbits and rattlesnakes (he threw up the first time he watched the stablemaster skin one of the snakes to make a belt). The woman who operated the school, perhaps predisposed in Foster's favor by his father's gift of a library, turned him into something of a pet, letting him come into her room early each morning to snuggle in her bed with a puppy she owned while she got ready for the day. She was not a particularly warm person—indeed, she could be something of a disciplinarian—but Foster thrived on the special attention. Well before the end of his five-year stay in Arizona, his asthma had entirely disappeared.

After he returned home in 1939, his father decided to build the largest model Gunnison Home for his own family in the Gypsy Trail compound, and for the next three years Foster Jr. and his mother were nearly year-round residents there. He attended the local Carmel high school and then spent two years at Culver Military Academy in northern Indiana, where his father had once been a summer cadet. Unpredictably, Foster Jr. enjoyed Culver: He was able to continue his riding there and, although he never achieved any substantial military rank at the school, he felt, “as a person dependent upon authority,” that the structured, disciplined, subordinate life suited him well.

After graduating from Culver, he entered Haverford College in the fall of 1944. Foster Senior had handpicked the Pennsylvania school as suitably small and prestigious. But Foster Jr. never took to it, and in his first term very nearly flunked out. He got a 42 in physics and a 54 in government (with 60 as a passing grade)—and his
highest
grade was a 68 (in English). His father, for once, handled the situation with some tact. While pontificating in his usual way about “the need to complete whatever one starts,” and while managing parenthetically to deplore Junior's sloppy handwriting in his letters, Foster Sr. was nonetheless able to emphasize the positive: It was now clear, he wrote his son, that Junior's bent lay in liberal arts, not in engineering or scientific subjects—however much father and son might have hoped otherwise—and he urged Junior to be grateful that he had learned in the nick of time what his strengths were, and could therefore play to them in planning his future professional life.
²

But Junior's unhappiness in fact encompassed more than a few uncongenial courses. He confessed to his father that he had been in “a constant state of depression” since arriving at the school. He found “every phase” of life at Haverford disagreeable: The food wasn't to his taste; the boys—mostly Quakers—had a set of ideals he did not share and could not fathom; there was no high-powered sports program; and, perhaps worst of all, he had discovered that his roommate “exhibited several glaring tendencies toward Communism.” Foster felt wretched, lost fifteen pounds, and had “a constant tired feeling.” Realizing that his father might ascribe those ailments to malingering, to a lack of “stick-to-it-iveness,” he shrewdly played to a set of complaints Foster Sr. might find more congenial: He needed a school, he wrote his father, that was closer to home and that placed more emphasis on “college spirit” and on fraternities; and he confessed to a special hankering to be on a campus that had a chapter of Beta Theta Pi (the family fraternity for several generations).

Foster Sr. took the bait. Misreading his son as usual, he announced that he had hit upon exactly what was needed to pull Junior out of the doldrums: a coeducational college. It would give Junior “a brighter life,” and that in turn would stimulate success in his studies. But Senior refused to consider a transfer until his son had satisfactorily demonstrated that he could “conquer all your problems at Haverford—even though you are unhappy.” With the promise of release in the wind, Junior studied around the clock and in the second term of his freshman year achieved “a very creditable average.” Fulfilling his side of the bargain, Foster Sr. allowed his son to transfer to Columbia, which accepted him on condition that he repeat his freshman year.

In the late forties, Columbia had one of the best football teams in its history, and Foster Jr. became a rabid fan, experiencing near delirium when Columbia pulled “the upset of upsets” in breaking Army's long undefeated string of victories. With a new lease on life, and trying his best to fit the collegiate mold, he did join his father's old fraternity, Beta Theta Pi, and in fact enjoyed the camaraderie—including the repeated trips he and a group of brothers took to Union City, New Jersey, or to the Globe in Boston to catch the burlesque shows. It was the comedy Foster liked, not the sex.

Indeed by now, aged twenty, Foster was well aware—though he had done only a little adolescent experimenting with friends—that his orientation was homosexual. At Columbia he sometimes dated to keep up with his peers, but fled in alarm at the occasional discreet
signal from a fraternity brother that some kind of sexual advance might be welcome. When one of them (a man later well known in publishing) directly propositioned Foster, he was so shocked and self-protectively “incensed,” that he grabbed a dry mop and chased him out of the room. Indeed, Foster's uncertain footing in matters of sex was to result in a pattern of lifelong celibacy. Once, in his mid-forties, he got an “expertly administered, absolutely delightful” blow job; that would be the sole sexual experience of his adult life. Which helps to account, perhaps, for the special zeal with which he embraced every opportunity to bury himself in organizational work, to toil, with vast enjoyment, and semi-anonymity, on behalf of a cause he believed in.

He discovered his penchant for organizational work even before he graduated from Columbia. On one of his visits to New Albany in the mid-forties, his father had taken him to visit the local chapter, in nearby Louisville, Kentucky, of a recently founded national men's singing organization designed to preserve what was viewed as the disappearing folk art of barbershop quartets and choruses. The Louisville chapter was made up largely of local businessmen, and it was the networking, not the music, that had drawn Foster Sr. But the barbershop bug immediately bit Junior and became a lifelong passion with him. For a few years he sang in a male chorus, but later found that he enjoyed the business end even more; he helped to organize local, then district, then national programs, and took special satisfaction, one spring day in 1961, at being present for the formal ceremony in the office of Governor John Dempsey of Connecticut that proclaimed April 8–15 a week for officially celebrating the venerable institution of barbershop quartet singing.

In 1949, the year Foster graduated from Columbia, his father and mother, already long separated, finally decided on a formal divorce. But the settlement proved protracted and acrimonious, with each parent trying to enlist Foster Jr. as an ally. For a time, his father would have the advantage. Foster Sr. saw that his son, after graduation, was floundering, uncertain what kind of work to take up and where his aptitudes might lie, and so offered to set him up with a Gunnison Homes dealership in St. Petersburg, Florida. He assured Junior that he would accumulate considerable capital in short order. That alone had appeal, but what appealed still more was the possibility that his father might finally, after years of doubt about his son's commonsense abilities, find in him something like a worthy business associate.

PART TWO

YOUNG ADULTHOOD

YVONNE

Y
vonne's sister had gone to college in Georgia, but Yvonne was having no part of it. There was no way, she told her mother, that
she
was going to go south to college.
No
way. Theo couldn't argue with her too much; having brought her daughter up in her own outspoken image, and having imbued her with proud, pro-black attitudes, she realized Yvonne might be right in predicting that she would end up dead in a Southland still rigidly insistent on segregation.

But why in heaven's name, Theo wanted to know, had Yvonne settled on Seattle University? Was the Far West the only possible alternative to the Deep South? Yvonne said something sly about how pleased Grandma would be because Seattle was run by the Jesuits, and then, more seriously, insisted on how well suited the school was to her own burgeoning interest in philosophy; what could be better than the chance to read scholastic philosophy with the people who invented it? “But what will you
do
there?” her mother asked in mock horror. “It's tucked off nowhere, way out in the left-hand corner!” Yvonne tried to reassure her that since her childhood friend, the studious Freddy, was already enrolled at Seattle University, the two of them could concoct some plot or other.

Theo couldn't help but smile; she'd been considered wild herself all her life, and took some vicarious pleasure in her daughter's high-spirited decision to shock the neighbors—this was 1950—with the spectacle of a seventeen-year-old girl going off to school at the other end of the country. That Freddy would watch over her was thought
a dubious blessing; he was already suspect in the neighborhood for his “swell-headed” bragging that he intended to study Russian and become a diplomat (what he hadn't announced was that he, too, was gay).

To the neighborhood's satisfaction, Yvonne lasted only two years at Seattle University (though Freddy graduated with honors). She did well academically—thanks to how bright she was, not to how diligently she applied herself. And she dutifully joined the prestigious Alpha Kappa Alpha black sorority. But then, as an antidote to that conventional social scene, she got in with an older black crowd that included Patti Bown (later well known as a pianist) and spent much of her time, as she had in high school, in the jazz clubs—and also in pursuing a love affair, the last she would have with a man. Moreover—and without really needing the money, but attracted to the thrills—she set up an inventive fence operation in which she sold (at a 50 percent commission) the booty some of her navy friends won while gambling aboard ship.

Yvonne enjoyed the edgy secrecy of moving in and out of disparate worlds, some of them clandestine, some of them proper. And that included the gay world. While still back in New Rochelle, she had managed to connect with a few very discreet lesbians in the surrounding towns, but when she set out to explore gay life in Seattle, she soon found that there was little to explore.

The West Coast certainly had its share of bars; although there were not more than thirty exclusively lesbian clubs in the whole country in late 1963, the West Coast had for several decades boasted a fair number of them—as well as the ubiquitous undercover agents and surprise police raids that were their invariable accompaniment. Mona's in San Francisco, which opened for business in 1936, was probably the best known of the early lesbian bars. Their number increased during and after World War II, with the If Club and the Star Room in Los Angeles becoming especially popular.
¹