The Best Little Boy in the World (12 page)

But mainly, I had no less than eleven years' worth of defenses keeping my mouth shut, flooding my brain with caution signals, and reminding me that my martyrdom, my wicker-weave throne—everything depended on keeping that inner shell intact.

They turned a corner. I kept walking, tears in my eyes, knowing that I had missed a once-in-a-lifetime chance to fulfill all my desperate yearnings.

I don't mean to sound soap opera about it, but it hit me hard.

Thinking back on it, I can hardly believe I could have missed the opportunity. I can hardly believe that anyone with half a brain in his head could get so totally wrapped up in his own martyr complexes. I mean, fun is fun, and if you can't find anyone, you may as well try to enjoy your loneliness—but here was my chance! Not a fantasy, a real chance! With everything to gain and nothing real to lose.

Jimmy got married. I could hardly believe that, either. But then, if I, at the very tip of the scale, had been able to go for eleven years without having sex with a guy, surely he, closer to the center, could go forever with relative ease.

I really like the girl he married. Her sense of humor is as good as his, though he makes most of the jokes and she does most of the laughing. She is attractive in an unglamorous, unthreatening sort of way, sweet and cuddly, warm, with big brown eyes and Southern charm.

I was an usher in their wedding in Atlanta. After the wedding, I had no roommate.

That was in June, a year after my graduation from Yale, and well into my career at IBM. That summer, with Hank still in Europe and Tommy married and Brian and Chip who knew where, and Rick still friendly enough at the office but leading his own social life after hours, I made frequent trips to visit Brook, who was working in Washington. He and Debbie were semi on the rocks, and I think he was glad for the company.

One day in July—Washington swelters in the summer—we went out to a pool together. His sun-browned twenty-year-old's body, glistening wet.... Most people, when they see something sexy, I think they whistle or smile or get excited. I used to feel sad. My eyes would cloud over with longing. It was too depressing to smile, too taboo to whistle, too impossible to get excited over, too sad to be cosmic. Oh, come
on
now: Was it really any worse for you than for anyone else, of whatever sex and inclinations, who sees someone beautiful and unattainable? Maybe not. But if so, it was because I couldn't even show admiration, whistle, or say I loved him. Or even tell all my friends about him when I got home. It had to be pent up inside.

This cosmic martyr trip had been okay for the last eleven years. I doubt that those years were any less happy, on balance, then they are for most people; indeed, I am almost certain that the reverse is true, what with all my little achievements in camp, in high school, at Yale, playing and working all the time with cowboys of the first order.

But there is a time and a place for everything. We even recognize Red China when the right time comes, when we can swallow our pride, when we can shatter our mirror and break out of our shell. I was becoming acutely aware that the cosmic trip was not going to take me much farther. It was going to leave me all alone in a cave somewhere, with no cowboys, sitting in a lotus position looking down at my ugly left thing, feeling sorry for myself.

I visited Brook again in August. We met for drinks at one of those plush downstairs Washington bars. This time I told him. I told him because after eleven years of silence, I could stand loneliness no longer, I could stand pretending no longer, and I wanted to tell someone that I loved him. I told him because I felt the best years of my life were slipping away, working late at IBM.

With three drinks in me and more stammering and prefacing and blushing than I care to remember, I made the startling, astonishing revelation—that I liked boys instead of girls. I was shaking with adrenalin, and my teeth were chattering.

Thousands of times I had fantasized telling someone I was "a homosexual." (Which sounds so much worse than telling someone you are "gay.") And now I had done it, the record spoiled, birth given to the idea. But the rest of the fantasy never materialized. Brook did not stand up in surprise and disgust and shout, "A
homosexual?,"
attracting the stares of everyone in the bar. Lightning did not strike. The floor did not even move.

He just listened sympathetically. Not sympathy for my homosexuality, but for the trouble I obviously had accepting it, making it work. His first question was: Had I seen
Boys in the Band?
No. You should, he said.

We talked for hours; rather, I talked for hours, telling the horrors of sleeping with Kathy in Tossa, Hilda in camp, the red crayon; Tommy, Brian, Hank....

Brook said that he had slept with a few guys at college and that he wanted to be able to find some physical expression for the emotional "love" he felt for other guys. But that he had not had too much success. I guess he is "eight" or "nine" on the scale. And what normal male
doesn't
have some locker room pat-on-the-butt feelings for his best buddies? Ten is an extreme, not a goal or a standard of desirable normality. No?

When the bar closed, we went back to Brook's apartment. I got undressed to go to sleep. He came over and put his hand on my shoulder. I felt awkward, embarrassed—he was thinking of me not as a friend when he did that, but as a homosexual, which made it different. I started to move away. I thought he was doing it not because he really wanted to, but because he felt sorry for me, and I was too proud for that. He wouldn't let me back off. He put his arms around me and hugged. I hugged back, confused but very hard.

He said he wanted me to get used to touching. He said that to a point, he liked contact with me—back rubs, lying on top of each other, wrestling around. He just didn't want it to go too far; he wasn't sexually turned on by me. That was the part, of course, that made me feel awkward, that made me feel like one of the resident faculty members at Yale trying to pick fights with the attractive undergraduates.

So I can't say that I was at ease or that we had wild, glorious sex together. We wrestled around. But that didn't matter: I had someone to talk with. I was luxuriating in
honesty
for the first time in my life. And relaxing my defenses. Creakingly, haltingly at first, and not without second thoughts, yet letting my guard down all the same.

I could tell Brook I loved him. I did. He told me that though it was not sexual, he loved me back. Now I'll tell you something. He must have loved me in a way, or else he wouldn't have had the patience to help me through this rather critical period. It put quite a burden on him. He was, after all, the only person I had ever told. Whenever I had something heavy to say from then on, I would call—who else? I didn't have other friends to spread the weight around to, and there was a lot of weight in the months following August, while I tried to adjust to a whole new way of life, a whole new set of values, a shaking up of all my solidly entrenched defenses.

At first it was all I could do to say the word "homosexual" and its synonyms. I had trained myself never to utter those words, never to slip, not even in my sleep. It took months, literally, for me to get reasonably comfortable talking with Brook about what I thought and felt. I called and visited frequently.

Once around Christmas he was talking about the British girl he had met over the summer and about how he wished he could go to London for Christmas vacation to see her. My chance! Here was a way to show true, selfless love and appreciation. Here was a way to symbolize that it was Brook himself and not his body I loved, by sending his body away to London to be ravished by a heterosexual girl. (I think I was getting a little carried away.) I could give Brook the gift without his wondering whether I was "queer on him"—because he already knew. Finally, someone knew.

As you might expect, he was embarrassed when I presented him the round-trip ticket. I told him I knew that in a way people didn't like to be given things, that it could ruin a relationship if it appeared the donor was trying to buy the other's friendship. But he would be doing me a favor if he would just accept the stupid ticket: I had so much damn love inside me that had always been looking for an outlet, and would he just grin and bear it and be the outlet? Brook understood. He accepted the ticket and thanked me, once then and once when he returned, and neither of us has mentioned it since. Perfect.

Hank came back from Paris and was home in St. Louis. I found a business excuse to go out and visit. I had missed my ex-roommate a lot that year. Friday night we went to the dating bar to try to pick up a couple of chicks. Unsuccessful and sleepy, we returned to his apartment around two.

"Sit down, Hank. There's something I want to tell you." My teeth were beginning to chatter again; my palms were sweating like cold-water pipes.

"Say what?" he yawned, sitting down.

"Ever since I was eleven I've had this big terrible secret that I've kept. Remember the night when you and D.C. and I were walking back from Mory's singing 'Puff the Magic Dragon' and you asked me why I looked so goddamn depressed and I said something very adolescent-sounding about not being able to tell you, but it would make your hair stand up on end if I did?"

Hank sort of nodded, not wanting to interrupt, and no longer yawning. I'm sure I was making no sense—but I was looking awfully intent.

"Well, I don't mean to burden you or anything, but you are about my best friend in the world, and I want to be honest. I have to tell you who I really am, and stop pretending." Stop sounding like
Where the Heart Is
or
As the World Turns,
for crying out loud and get to the point! But this was still only my second revelation, I hadn't had much practice, and I was afraid of losing Hank's friendship. Not that I thought he would consciously want to kick me out of his life; but revulsion toward homosexuals runs deep, and he might not be able to help himself.

I looked down at my hands. "I don't know why, but I have always felt exactly the same way you have about sex, except you've felt it for girls, and I've felt it for boys. For as long as I can remember," I said, sneaking a glance at Hank, "I have been gay.

I mean, I've never
done
anything. You're only the second person I've ever told. But I finally decided I would risk my friendships for a chance to open up...."

So I opened up, and we talked until five in the morning. Of course, I assured Hank that while I loved him, I had long since repressed any sexual designs on him, and he was safe. He blushed.

Hank seemed moved. Unlike Brook, he had never had even the slightest contact with homosexuals except for brushing off the occasional approach. He had never thought much about it. All he knew was that there were some people in the world who were born boys but wanted to be girls and that they were pathetic, lisping, swishing "queens." But like Brook, the only reaction my revelation apparently evoked was the desire to make things easier for me. The first thing he did was to tell me he was amazed; next he told me it made no difference to him, that I was still his best friend; and then he asked whether I had seen
Boys in the Band.
Or, for that matter, whether I oughtn't to see a psychiatrist.

I didn't think so. As I have said, on balance my past years had been wonderful. If anything, going to a shrink would have caused me even more embarrassment and anxiety and would have robbed me of my cosmic martyrdom. I wouldn't have been the BLBITW, I would have been a disturbed child. And fourteen-year-olds don't just walk off the street into a shrink's office. Their parents bring them. My God! If I wasn't allowed to ride my bicycle out on the street, do you think I would have been allowed to be a homosexual? My parents would have been shocked and, mainly, awfully unhappy. They would have felt guilty, that they were "to blame"—which is simply ridiculous, because they have to rank among the world's best parents.

As for seeing a shrink now that I was old enough to go by myself and now that I had broken my inner shell—well, I still didn't think it was a good idea. After eleven years of thinking about myself for hours on end, day in and day out, I had come to know me reasonably well. True, I had steered clear of the clinical literature. True, I had been leaning hard on seemingly ridiculous cosmic fantasies, martyrdom, and the like. But I knew what I was leaning on. I knew the self-image I wanted. I knew what I was doing, in a way.

One thing I knew for sure was that I was not changeable. Hypnosis, Freudian psychoanalysis, shock treatments, or just "the right girl" were not going to work in my case. Maybe for someone at "three" on the scale; not for me. From age eleven I had gotten hard when I saw pictures of boxers in
Sports Illustrated;
I had never gotten hard looking at
Playboy.
Quite the contrary: The best way I had found to get rid of my hard-on when it might prove embarrassing was to fantasize sex with a girl.

Nor did I have any desire to "be changed." I had grown rather attached to myself over the years, screwball though I was. A me that liked girls rather than boys wouldn't be me at all.

If I
had
wanted to change,
then
I would have had a real problem, seeing as how it would almost certainly have been a lost cause, at $25 an hour, three times a week, for life.

I decided that being gay wasn't a problem; it was just the way I was. And I decided that I hadn't been particularly unhappy before—no one is happy all the time, and a little unhappiness can be a meaningful human thing—and I decided that I was not going to be unhappy in the future. I would make do with what I had, which was quite a lot, when I thought about it.

"No, Hank, I don't want to see a shrink right now. I think I can work things out without one," I said, explaining about the unlikelihood of my ever "changing." "Do you think a psychiatrist could make you gay?" I asked:

"No."

"Well, I feel the same way, only in reverse. Sexually speaking, I'm probably just like you—only multiply everything in the equation by minus-one."