The Best Little Boy in the World (13 page)

The dam was indeed broken, and I started pouring myself out with increasing frequency and ease to virtually all of my good friends. All were straight, as I expected; all were glad I had told them; and, some amusing awkwardnesses notwithstanding, all reacted well. As I had hoped, it made us closer friends. For my part, I was much more relaxed and happy, not having to think twice every time I opened my mouth. How refreshing to walk down the street with a straight friend and, while he was nudging and leering about the approaching girl, nudge and leer back about the approaching girl's date! "I'll grab him; you can grab her."

I have to admit, too, that I relished the initial expression of surprise that would invariably form on my friends' faces when I (old them. "Bullshit. You're putting me on. You're no fag." It was confirmation that my masquerade had been convincing and that my masculinity remained, more or less, intact.

My straight friends seem pleased that I am honest with them. It shows that I really like them, as I really do—and who doesn't like to be liked? Telling them does make us closer, which is as nice for them as for me. And it's not your average ho-hum conversation.
I
'm talking about something new to most of my straight friends. In many cases, I'm sure, they listen thinking mainly of themselves—their own playing around in camp, if they did; where they fall on that scale of mine; where they would like to fall; whether a shrink could change
their
sexuality; what it would be like making it with a—yukh—guy; who else of their friends might be gay, if I was....

But was I really? I mean, sure, I've been talking a lot about it, but the only foreign tongue that has ever entered my mouth has been Hilda Goldbaum's. Isn't it time for a little action?

It was now February of that year of revelations, and I was beginning to run out of straight friends to astound. I had actually gotten to the point that I could speak the words with some fluency.

The economy had seen better days, but I was riding about as high in New York as a twenty-two-year-old junior executive could ride. My parents were awfully proud of me, which was what had always made me run in the first place. The only hints of concern they showed, in a very low-key not-to-be-pushy way, were: (a) that I was working so hard I was not having a "full life," which in a family like ours is the way intercourse is described; and (b) that I was maybe smoking a little too much grass, and mightn't it be bad for the genes I would pass down to their grandchildren? (Up to this point, Goliath and Goliath-in-law had not produced any grandchildren. It was beginning to look as though that might be my job.)

My parents' concerns were pretty well summed up one day about a year ago when I received in the mail a clipping from the New York
Times,
MARIJUANA IS LINKED TO DULLED SEX DRIVE
, read the headline, with the text that followed too ridiculous to quote. My inimitable mother had written across the top: "LET IT BE A LESSON TO US ALL."

Yes, I was smoking grass. And I must tell you the most remarkable thing. After I had told Brook "who I really was" and all that, I started to get stoned when I smoked. It was the same $15-an-ounce shit, according to our source, and I was rasping it down my tender throat—need I mention that the BLBITW had never smoked cigarettes?—in the same awkward way. But now I was getting stoned when I smoked it.

In any case, I was doing well in New York, and except for being a sex-starved druggie, I was still the perfect son. But every time I talked with Brook, he would ask how I was
doing—
that is, what
progress
had I made. And I was wondering much the same thing. The newfound openness with my close friends had set my caged psyche free, the handshakes were still great—but you know there is just no limit to human desire. Not to mine anyway.

I still could not bring myself to go up to a blatant queen on the street and hold a press conference, or ask it—I couldn't bring myself in those days to call such a person "him," which it did not deserve, or "her," which made me even more uncomfortable—to hold a press conference of its own, during which I would ask for a short primer in life, and then, specifically, for the names and numbers of four superattractive young cowboys who would no more associate with someone like it than I would.

At the same time, I was becoming semidesperate. The goal was so much closer, almost within reach, now that I had begun to come to terms with myself and with my straight friends. And having once allowed myself to think about being gay in deed as well as in fantasy, there was no turning back. And for crying out loud, God damn it, I had better get on my little horse, wouldn't you say? I was about to turn twenty-three, my hairline was, woe of woes, beginning to recede, and I had already wasted ten of the best years of my life!

I would read the bathroom bulletin boards. But I knew that even if I ever did chance to find a "Meet you here at 3
P.M
. on the 23d" sometime prior to 3
P.M
. on the twenty-third, which somehow never was the case—I could not possibly show up. Is it possible that those floor-to-ceiling extensions the library had added to its bathroom stall walls were to prevent what I thought l hey were to prevent? Is it conceivable that those peek holes that had been bored in bathroom stalls all over the world had been bored for
peeking?
Of all the things I wouldn't want to peek at!

The only practical course of action I could think of was for one of my straight friends to introduce me to one of his gay friends. But none of my straight friends
had
any other gay friends. (Rather, no others they knew of.)

So I just started "looking" even harder. For one thing, I went to see
Boys in the Band.
If I had seen it much earlier, if it had been shown in my high school or at Yale
—mandatory,
so no one would have to choose to see it voluntarily and thereby implicate himself—I think I would have had an easier time of things. And if I had known then which of the actors in this movie were in real life straight and which in real life gay, then I would certainly have been given heart!

I am not saying that if I had seen it earlier I would have been encouraged to come out in any direct way. To be the powerful, hysterical movie it is—hysterically funny and just plain hysterical—an unrealistic, forbidding amount of emotion and unhappiness must be crowded into a two-hour gay birthday party. But at least I would have learned a little about gay life, become familiar with some gay lingo. I would have seen a perfectly straight-looking, dignified pipe-smoking man who was gay, and that would have made an impression on me.

At any rate, I went to see
Boys in the Band
not so much to learn gay lingo as to meet someone standing on line or in the theater. I met no one. I think my problem was that I just couldn't force myself to look "inviting," however you do that. Well, I suppose a start at looking "inviting" would be to stop looking forbidding. What I looked like, I think, was a straight kid who didn't want any funny stuff from any of the queers who went to see this movie.

After
Boys in the Band,
I secretly went to see a movie I simply could not resist. It was one of the first of the gay porno movies to be shown at regular prices in more-or-less regular theaters, off Forty-second Street. I couldn't resist it because the ad in the New York
Times,
no less, was for Andy Warhol's—That makes it art! An excuse if I'm seen!—
Lonesome Cowboy.
Need I say more?

I had a team of wild horses dragging me to that movie, and another team of equal strength trying to drag me in the other direction. The reason the first team won was that I was pulling with them and tipped the balance.

Fortunately there was no line to be seen standing in; neither was there a line in which to meet someone to sit next to. Fortunately the ratty old theater was too dark for me to be identified; but it was just light enough for me to realize that the audience was almost entirely old men with overcoats in their laps.

Lonesome Cowboy
was quite the turn-on. The star had the most beautiful body you can imagine; he was dressed like a cowboy; he was gay and let other people do things which the BLBITW simply cannot and will not write down on paper. (I think the leading lady was a transvestite cowboy, but I still had lots to learn when I went to see the movie, so I may have missed a few of the fine points.)

If you are straight but curious to find out more about what gay life is really like, skip
Lonesome Cowboy,
and Warhol's
Flesh
and
Trash,
and the transvestite movie
Tricia's Wedding.
Please skip also a dreadful movie only Judith Crist could like called
Some of My Best Friends Are.
This last one portrays a joyous New Year's Eve at a gay bar where every possible gay tragedy occurs: Mother walks in to discover son, and both become hysterical; girl is discovered by boy to be boy, after all, and is beaten mercilessly into hysterical tears; young man deserts his older john on the eve of their trip to Europe, and older man, who is hopelessly, blindly in love with young man, will, we presume, become hysterical. Just a typical night at a gay bar in Anyplace, U.S.A. I would rather you saw
Sunday Bloody Sunday.

Anyway, I sneaked out of
Lonesome Cowboy
before the end so as not to be seen, and left as Lonesome as ever, only, if possible, hornier.

Then one night in March I was flying back to New York from a business trip, reading an article in
Esquire.
All I recall of the article was that it said something about Gore Vidal's references to the "Personals" in the classified ad section of the
East Village Other.

When we landed, I bought a copy of the now-defunct
East Village Other.
I felt guilty as I asked for it, as though the newsy could read my motive, and I felt stupid for feeling guilty. Sure enough, the personals were filled with groin tinglers, mostly for male "models" who would pose for nude photography, who were "butch," whatever that meant—I swear I didn't know at the time, though I got a sense of it from the word—who were "well hung," which I supposed to my embarrassment had something to do with that area down there, and who all had different names and measurements and hair colors in different ads, but who all had the same phone number. Hmmmm.

I called that number several times. Sometimes it just rang and rang. Usually it was busy. And sometimes a male voice answered. When that happened, I simply said—nothing. I was really going to ask some voice to come up to my apartment, right, past my doorman, maybe past the superintendent, who often hung around the lobby, maybe on the one night my parents would decide to drop in unexpectedly—and when this model got up to my apartment, I would take out my finger paints and my red crayon, right, and start to draw him in the nude. I was almost certain those models were never drawn or photographed, that they would come expecting to have sex. But there were an awful lot of people I didn't want to have sex with, so what if this happened to be one of them? Or what if he happened to be in the business of recording names and addresses and sending you little bills each month? Or of just coming over with a couple of friends and rolling you, for kicks? I would listen to the voice saying "Hello" and try to perform some kind of audio holography by picturing the whole person from just a voice fragment. It didn't work.

I was beginning to get a little impatient with my own hemming and hawing and whining, and I finally decided to go down to the address listed in one of the personals—just show up and see what happened. I brought my wallet with plenty of cash and no ID.

It was a bright April day. I walked up the stairs of a warehouse-type building in the West Teens somewhere, into a room whose door was partially open. There was no sign on the door, but it was all so dingy and dark, with my pupils just beginning to adjust from the bright outdoors—I knew this was the place.

As I walked in, something in the stale air reminded me of a traveling fair that had passed through Lewiston, Maine, when I was a junior counselor at camp. Another counselor and I had gone to check it out, bet on the wheel and throw baseballs through tires, but when we got there, a barker was calling to us—it was a very small fair—"Come on, boys, show's about to start, last call to see Darlene do her world-famous tease, last call...." I'm sure his patter was much raunchier than that; I had all but entirely repressed the whole experience from my memory, it was so awful. My companion, of course, was dying to see Darlene do her thing, and only a homo would have held back. The air inside the tent was nauseating. There were only a few other people inside gathered around a small elevated wooden stage. For twenty minutes more nothing happened as the barker kept exhorting others to hurry, hurry, hurry, the show was about to begin, and for twenty minutes I had to pretend that I couldn't wait for it to begin, when really I couldn't wait for it to be over.