The Best Little Boy in the World (17 page)

While there is little that can be done to make short people taller or ugly people beautiful, there is much that can be done to change society's view of homosexuality. Understanding and acceptance would relieve much of the pressure that makes so many homosexuals miserable—pressure that causes the stereotypical behavior that causes the intolerance to begin with.

I think the reasons society is intolerant of homosexuality are not hard to imagine. Homosexuality, I think, threatens two things: propagation of the species and "masculinity," both of which were until recently vital to us animals and neither of which is vital anymore. Until recently, man always found it in his interest to multiply. The more sons a man had, the more likely they would have the strength to support him when he could no longer do so. The more sons in a tribe (and the more daughters, the more grandsons), the better chance the tribe had to defend itself or to conquer other tribes. Just a few years ago China was rewarding people for producing babies, a national goal. The process of evolution, by definition, favors heterosexuality and would, if anything, tend to discourage homosexuality. The simple fact that we now have too many people on the earth—that, in fact, the population explosion is suddenly at the root of most of the world's problems—does not abruptly change the attitudes and instincts we have developed over tens of thousands of years.

Thus my first proposition is that homosexuality threatens propagation, which until recently made it "bad" and nowadays makes it "good," though most people still think it's "bad." My second proposition is that homosexuality threatens "masculinity," whatever that is.

Evolution favored those individuals who stayed with the tribe. Evolution favored the tribes whose members cooperated. In order to cooperate, you had to have some guidelines, a little law and order, and the order was provided by dominance. The pecking order. Until recently, the animal that was dominant was the strongest, toughest, most threatening animal around. The more threatening you were, the more likely you were to get the prime cuts of beef, the more females you could have. What greater incentive to be tough than the thought of a good lay, right? Now it wasn't just how strong and tall and quick you were in a fight; it was how
threatening
you were, which is to say, how tough you
pretended to be.
(If it actually had had to come to a physical test each time, the tribe would have killed itself off in no time.) One ideal way to pretend to be tough was to dump on Jon Martin. Another was to deny your wife the right to a career or an equal say in the relationship. Another was to bully or at least disparage small, frail, "sensitive," or, generally speaking, feminine types. (What kind of credible
threat
to mobsters and Commies would the FBI be if the late J. Edgar Hoover and his lifelong friend Clyde had allowed women or avowed homosexuals to work for them?) You wanted the best for your sons, so you made sure they felt the same way, and dumped on Jon Martin, too.

I don't mean to suggest that all homosexuals are physically weak or feminine. That isn't true. The homosexual corporation president is only shat upon if he
"admits"
he is a homosexual. (So he doesn't, so the stereotype is not changed.)

Wasn't homosexuality threatening to survival of our species and to masculinity until recently? And aren't the women's liberation and gay liberation movements saying—Look! Things have changed: A woman's primary function need no longer be to have the most possible babies. Look! Order should no longer be provided to the tribe by a baboonlike dominance hierarchy based on toughness. Such an order is based only on the threat of violence and pain.

That said, I am happy to get back to my stool at Sporters, staring holes through the kid I wanted to meet. That was, more or less, what Oscar had told me to do, only I realize now that he meant for me to be considerably more subtle. At the time, I had a "fleeting, seductive glance" like a carbon-arc searchlight. I just kept looking, feeling terribly pent-up and awkward, helpless, average-looking.

Not to Rob I didn't look average-looking. Rob was almost as surprised by my obvious interest as I was when he came over and said hi. I quickly established myself as a complete novice—my latest defense for everything: Just claim inexperience and all your sins are forgiven. Ordinarily, Rob might have spent half an hour chatting until he was sure I would not shoot him down when he asked me home. But he could tell that I wasn't into game playing, and he wasn't about to give any of the other people in the bar time to come over and horn in on his good thing. Just as I would have preferred Tommy (from camp) to Rob, because Tommy was straight, so most of the people in the bar would have preferred my awkwardness to Rob's experience, because I seemed almost straight. Straightness is attractive to most gay people.

The point is, after Rob said hi and I said I had been out for two hours, he asked me if I wanted to go home with him, and we pushed our way through the crowd to the door. On the way to his apartment in Back Bay he explained that he was, of all things, a computer operator on the graveyard shift of an all-night insurance-company computer installation. He was twenty, he had been out for about five years if you count his first parochial school experience, and he was planning to take a course in programming, which would pay a lot better and allow him to work daylight hours.

He shared his Back Bay apartment with a waiter who was clearly a moron and whose only distinction was a wig he had bought that day—a woman's wig—which made me exceedingly uncomfortable. How could Rob live with a moron like that? Well, it was someone to split the rent with, and Back Bay doesn't come cheap.

I was already having visions of Rob moving out of such an unhealthy situation and into my Cambridge apartment, which was more than adequate for two people. I had known Rob all of an hour when I first suggested the possibility. I lacked perspective. Rob was the only one out of hundreds in the bar that night that I had liked. Surely I would have to take him away from there fast before someone else came over and horned in. If Rob was foolish enough to be attracted to someone like me, well, I wasn't going to steer him away.

I would say Rob, twenty, was three to five years older than I was at twenty-three. He knew where my head was; his had been there years before. He knew it would be safe to say, "Sure, maybe I'll move in—let's see what happens," because he knew I would change my mind within days, if not within hours.

As it happened, it was hours. The sex we had was not all I'd hoped it would be. It was upsetting. He wanted to do all the things gay kids do. He wanted to kiss (germs!); he wanted to put our respective things in our respective mouths (I had always counted: sixty-seven, sixty-eight, seventy, seventy-one...); and he even tried to, well, rob me of my virginity. That last, which he should certainly have known better than to have tried on someone so patently naïve, was not only disgusting to think about, but was also, judging from what little progress he was able to make before I resisted, likely to be excruciating.

God damn it! Why can't I be like everyone else and like to do those things? What are people going to think of me? Is
this
what the Lone Ranger and Tonto did during the Quaker Oats commercials?

Rob didn't come right out and say that, he was pissed off at me for being so stiff in bed; but I knew he was thinking it, and I felt sorry for myself. He said that I would get used to all those things real fast and that I would soon love them. For now, he sighed, why don't we just beat each other off? He used his hand, and I just shut my eyes, determined to come. I pretended his hand was mine, that I was up on Brooklyn Bridge, fantasized my regular cowboy fantasy, and finally, eventually came—the first time ever with anyone else, though my fantasies were in Wyoming, not Back Bay, and I may as well have been alone.

Okay, enough. I think we need no more nitty-gritty passages in this book. I don't like writing them; I think this kind of thing should be private. I am not an exhibitionist, and I have only gone this far in order to give you an idea of what was going on in my head and how I was coping, or failing to cope. I am by no means going to describe every tiny step I took on the road to lowering my inhibitions and having normal, uninhibited sex. I will say that if the road to good sex extends from Lisbon to Leningrad, I am at the time of this writing lost somewhere in the Pyrenees, but hopeful.

There was a second reason I didn't ask Rob to move in with me in Cambridge. In addition to his making me feel sexually inadequate, his verbal aptitudes were not equal to his math aptitudes.

I mean that quite literally. Remember, I went to a highly competitive high school and was supercompetitive myself, in the days when there were no pass-fail courses and when the stigma of asking a fellow student "Whaddya get?" was second in pain only to not knowing—so we asked. This is a must for anyone who is trained to be the best little boy in the world, for here is an objective, accurate measure of a boy's worth. Surely you wouldn't question the relationship between grades and personal worth? And in case you
are
one of those strange rebellious people who tended to pooh-pooh the importance of grades and to call them arbitrary and meaningless—that is, in case you are one of those miserable people who refused to play the game by my rules and thereby refused to recognize the legitimacy of my superior status—well, in case you are, I have an answer. The Educational Testing Service in Princeton, New Jersey. Its tests are scientifically designed and scored by
computers!
ETS is the Great Scorekeeper in the Sky's agent on earth.

Therefore, as I was a lousy judge of people—people were never my long suit—I relied on their test scores to tell me just how smart or how dumb they were. I had this thing about what do you
do,
how smart are you—"are you acceptable?" I am not proud of the fact that I steered Rob's conversation around to the Scholastic Aptitude Tests, which are scored from 200 to 800 and anyone under 650 is at Yale because he plays good football, and I had never known anyone (but Brian, with whom I went to
Moby Dick)
under 500. Without having any idea the importance I placed on it, Rob told me he had scored 705 on his math SAT, and 321 on his verbals.

This remarkable disparity, which I had never before encountered in anywhere near the same degree, was clearly borne out at our after-sex pizza. You could sense that Rob was intelligent (well, you knew he got 705 on his math boards, right?)—but he didn't say anything. What would be the point of living with an attractive twenty-year-old kid with whom you could neither sleep nor talk? Not even sleep with in the literal sense: too many defenses. Too many years of curling up all alone, programmed not to mutter in my sleep, programmed not even to have wet dreams. Put me in a double bed with a shared sheet and the possibility of
touching
and the inevitability that my half of the sheet will move when the other half moves—and you have one grumpy, groggy boy in the morning who has been up all night trying to fall asleep. Given all that, need I even mention that in a
single
bed, entwined in someone's arms and legs, I am no more likely to fall asleep than General Custer was when he saw the first million Indians coming?

Rob did not move in, but he introduced me to Peter the next time we were in the bar. Peter had a big smile, was a little on the cherubic side, twenty years old, and a tour guide. He was so much more gentle and understanding in bed, plus the strange things he did with ice cubes, that I made it with him several times before I lost interest. I even went on his tour of City Hall. Peter introduced me to Eric, who was going around the bar inviting people he knew to a party in Cambridge. "Cambridge!
I
live in Cambridge!" I said. Eric professed astonishment and delight at the coincidence—of all places for someone in the Boston area to live, Cambridge!—which just goes to show that it is the actor and not the line that makes the show, and I was invited.

There were probably a few nights in between Peter and Eric that I don't remember. Well, I was on vacation, and after my initial hesitation, I was coming out with a vengeance. It is enough to say that I was ready to have sex with anybody who turned me on, and as I was a new face, they were ready in return.

Why so promiscuous? Well, of course, there is the making-up-for-lost-time aspect. If I had taken five years to learn five years' worth of life, I would have been twenty-eight and balding by the time I was, emotionally, twenty-three. And besides, why
not?
I was tired of cosmic games and sacred virginities and monastic existences. I had already had sex with a hustler, albeit a nice one, so I wasn't saving my first experience for a true love.

All the taboos against sex that straight kids used to have, and some still have, no doubt have a lot to do with not making babies by mistake. The Pill was supposed to have revolutionized morals; well, we faggots have something far more effective than the Pill.

Did the taboo against promiscuity have something to do with the danger of catching VD from strangers? Unclean, unsanitary, germ-carrying strangers? VD kills, you know. But now VD is more easily cured than the flu, so "Even Nice People get VD," as the ads say.