The Best Little Boy in the World (22 page)

Frankly—I hate to be so cynical—I can't believe that even total, nonfantasy sex with the same person night after night, if I could achieve it, would make me much happier. Is the view from the mountaintop ever as good as you thought it would be?

Yes, I had come to know more about myself that summer, and

I had decided quite definitely that there was nothing "wrong" with the way I was, nothing to feel guilty about. I was tired of feeling guilty, and I was just a little pissed off that society had made me feel guilty so long. There was no more reason to feel guilty for being gay than for being a heterosexual, no more "wrong" with a guy's wearing a dress and high heels, if he wanted to, than there was "right" with another guy's three-piece suit. Sure, on an evolutionary basis certain characteristics are required to propagate the species and are thus desirable, while other characteristics would, if universal, wipe us out. But can an
individual
be expected to be judged by these criteria?

I finally began to feel indignant rather than guilty, and I began to feel as though I wanted to change things if I could. I acknowledged that there were other more pressing world problems than the social stigma of homosexuality, but this happened to be the "cause" I was most interested in.

Yet what could I do without making my parents miserable? What if they saw me on TV marching for gay lib? Lots of gay kids either have no parents or hate them. I have them and love them. My mother would understand, I think, if I told her. My father would, too; only it would be much harder. Men find male homosexuality harder to accept than women. It is more threatening; they have been trained to find it repulsive. No doubt my father would feel he had not projected the proper image for me to identify with. Nonsense. Look at Goliath. As normal and heterosexual a giant as you would ever find. Yet how can my father be expected to be objective about a thing like this?

As for all the employers who would regretfully pass up my resume if I were openly gay, and black resumes, and women's resumes—fuck 'em. There are already too many career choices for the average college graduate to choose between. A little discrimination would just narrow things down conveniently. My present boss does know I am gay, does know about the book. I wanted it that way, because I am spoiled now: I have told all my straight friends I am gay, I have told Goliath and Goliath-in-Law, and the only people for whom I am willing to keep my guard up are my parents. Now, you may surely say that I have no more business telling my boss I am gay than you have telling yours you are straight. That's a private matter. No one should care who you sleep with.

Exactly! When the unlikely day comes that no one
does
care that I sleep with guys, there will indeed be nothing to tell anyone about.

I told all my straight friends I am gay partly to luxuriate in the honesty of it all, to relax now that I didn't have to think twice before I said anything, but partly because it seemed the most meaningful way I could change a few attitudes. If Hank becomes a Senator, there's no
telling
how soft he might be on queers!

Feeling self-righteous this way and feeling so happy about the whole summer, I decided to tell my parents everything.

I drove down to Brewster to spend a weekend with them and went over and over my speech as I drove. Naturally, I would have to check that no company had been invited over for that night or Sunday; I would have to get a couple of drinks down my father. Mainly, I would have to somehow impress upon him the importance of keeping his mouth shut until I had said all I wanted to say. My father is no less impatient than I am, and after my first sentence he would be interrupting, telling me to get to the point. Well, to be understood properly, it just couldn't all be said in a sentence. So
please,
trust me and listen:

"I have some good news that will take you a little getting used to, but I very much want you to share it with me. Why don't you sit—"

"You're getting married!" my father would say.

"Oh, dear, who
is
she? Why haven't you told us about her before!" my mother would say.

"Wait!
It's not what you think and you are absolutely going to have to just sit for ten minutes and hear me out, all of it, until I finish.
Please."

"All right, bun," my father would say to my mother, "let him get to the point."

"But
you
were the one who inter—"

"Mom, listen. For the longest time I had a problem. Do you remember how serious and sullen I always used to look when I came back from school? Well, I had a personal problem that bothered me for a long time. I would have told you all about it, only it was just not the kind of problem you could possibly have helped me on, and I knew it would make you upset. The good news is that this summer I have worked things out. This has been a very happy summer for me, and I think the future is going to be very happy, and now that—"

"For crying out loud, will you come to the point!"

"—and now that I have solved it, I feel the only way we can really be close is if I share it with you. The reason I am taking so long to get to it is that it is quite complicated and it's going to be very hard for you to understand."

My parents are silent now, running through the worst fears they have ever had for their son, possibly considering this one, but, I would guess, probably not. Maybe—but I just don't think they would have allowed themselves to think such things about their son. They look worried, sympathetic, and they wish I would come to the point.

"Ever since I was eleven"—I am looking at the floor now to spare them (me) the embarrassment of having to show (see) their initial shock and, perhaps, revulsion, when I say it—none of this would be so bad if they didn't love me so much—"I have known that I liked boys instead of girls. You can imagine that that was an upsetting kind of thing to know, as I'm sure you feel upset now hearing about it"—I am talking very quickly, not about to brook interruption—"but this summer I have come to terms with myself, and I am very happy."

"Oh, my God," says my father, who, for all his quickness of wit, is still back where I said the part about having always liked boys instead of girls.

"Thank God," says my mother, crying, assuming that what I mean about having come to terms with myself is that I have finally started making it with chicks and that I have gotten myself back on the right track.

"I forgot something in my preface. I forgot to say how I know that the one thing you want more than anything is for me to be happy—isn't it?"

"Of
course,"
says my mother, responding to a very old sales technique: Get them committed to your position. Nod your head and smile; the prospect will nod her head and smile.

"Well, I know we will have to spend hours talking about it so you can understand why I am really happy, but—"

"Oh, my God," whispers my mother as she realizes that I
still
like boys instead of girls. She is flashing to what she did wrong, to how unhappy I must be, to statistics she has heard about psychiatric cures, to what my father must be thinking.

My father is flashing to what his father did to him when he heard he had a gay teacher, to swishy types who had occasionally approached him in his youth, to fleeting images of unthinkable sexual perversions which are instantly pushed from his mind, but which keep fleeting, flitting back, to what he did wrong, to what my mother must be thinking.

The trick, I know, would be to keep talking and make them listen, not let them think. "I know we have to spend a lot of time talking about it, but if what you really want is for me to be happy, and I know it is, I know you will come to understand it and be happy for me."

And on we would no doubt go for some time, my recounting many of the stories now recounted here, my naming all the famous, important, wholesome citizens I could possibly think of, all the way from Leonardo da Vinci to the present, who I knew were gay, so they would have lots of new images to identify their son with, not just the effeminate types that even people as naive and wholesome as my parents recognize on the street and consider,
a priori,
"pathetic."

And, I think, because my parents are awfully bright and loving and because there really
is
nothing to be ashamed of, they could gradually come to accept it, more or less. Probably, my father would simply never want to talk about it. My mother might even become rather enthusiastic, with time, though always expecting me to see the light one day and pop off a few grandchildren.

Lots of my friends have told their parents and have either formed a tacit agreement that it is okay but not to be talked about and we love you no matter what you do, or else have a real, genuine, talking acceptance of the whole thing. More power to them.

Unfortunately, far more of my friends would never dream of telling straight friends, let alone their parents. Many of those who have tell horror stories. Jon Martin (of course I met him in a bar after I came out; all was forgiven) told me about one of our Yale classmates whose parents were told by a third party that their son was gay (a hell of a thing for a third party to do, of course), and the kid's parents never talked to him again. Disowned.

I knew that my parents would react well if I told them and that I could probably even keep them from sending me to an analyst three times a week to prove to me that, really, deep down I
was
unhappy—though that would be their first impulse: "If only you had told us! But no matter what it costs, we will cure you!"

And there is always the chance that I underestimate my parents' savvy, which would be fine with me. I certainly have not tried much lately to put up a front, and I keep changing the subject, raised less frequently now, of who I'm dating. Views are changing fast, and they live in
New York,
for crying out loud. So maybe they have a very good idea what's going on and are willing to accept it—though they have not cared to acknowledge it or have their suspicions confirmed. Maybe.

Whichever scenario it would have been, I chickened out when

I reached Brewster. I decided not to find out that summer. I decided that though telling them might make visiting and being with them a lot easier for me, it would not be fair to them. It was almost certain to make them unhappy, and I doubted whether the new closeness and honesty in our relationship would be sufficient compensation for the hurt. Nor did I relish the idea that they might, conceivably, no longer look upon me as perfect. Well, how could they? Was I ready to live without their thinking I was perfect? Every week I call and tell them my latest accomplishments, and they say to themselves, and I hear it: "That's our boy—the best little boy in the world." Why shatter all that for them or for me?

In fact, to date, two happy years later, I haven't shattered it, but again I am drawing close. I told myself then that I would only tell them when there was reason to, when I thought there was a chance they might otherwise hear it first from someone else. Now with this book is that time, and I don't know what I will do.

How could I write a book that might cause my parents so much pain? I am writing it because I want to, because like everyone, I want to try to do something meaningful with my life, because I
do
want to be the BLBITW, and because I think they will understand.

Very heavy.For me anyway. But there was still a week left in my Summer of '42, and, as these things sometimes happen, the most important event of the summer was not to occur until that last weekend, the weekend after Eric and I went down to Provincetown, when I went back alone.

It didn't seem so all-fired important at the time. I can't even remember whether Golden Boy was around—I think he was and that I got in another "hello" or two, little investments in the relationship he didn't know I was building with him.

All that happened of significance that weekend is that as Piggy's was closing, having found no one to go home with—and home was an extravagant $20 motel room that I was loath to waste, not to speak of the blow to my ego of sleeping alone on a Saturday night in Provincetown—as I walked toward the door, I saw Chris, the Harvard Business School student Eric had introduced me to, one of Golden Boy's friends, looking a little drunk, a little dejected by the door. Not really my type, but better this than nothing.

"You're Chris, aren't you? Eric's friend?"

"Say, how's it goin'?"

"Not bad—how about you?"

"Oh, not too bad." (Harvard and Yale were in rare form, weren't they?)

"Look, I'm staying down the street—would you like to come back with me?"

"Sure."

It would be nice to romanticize that first night together or the next day on the beach. Roberta Flack tears me apart when she sings about "the first time ever I saw your face." When I hear that song, I go misty immediately, and a cosmic—no, I think a genuinely painful—expression washes across my face. When I hear that song, I immediately think of Chris, and tears well up in my eyes. The tears don't well up because I saw the sun rise in Chris' eyes that night. I didn't. They well up because I wish I
had
seen the sun rise in Chris' eyes, because I wish I were the kind of person to whom beautiful romantic things like that could happen, because I wish there were a way Chris and I, or maybe anyone and I, could really make it.