Read The Best Little Boy in the World Online
Authors: John Reid; Andrew Tobias
Tags: #Reid, #Social Science, #Gay Men, #Parenting, #Gay Men - United States - Biography, #Coming Out (Sexual Orientation), #General, #United States, #Gay Studies, #Biography, #Biography & Autobiography, #John, #Family & Relationships
I grant you that was crude and unlike me, but I do like surprises, and you rarely get a chance for impact like this. Here was Nixon announcing the legalization of dope. Tiny Tim announcing his enlistment in the Marines. The four others at the table could just hear what I said and were trying to discern what there was about Jack, now in his early thirties, that could evoke such spontaneous passion in a good-looking twenty-three-year-old. (I was beaming with pleasure, so I looked good.) Jack spun around and sort of fell apart.
We were delighted to see each other. I brought him up to date on me and IBM, but mainly on my coming out. He told me about his job with Richardson-Merrell, but mainly about what had been going on behind the tent flaps when we were at camp. Yes, Tommy, now married with a kid, had been sleeping with his counselor, still unmarried and coaching college football. Yes, Marty the fish would do anything for anybody and had had more sex by the time he was a junior lifesaver than most people have in a lifetime. Yes, Dan the dishwasher used to terrorize the waiters and beat off looking at the pictures he took at swim meets. Yes, the older counselors who came back year after year, most of them schoolteachers in the winter, were more than close friends.
What about that counselor you used to go out with all the time from the sister camp? Jack said he still sees her and that she had just published her first book of lesbian poetry. They liked each other in a nonsexual way, and their relationship threw young campers and suspicious parents off track. They would have gotten married, only their careers took them to different cities.
A few weeks after Jack and I met that evening, I got a sort of congratulatory phone call from Dan the dishwasher.
I was in Sporters one night and saw a former acquaintance from Yale walk in with a girl. I thought they might have walked in by mistake, or to use the phone, or that they both might have been gay. When they didn't go running back out, but ordered drinks, I walked over to Bill and said hi. He was wearing jeans and a blue Chemise LaCoste shirt, just like the one I had on. He looked a little embarrassed and explained that he and his girl had been out drinking and thought they would come in here to see what a queer bar was like. This is what it's like, I told him, describing some of the other kinds of bars and ordering a drink myself. He was with one of the Boston banks, he said; I was at IBM. I could see he couldn't quite believe he was having a conversation like this with me in a gay bar—why wasn't I begging him not to tell anyone he saw me and all that?—and he was embarrassed that it might look as though he thought of all this as a freak show he had come to watch. "We didn't come in to sneer, just out of curiosity," he reassured me several times, sounding very much the budding Boston Brahmin, even if slurring some of his words. His date was silent. Bill didn't want to offend me, so he kept saying how surprised he was that this was what the bar was like, how impressed he was. What did he mean, I wanted to know. "Well, everyone is so well
behaved
," he said. He kept repeating that.
"We must have lunch sometime," Bill said in parting, but he never called me, and I spared him. What would his fellow bankers think if he were having lunch with me right in the middle of Locke-Ober's and all of a sudden I forgot myself and did something perverted?
Another time in Sporters—I've spent a lot of time in Sporters— I met Hank's Harvard Law School roommate. Later Hank moved off-campus with a really super girl, but his first year he shared a room with Parker Martinson III. Parker, Hank, and I had been friends back at Yale.
Parker is an emotional, excitable type. You'd say, "Parker! Look at that giant carrot behind your left ear!" and invariably he would turn to look. When he turned back to find his butterscotch pudding gone, he would make a big thing about it: "Jeez, why do you always
pick
on me?" If he came into the room wearing an expensive new sport coat and said, "Don't I look great?" and you said, obviously fooling, that it looked just like the one they buried Charlemagne in, he would take offense and start whining. Parker wanted attention; he wanted to have his feelings hurt. And now here he was in Sporters.
"Parker!" I said loudly, slapping him on the shoulder from behind, feeling sure I would evoke one of his more classic reactions. It's not often you meet someone you know from "the real world" in the bar.
"Oh, my God!" Parker sort of yelped, wide-eyed. He was pale. "John, you've got to
promise
me you will never tell anyone about this. Promise me."
"Okay, I promise. But
tell
me, Parker—this is great!—how long have you been doing this? Tell me everything." I was beaming again, sure that Parker would quickly overcome his initial fright and start to beam, too. Well, it's like being alone in Tokyo and running across an old friend. We could speak the same language. Super.
"First promise me."
"I promise! Tell me!"
Apparently, Parker had been going to gay bars, and other places, for
four years
now—"Parker! You're a pro! If only
I
had been out at Yale!"—and he had
never
met anyone from the real world before. He had dreaded this moment for four years. All his work dating girls and making up alibis, shattered.
"Promise me you will never tell Hank!"
"Tell Hank what?" I grinned.
"Come on, John, you know what!" he said in his why-were-we-always-picking-on-him tone of voice.
"What? That you're gay? He wouldn't care. I told him about me and—"
"You what!"
Parker moved forward a little, and his hands went out to the sides, the way you would move if you were opening a double door, only he forgot there was a drink in his right hand, and half of it sloshed out of the glass, narrowly missing a piano-tuner friend of mine.
"Relax, Parker! I promise I won't tell Hank about
you,
but when I told him about me, it just made us closer."
"Promise me you will never tell a soul you met me here!" Well, I had no intention of exposing or blackmailing Parker Martinson, but I was getting just a trifle miffed that he had so little faith in my discretion. I mean, I had already promised him three times now, and he was still asking me to promise him. I decided to show him how ridiculous he was beginning to sound, by being sarcastic:
"No, Parker, I am going over to that pay phone there—oh! look at that hunky number by the phone! Maybe I can kill two birds with one phone"—I was on my third beer, so excuse me—"and I'm going to call your mother. Is there more than one Martinson in the Baltimore phone directory? Oh, that doesn't matter, I forgot. If you're the third, then your father's name must be Parker, too."
Parker was aghast and at least pretended that he took me seriously. He kept imploring me not to call. I kept asking him to lend me a dime.
But this was too ridiculous. How could anyone as bright as Parker, who had been out for four years, for crying out loud, not pick up on my sarcasm and just shut up? How could he be so paranoid?
"Parker.
Shut up!
In the first place, I haven't the slightest reason to tell anyone I met you in here, and I've promised three times that I won't. In the second place, you should be delighted you met me. Stop being so paranoid and start being delighted." I sounded very authoritative. Parker calmed down.
Parker had been dealing with his homosexuality—rather, his bisexuality, as he was quick to remind me—differently from me. Not only had he never told any of his straight friends he was gay, but he also went by a phony name in the bar and never brought anyone home to his place or gave out his phone number. He almost never saw anyone twice. He would just sit at home, his horniness for a guy building up and hating himself for that, and finally he would give in and go out hunting. After he had had sex with a guy, generally under the raunchiest, most impersonal conditions, he would invariably resolve to go straight from that moment on. To paraphrase the stale cigarette-quitting joke: He had gone straight a hundred times in the last four years.
I thought Parker should have been delighted to see me because after four years he had finally found someone he could trust to talk to. I knew what it was like to go for years without having anyone to talk with about Topic No. 1, and I assumed he was bursting.
I was right. Parker and I have talked almost every day over the last year and a half since I met him in the bar. I guess I'm his closest friend. Our friendship is special for me, too, because Parker is the only close friend I have to whom I am not the least bit sexually attracted. My close straight friends and my close gay friends are handsome. Parker is not. At least in his case I can be sure that I like him for noncarnal reasons. It's not that I have anything against my sex drive. My customary rationalization for having only attractive friends is: There are more good people around than you'll ever have time to get to know, anyway, so you may as well choose the ones who are attractive as well. But a world in which looks are so important is not an equitable world. And I guess I do resent the power my sex drive has over me. Anyhow, I find myself a little more palatable for my friendship with Parker.
So Parker Martinson was gay. What do you know? I
told
you Hank was attractive. Not that Parker had any more idea of making it with Hank than I had, just that everybody, male or female, likes to be around someone as attractive as Hank. I had to smile when I reflected that not only had two of Hank's several roommates over the years been gay without his knowing it (he still doesn't know about Parker) but so was his boss at the part-time job he held down. Hank was surrounded by us and didn't know it.
I don't mention this to make you feel uncomfortable, as though there were this creepy, insidious plot to surround good-looking ail-American boys with unwholesome perverts who plan to corrupt the world when the time is right. This is not Rod Serling's humanlike aliens who must be detected and rooted out by J. Edgar and Clyde before they take over the earth. What interests me about this coincidence is simply what it says about a lot of gay people: They are just like everybody else; you wouldn't know they were gay unless they told you. (Some, I'm told, are even very well behaved.)
If you are a reader who resents my spelling out such an obvious and trite message, I can only plead the Sophistication Gap. On one side of the gap you have gay people and some straight people, mainly Spiro's effete snobs, I think, who know all about homosexuality and gay bars and drag queens and guys who ride humungous motorcycles. They know about the famous people who are gay, and they couldn't care less. Of course, they would rather their
own
sons didn't grow up gay, because that strikes some sensitive intimate chords, but they enjoy the company of their gay friends. On this side of the gap myself, I keep having to remind myself of the other side—of all the people George McGovern had in mind when he asked the Democratic Convention not to commit political suicide by endorsing "The Right to Be Different." On this other side of the gap are Jon Martin's friend's parents, who disowned their son the Yale graduate because he was gay. Hell, my Playboy Club project-worker friend went to Arizona State and to Stanford B-School and reads the New York
Times
every day, but when I mentioned to him recently that a guy we had just passed on the street was "in drag," he said: "What's 'drag'?" (It's a guy dressing up like a girl—but can there really be people who don't know that?)
One rainy Saturday afternoon I went to see the double bill at the Harvard Square Cinema. I like going to movies alone, curling up in a nearsighted row with no one around me and becoming totally absorbed in the picture. I found myself standing in line next to a boy in a Harvard crew sweatshirt and track shoes, whose name was probably something like Doug Decathlon. My knees went a trifle wobbly.
There was nobody with him, and I wanted to think of something to say to make conversation. Yet anything I said to this guy would be motivated by my attraction to him, so that while it might sound innocent enough to him,
I
would know it was a despicable "approach." He turned to me, smiled, and said, "Hi. Howyadoin'?"
I was fine, and I wondered whether he really rowed for the Harvard crew, as his sweat shirt suggested, because a friend of mine had been on the crew at Yale. (Such an astounding coincidence.) Pete (it was Pete, not Doug) did row for Harvard and had narrowly missed going to the Olympics.
The first sentence you hear someone say often tells you 90 percent of all you will ever know about that person. How many years of school did he sit through, where is he from, where on the scale from formal to flipped-out, where on the scale from self-confident to insecure, where on the scale from genuine to affected. Sometimes at Sporters you go up to someone of apparent cowboy potential and the first words out of his mouth say: "I'm from Queents, New Yawuk, and my life'ss ambition iss to go to Porto Rico and find some gorgeouss number to fuck me." In contrast, Pete sounded as ail-American as you please.
As he was buying his ticket, my palms began to sweat. I could think of absolutely no way to ask another guy to sit next to me in a movie without sounding queer. He waited for me to buy my ticket and asked me where I liked to sit. "Ya-ha-ha," I gurgled.
The first movie was
Women in Love,
which all my friends had told me to see and all the critics loved. I am too impatient and businesslike to enjoy a movie like that. That's no movie—that's art! Like trudging through an endless museum. The photography was beautiful, but nothing
happened.
I was bored with
Women in Love.
Even the famous nude wrestling scene left me cold. Who wants to see some hairy barrel-chested men wrestling? With their things hanging out, no less. I'll bet Pete doesn't have a hairy barrel chest. I'll bet he's not even twenty-one. What I wouldn't give to wrestle him!
While we were waiting for the next movie to start, a good one, I thought it would be safe to talk with him about homosexuality. Not
mine
, needless to say; the homosexuality in
Women in Love.
Pete seemed to know a good bit about the subject, but not enough to incriminate himself.