The Best Little Boy in the World (27 page)

The next movie was
The Great Escape,
starring Steve McQueen in lots of implausible action. I gobbled it up, middle-brow all the way, and then tried to get Pete back to our interrupted discussion as we were filing out. I said it was amazing how many people were gay—I had even heard a rumor that Steve McQueen was gay. (Well, I hadn't, but Pete couldn't know that, and it fit the conversation because we had just spent two hours watching him being masculine.) Pete, who I was beginning wishfully to think just might be about where I had been when I was twenty, said he hadn't heard that rumor and hoped it wasn't true—it would ruin his image of Steve McQueen, he said. That was the end of that.

As we were leaving the theater, the sun down by now and faint claps of distant thunder in my stomach, I decided to invite him back for dinner. Why not? He may have looked like a statue, but surely he got hungry like anybody else. Why should I feel guilty about asking him over, so long as I planned to do nothing improper? But before I could ask him,
he asked me.

What's going on? He is thinking all the things I'm thinking, I think, but he isn't really, is he? Or is he?

We had dinner at his off-campus apartment, ignoring his two roommates. A little white wine, talk about Harvard and Yale, talk about the stadiums he had to run, up and down those steps twenty times, to keep in shape; talk about WBCN and the Firesign Theatre, about the draft, about how he was coming with his thesis. "Well, look, thanks a lot," I said. "I hope you'll come over to my place for dinner sometime." (Or, as the young man in the American Museum of Natural History once put it, "Now let me show you what interests me.")

He called a couple of nights later to see whether I wanted to hear Pete McCloskey talk about the war, and I said sure, why didn't he come over first since we had a couple of hours before it started? When he came over, after a little preliminary talk, I told him I was gay. He perked up. "I'm glad you told me that," he said, because he was sometimes attracted to guys. Well, he was attracted to me. But whenever he had tried to talk about the general subject with any of his friends, they put him down and wouldn't talk about it.

Well, I would talk about it until I got cramps in my jaw if he wanted. Attracted to
me!
Hot dog. Of course, he had a steady girlfriend and would surely marry and have kids, but he had always thought it was a shame that guys couldn't express what they felt for other guys.

We missed the McCloskey talk and rambled on for hours about our respective hangups and inclinations and backgrounds and life-styles. I was a very good boy. I liked Pete too much, wanted him to like me too much, to ruin it with any horny ideas. If it was going to happen, it would happen, but I wanted our friendship to be more than just a means to get him into bed. Or was I such a gentleman because I sensed the only way to make it with him was to pretend I didn't care about that, only about our friendship? How much of "love," particularly early in a relationship, is based on sex? How much of friendship? Of friendship between two guys who are eight or nine on my scale? Of charisma? More than the romantic in us would care to admit, I think.

It happened.

Once it did, my burning, romantic desire to be Pete's close friend abated a good bit.

I'm surprised I went home with Ernie. He lived at Radcliffe, which was strange enough. Who would ever have thought
I
would be screwing around at Radcliffe? Well, who would ever have thought Harvard guys would be living there, and Radcliffe girls living in Harvard dorms? But stranger still, Ernie is black. Well chocolate. Growing up in New York made me a guilty liberal, anxious to see blacks get their fair share and it made me nervous. I see a black guy coming toward me late at night, I get nervous. I see four black guys coming toward me, I get very nervous. This despite the fact that throughout my entire sheltered existence my only "mugging," and a nonviolent one at that, occurred when I was five, with Goliath in the park—and the mugger was white and about ten years old.

Objectively, I see many handsome black guys. Subjectively, they register low on my preppie dial, my cowboy dial, my wish-I-could-be-like-him dial. I don't wish I were black. Nor am I into the black-master-white-slave trip some people are. Or even the white-master-black-slave trip. (I do have one friend, married with kids, whose sole homosexual experience was in college, where he had this craving to be debased at the feet of a big black classmate. He felt so
guilty
being a rich young WASP, or at least that had something to do with it.)

Anyway, Ernie is such a handsome guy I always think of him as a model for one of those four-color Jamaican rum ads in
Playboy
or
Esquire.
He's just under six feet tall, or just over if you don't press down the Afro when you measure, and he is the picture of health and proper proportion. His father is a doctor in California, where Ernie was the token black in his suburban high school class. The prep school tradition isn't as big on the West Coast as the Andover-Exeter tradition is back East, but the kind of school he went to was a close equivalent. I guess it might be likened to Scarsdale High. He was a shoo-in to Harvard, the kind of applicant who brings a moment of tranquility and joy to the consciences on the besieged admissions committee: "No question, boys: We'd want this man for the class of '77 if he were white, green or purple."

Whatever the percentage of whites who are gay, the percentage of blacks is probably higher. (You knew they were bad folks all along, didn't you.) I think there are two and a half reasons for this.

First, there is Daniel Patrick Moynihan's matriarchal society: A higher proportion of blacks grow up not knowing who their fathers are, or not seeing much of them, and they identify with their mothers.

Second, blacks are made to feel they are inferior, second-rate. Some may hate themselves for being black and develop masochistic tendencies as a result of their self-hate. And if you are into masochism, it's probably easier to work out with a man than a woman. They are dominated by "the man." What role does that leave them? Being black, like being gay or blind or even just being Jewish or short or uncoordinated, may cause emotional problems, insecurities, lack of self-confidence, which may in turn cause homosexuality.

Second and a half, and I say a half because I doubt it is as common a phenomenon as the first two, is the situation that I think made Ernie gay. Rather similar, really, to the situation that I think made me gay. There he was, black, in the library doing his homework when all his "brothers" were out shooting hoops. He was learning trigonometry while they were learning to kick ass in the street. Not that he knew any of his "brothers" personally—his parents didn't want him mixing with hooligan elements—but
everyone
knows that the brothers are tough street fighters and that they do naughty things. Well, Ernie became as frightened as I did when he saw four blacks walking toward him. His special fear was that he knew he wasn't really a man. He wasn't a black, and he wasn't a white. He was a phony.

One way to compensate, of course, was for Ernie to work out with weights and go out for sports; he didn't
look
weaker than his brothers, by any means. But inside, he felt less tough. He felt different. He wished he could be Leroy Stud.

Second and the other half, I guess: He wished, as many blacks must, that he could be like the beautiful people he saw on TV or in magazines or in movies or in politics—all white. Not necessarily because he hated being black or hated himself for being black. Like me, he knew he was pretty good-looking. He just wished he could be like Hank, Tommy, and Brian—be
that
good-looking, that TV-normal, that TV-wholesome-looking.

Needless to say, the fairly recent Black Is Beautiful theme in our society, in our ads and our movies; the Black Power theme,
Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers
and refusing to be dominated by the man—needless to say, this is all likely to make the sexual profile of tomorrow's black teen-agers different from the profile of yesterday's. But Ernie grew up yesterday, and he was in bed with me in his room at Radcliffe.

Being gay, like being black, tends to give you a liberal perspective on life. You take a dim view of oppression, whether it be your own or someone else's. Also, coming out can be a democratizing experience—especially for a Yalie. You are likely to meet, and perhaps come to appreciate, a broader spectrum of society than you would if you were straight. There is not as much stratification of gay society as of straight. There are so few gay gathering places in most cities that everyone, rich and poor, must go to the same ones. And, hell: In the eyes of society,
all
gay bars are lower-class, anyway.

Straight blacks and gay whites have much in common. Harlem and Roxbury are analogous to Greenwich Village and Beacon Hill. The black subculture has its jive, the gay subculture its camping and dishing. Some blacks overcompensate with Cadillacs; some gays overcompensate with motorcycles. Blacks are consciously trying to promote black pride, gays, gay pride. Most of society, perhaps despite itself, just doesn't feel comfortable with either group. They're okay if they stay in their place, but not running the Department of Defense, say, or dating my son. Even "liberals" feel uncomfortable just talking with blacks or gays: having to think carefully about everything they say, so as not to offend inadvertently, but not so carefully as to be obvious, which is offensive in itself. And there are those blacks and gays with chips on their shoulders who
want
to take offense and who can find reason to in almost anything.

Just as blacks in a predominantly white society are inordinately conscious of their color, gays in a predominantly straight society are inordinately conscious of their sexuality. (By the same token, I would guess that Catholics in Belfast spend more time thinking about their religion than Catholics in Rome.) Constant awareness of a socially undesirable trait can be debilitating, alienating, embittering. It can make you paranoid or just plain bitchy. In any case, it will have a profound effect. Not the skin color itself—that will determine only the degree to which you reflect light and can hide in dark corners. It is the "wrongness" of the color that will get you. Not the sexual orientation itself—that will determine only whom you want to sleep with. It is the wrongness of the orientation that will get you. In both cases, it is the prejudice, not the condition, that does the harm. It may be, as some would have it, that blacks are inherently inferior to whites or that homosexuals are all, by definition, sick. So what? Even if either condition truly is inherently undesirable, no manner of social pressure will turn blacks into whites or gays into straights. Social pressure will only exaggerate the handicap. It is still the prejudice, more than the condition, that does the harm.

There are some interesting differences between gays and blacks, too. People may not like blacks, but they can hardly argue that blackness is immoral, that blacks should be painted white. By contrast, many still feel that homosexuality is "bad," that homosexuals should be treated to make them heterosexuals. And, if you are black, everyone knows it. It's just a physical property, though it has its effect on the mind as the mind develops. But if you are gay, it can be (must be) hidden. It is all in your mind. Tangible manifestations may follow, as in manner of dress or speech—but conceivably there could be five or ten or twenty million men and women walking around this country whom everybody assumes are straight, but who are actually gay.

Given the social and career costs of being gay, most of those who are not obvious are not going to wave only flags. A white newsman or politician can join the fight for racial equality without any fear that people will suspect he is black. Can a straight male do the same for the gay cause?

I met Charlie on the second floor of the Doubleday Bookstore where they filmed those scenes in
The Owl and the Pussycat.
I was in New York on business. My friend Freddie (of the oral virus) had met Charlie some time back in the Boston Public Library and thought he was a terrific guy I should meet. So I called Charlie, who said something about any friend of Freddie's being a friend of his, and why didn't we meet up there by the New Titles rack?

Charlie is refreshingly conservative. Besides his natural, rugged appearance (no hair dryers and Guccis for him, even if he does live in New York), he never goes to bars, never blows dope, never talks about how he is dying to go to bed with so-and-so. He is not promiscuous. Instead, his energies go into a hundred enterprises, from painting the hallway of his building to cutting some ivy from City Hall for his friends (it grows back), to going for a bike ride, to baking banana bread. He runs on just a few hours' sleep, never complains about anything, even about New York. He loves New York. He is always busy and happy. I run on like this because I stand amused and awed by his marvelous good spirits. He is what I think they call "well adjusted."

Freddie was right, we did hit it off well. Charlie was so different from most of the people I met who would have taken me to the bars, or maybe a movie, and then back to their place to have sex. Charlie had me drive around the city and showed me where all the notable buildings were with little stories about their architecture and all—boring, but different—and then at one in the morning he said, "You know what we should do now? You may not want to, but I hope so." Well, I knew what he had in mind, and I wanted to. "We should drive to the tip of Manhattan and take the Staten Island Ferry for a nickel."
What?

That was typically Charlie. He is gay with straight, old-fashioned ideas. It was only later that I realized one reason for Charlie's self-control was that he had a lover, an executive at Bristol Meyers with whom he shared a townhouse. Still, sex seems less on Charlie's mind than on most, and that is appealing.

"Imagine my surprise," therefore, when one evening visiting Charlie, after dinner and a bottle of wine, he said he wanted to show me something he had only shown a few of his closest friends. I thought maybe he was going to drop his pants or something, which never does as much for me as it's supposed to—but then he reached behind a cabinet and pulled out a manila envelope. Inside was a magazine of gay pornography.