The Best Little Boy in the World (28 page)

Really, Charles, you are too much. I mean, prudishness is one thing, but to be secretive about a silly porno mag. I mean
everybody
has them or has seen them. I was thinking this as I looked through the thirty-two pages of color photographs of two nude males doing various things—I prefer pictures with pants, like in
Sports Illustrated
or the back of
Esquire,
but I look through the hard-core stuff when it is offered—and even Charlie shouldn't make such a big deal out of a magazine like that.

"One of my odd jobs," he said. "I'd rather you didn't mention it to people, but I thought you'd get a—"

"Wait a minute!
Is that
you?"

He grinned half-sheepishly, half-proudly as I looked back and forth between him and the better-looking of the two guys doing all those disgusting things in full unairbrushed color.

"How much did they pay you for that?" I had to ask.

"A hundred bucks."

I could describe lots of other people I met that first gay winter in Boston, but to introduce more would be stalling. It's just that it is difficult to write about breaking up with Chris that April; when I think about it, I still wince.

That month Chris met Hunter, a divinity student who was in the throes of breaking up with his lover of the last four years, a naval ensign stationed in Newport, Rhode Island. I first heard about Hunter from Golden Boy, who described him as the kind of guy Chris might easily get hung up on if he were not already hung up on me. Fine. By now Chris and I were getting together for dinner once a week and not staying overnight. No doubt, as he saw more of Hunter, he would see less of me, and gradually, painlessly, he would have a new lover, and I would still be his good friend.

Instead, Golden Boy decided to speed things up. He thought I was being unfair stringing Chris along the way I was and not simply cutting off our relationship so he would feel free to get deeply involved with Hunter.

I went down to the bar one evening and saw Chris looking darkly at his bottle of beer. Hi! He was cool to me. What's wrong? "Maybe there's been a lot wrong for a long time that I didn't know about." What do you mean? I had a feeling I knew what he meant, but it was inconceivable that Golden Boy could have told him. "If you don't know what I mean, maybe we should just forget it." I was beginning to feel knots inside. We'll still talk on the phone every day, won't we? Tears had come to my eyes. "Maybe we'd better not." I looked into his eyes and put my fists to my own eyes to keep anyone from seeing the tears as I ran out to my car.

I know this won't do much for the Joe College image I want you to have of me, but it's what happened. Usually I was in good control of myself. But I was not playing a role. I had suddenly felt such an overwhelming sadness for having hurt Chris and at the thought that I might lose his love. Not his body, his love.

I called Golden Boy and asked him why he had done it, why he had told Chris. He said he had hated seeing Chris torn between Hunter and me when I didn't really love him. He was sorry, but he thought it was for the best. What a crazy thing to do! It would have to ruin the friendship he had with Chris, mine with Chris, mine with Golden Boy. It hurt Chris so much!

The next few weeks were painful for all of us, as painful as any

I've ever experienced. All the cold analysis in the world, with which I could ordinarily manipulate my emotions, wouldn't make the unhappiness go away. I felt dreadful that I had hurt Chris so badly. I felt awfully lonely without talking with him every day. I had to make up for it somehow, I had to make him understand what it was about me that made me the way I was, I had to get him to forgive me, and we had to stay best friends.

I knew I was not ready, if I ever would be, for a full-time kind of relationship. Sometimes the romantic in me tried to fool me into thinking I could handle it—but I knew the moment I had managed to persuade Chris to lower his defenses again and need me, I would again want to be free. Understanding myself this way was some consolation, but it was not the cheeriest understanding.

I spent hours writing to Chris, talking with Chris, trying to make him see why I couldn't be his lover but had to be his best friend. I told him that it was my problem, not his, that I couldn't love him when he loved me more. He was hurt now but would find someone to love who would love him back. Would I? Whether or not it fit the textbook definition of why, how, and when to love someone, I loved Chris now. Would he forgive me? Could we count on each other for good?

Chris said he couldn't just turn off his love for me. He said he had built up defenses to ward off the hurt, and he agreed that we would never be full-time exclusive partners in life. But he said he would always love me.

More tears. Look, it was a difficult time that reached to the core of things. It would bore you and sap my spirit to try to deal with these weeks in any more detail. They are important and meaningful to just three people: Chris, me, and Golden Boy. Good things don't come easily: I think the intense pain the three of us felt soldered a bond that really will last a long, long time.

More than a year has passed since that April, and Chris and I have talked or seen each other almost every day. Hunter, while he was around, understood. Hunter was number one, of course, but there could be other people in Chris' life, like me and Golden Boy. Golden Boy, too, was forgiven. The crisis was over.

Whether I love Chris or whether I just want to have someone to ache over when Roberta Flack sings "The First Time" or when Isaac Hayes sings "By the Time I Get to Phoenix," that's not important. I love him. It is part of my "religion," if you want to look at it that way, and I take it on faith. My love for Chris is one of my most important crutches.

Sex has nothing to do with this love; it may be only the fear of loneliness. What I think this love is, is a fabric of shared experiences and feelings, woven only with great effort over time. That's why I think it will only grow stronger. There is no "right guy" or "right girl" out there waiting to be discovered. There is only the hard work of building and investing in a relationship—and I have invested in Chris.

More than a year has passed since Chris and Golden Boy and I had our minor catastrophe, and I am about to move down to Washington. One of the "two proposals that would knock their eyes out" at IBM, which I alluded to earlier, did. I got a fat raise and was asked to move to Washington to supervise fulfillment of the accepted proposal. First, though, I was to take the vacation time I had accumulated, which I've spent writing this.

This past year has been a good one, and a little less frantic than the one before. I have lost much of my compulsion to make up for lost time: I've caught up with myself. Having packed several years' growing up into just a couple, all I have to do now is grow up a year at a time, which should, relatively speaking, be a snap.

Like anyone, I think a lot about what my life will be like in the future. How can I best take advantage of being gay and minimize the disadvantages? Let me introduce you to half a dozen people I've met whose life-styles have helped me see some of the alternatives open to me for "later life." Like when I am bald in a few years and the only heads that turn when I walk into a gay bar are the ones that turn away.

I met Bob Knight the first summer I came out. Peter-who-does-the-thing-with-the-ice and I were walking along the river toward one of the Boston Pops outdoor concerts, when we ran into Rob-the-mute-math-whiz and this very handsome boy, Bob Knight. He had his shirt off, draped over his back with just the sleeves hanging down the front.

I tried to be cool about it. I sensed that looking at Bob while talking with Rob or Peter was no way to score points with anyone, but I couldn't help myself. I came on too strong. I don't remember all the things I said to Bob, but I remember asking for his phone number and calling him several times, only to hear that he was busy. Some weeks later I asked Peter what I had done wrong. He told me that if the Germans had employed my subtle approach in World War I, they could have pushed through the Maginot Line in a week and a half.

A year later, which is to say a year ago, I met Bob at a party. He was dressed differently, verging on "piss elegant," and he sounded more affected than he had the summer before. Embarrassed by my excess of the previous summer, I ignored him conscientiously all night—and the tables turned. I was as straight-acting and -looking (that is, grubby) as I had always been, but I could swear he had lost some of his "masculinity." Why was he letting it slip away? Surely he noticed the difference in himself, no?

Three months ago someone walked into Sporters who was beautiful in a way too "graceful" to interest me—until I realized that it was
Bob
wrapped up in that silk ascot, with something very like a handbag slung over his shoulder. It was the same body, softened somewhat and carried differently. It was the same face, only the expression was somehow less natural, facial muscles "just so." And the voice—"My
dear,
was Miss Knight affected!"

Why do so many people follow this progression? Is is really that we all wish we were women and that we simply follow the logical path as fast as we can lower our inhibitions? Does the logical path lead to gowns, lipstick, and Scandinavian surgery?

For some it seems to. Yet I think much of the apparent femininity in the gay world is attributable to subcultural style rather than to an inner desire to be feminine. For example:

When I first came out, I noticed, disapprovingly, that most gays call each other by their formal first names. In a straight football huddle you would hear, "All right, Joe, you go long; McMicking, you go wide; Albie, you..."—not "Joseph, you go long, Martin, you...." So when I made friends with a guy introduced as Raymond, I called him Ray. Everyone else called him Raymond, and at least at first, I would wince imperceptibly when they did, and maybe feel a bit superior. But gradually, over many months of hearing him called nothing but Raymond, it began to sound more and more like his name. Ray sounded wrong. Somewhere along the line I started calling him Raymond. Was that a loss of masculinity? Was it caused by an inner desire to be a woman? Or isn't it natural to conform to the styles around you unless you make a conscious effort not to? In fact, because I do worry about silly things like this, I have reverted to calling him Ray. But if I worked in a largely gay environment, rather than at IBM, and if I weren't so hung up on my Brooks Brothers self-image, mightn't I call people by their formal first names? Mightn't I laugh when friends camped and in turn camp to make them laugh? Would I be doing it because deep down I wish I were a woman? Would my doing it make me somehow inferior?

I doubt that I will go the way of Bob Knight as I get older. Not because I think there is anything "wrong" with carrying a pocketbook—or a chain, for that matter. Just wrong for me, for the image I want of myself.

My lawyer is forty-three. He grew up in New Jersey, the only child of a powerful mother. He went to the University of Wisconsin, to UVa Law School, to Korea, and to the law firm that represents IBM. I say "my lawyer," though I have never had reason to engage him. I just worked with him occasionally in the course of my first years at IBM in New York. We became friendly enough that if anyone had ever decided to sue me for playing my stereo too loud and demanded the name of "my lawyer," I would have felt comfortable giving him the name of this man, Something Something, Esq., hereinafter referred to as Esquire.

Esquire carries a Samsonite attaché case, or did until recently; lives on the twenty-third floor of a swank East Side apartment building (the kind without elevator men, but with little TV cameras in the elevators to keep you from raping fellow tenants); wears a wedding band, though he is separated from his wife; and is remarkably dapper and trim for someone his age. You might know that he and his wife never had any kids, but how would you know that they never slept together? That they had been planning their "separation" even before they took their holy vows? You might know that Esquire took a month off every summer and was impossible to reach by phone. But even if you were his secretary, you would not know that he has spent the last fifteen Augusts in a Fire Island house he owns jointly with three friends, in a section of the island called the Pines. Esquire was careful to do nothing that would jeopardize his career.

Anyhow, about a year and a half ago I was back down in New York on business, and I called Esquire to see if he wanted to have dinner. With his wife gone he had a lot of evenings free and had told me to call him for lunch or dinner any time I was in the city. I should come up to his place, and we would go from there, he said.

His $500-a-month (I'm guessing) one-bedroom apartment sent gay bleeps into my radar, bleeps that would probably not show up on a straight screen, like the tube of K-Y in the medicine chest or the Barbra Streisand albums among his record collection. I wondered: Could Esquire be gay? I remembered the time we had played handball on his membership at the New York Athletic Club (no blacks and only twelve Jews allowed, but some faggots and lots of closet cases) and what remarkably good shape he was in. I wondered why he had separated from his wife and why they had had no children.