The Best Little Boy in the World (30 page)

If you would rather not stay at the Y when you come to New York, you could stay at the baths. The Continental is world-famous, though by no means the only gay baths in New York. Esquire goes to the Continental once a week, on average, and told me I should really come with him the next time I was in New York. I didn't like the image I had of older men with wrinkly paunches hanging over their towels, looking to see what was under my towel. I didn't like that at all. On the other hand, Golden Boy, too, was always selling me on the Continental—he loved to go to New York for a weekend and debauch a bit—and his description was appealing. Somehow I had pieced together a picture of a Holiday Inn kind of place, immaculate, where you could either rent a room (would the TV be color, I wondered?) or a locker and then swim, work out, sit in the sauna, dance, eat—a gay country club where you could smile at a number you liked and be in his room a minute later, doing it. I wasn't sure I could get into such impersonal sex, but it would still be fun to work out and swim and take a look, and you never know what kinds of Golden Boys might be walking around locker-room style at the baths. Wasn't this my high school locker-room fantasies come true? I could pretend the older men were the coaches, or alumni there for homecoming, and ignore them.

Eventually Esquire and I went. I was taken aback when I saw where the Continental was: less than a block from a building my family owns. My father inherited part interest in a small building in New York, the family's one claim to aristocracy, even if the building is falling apart and the neighborhood isn't what it used to be. The baths are less than a block away. I will give you five to one that my father hasn't ever heard of the baths and that he wouldn't believe what goes on fifty yards from his piece of New York.

We walked into a small lobby—very small and un-Holiday-Inn-like. On the other side of a large glass window were two attendants—again, one look at the attendants and you know you are in the right place—and an entire wall of safe-deposit boxes. "Occupancy by More Than 900 Persons Is Dangerous and Unlawful."
Zrzrzipp.
Esquire and I both asked for rooms. He said I would feel more comfortable having a room to go back to in case I wanted to catch my breath by myself for a few minutes or, of course, if I found someone I wanted to make it with. The room was $ 10, which I was pleased to see you could charge on your Diners' Club card—perhaps this place was like the Holiday Inn, after all. There were student rates, I noticed, too, hoping some students might have checked in that night.

We deposited our valuables in the safe-deposit boxes and were given keys to our rooms and towels. The keys are on wrist bands, so you can't lose them. The Continental baths are divided into three floors, and our "rooms" were on the third. Each room is barely large enough for a single bed and supplied with two clean sheets. There is a stool, a small mirror, a coat hook, and a yellow bulb with a string chain to switch it on and off. The ceiling is perhaps six and a half feet high, made of chicken wire. The real ceiling of the building is considerably higher. I presume the chicken wire is to keep things like underwear from being thrown around and to discourage people from climbing from one room to the next. The walls are thin plywood. There are speakers on this floor for the PA system—mainly calls to attendants to clean vacated rooms, or pages ("Will the BLBITW please come to the front desk?")—and no music. It's eerie. Dark except for some yellow and purple lights. Quiet except for the moans and slurps and sighs of sex. (GB tells me that is supposed to be erotic.) People talk quietly when they talk at all. Mainly, they stalk around the halls, which extend in all directions, mazelike, for what must be miles if you walked them all. Well, half a mile anyway, or close to it. Some of the room doors are open. If the yellow bulb is on, the occupant thinks your seeing him will encourage you to visit. If off, he thinks you will be more interested if it is left a little vague what you're getting into. If he is lying on his back, that means he wants one thing; on his stomach, another. It is proper etiquette for you, if you think you may have some commonality of interests, to walk in, take a closer look, and either stay or leave. All, perhaps, without saying a word. (Silence sometimes flatters these gentlemen, anyway.) I was too nearsighted to make any definite evaluations from outside the rooms in that fuzzy light and too embarrassed to venture inside for a reliable inspection. I knew most of these people had to be ugly when I saw them up close—what kind of guy was going to lie there in the first place? Certainly not me, for crying out loud—and I couldn't see having sex that way. I'm not good at sex, remember. I need someone who understands that, preferably someone who has an inhibition or two himself. How could I tell one of these pros the things I was not wild about doing, within earshot of, perhaps, 200 people. I could whisper, of course, or even just use hand signals—but how could I trust one of these strangers not to shout out, WHAT?
You mean you don't like to suck cock! My dear, are you gay or aren't you?
When I ran out of the room in embarrassment, I would have to wedge my way through the 200 curious queens who had gathered by the door.

None of this would happen, of course. It was just that, obviously, I was still not fully at ease with myself, to say the least. I still felt an unhealthy measure of superiority over these other people.

At any rate, most people walk around the baths in their towels, rather than lie in waiting. Those who only rent mini-lockers, gym lockers, or walk-in lockers (something for everybody), have no choice. They walk around the second or third floors, looking in open doors, or looking at others looking in open doors, or visiting The Dormitory, which sports a number of mattresses and a ten-watt light bulb, and is open to all. Thank you anyway.

I spent most of my time on the first floor, swimming in a small overheated pool with enough chlorine in it to kill any disease you can think of, or else watching Little Joe Cartwright on
Bonanza
in the color TV room, or else doing sit-ups and bench presses. I used the sun room, passed up a couple of invitations to dance, passed up the massage room, and couldn't buy anything at the snack bar because I had forgotten to take a dollar out of my wallet before putting it in the valuables box at the front desk.

Esquire led me around at first, explaining the "rules," but then disappeared with someone, and then with someone else, and then told me he was going home, he had an early client meeting in the morning. How many numbers had I had? Well, none. I was feeling sorry for myself. I couldn't get into it. Why was I so squeamish? What had there been about my toilet training that made that bad odor around the steam room so revolting?

As we were leaving, they announced a free buffet that would start shortly by the pool; and next Saturday they would be featuring Bette Midler, who performs on
The Tonight Show
every so often and mentions her engagements at the Continental; and the free VD clinic would start in five minutes in Room 100. I might have stayed for a free athletes' foot clinic, but could have contracted nothing worse that evening. We left.

In fact, shortly after our trip to the baths, Esquire left to go around the world. I have been back to the Continental three or four times. I have gotten used to it, though I am still not wild about it. There is much I simply block out. But there are other things which I think I should learn to get used to, which is one of the reasons I have gone back. You may applaud my distaste at having someone else's thing in my mouth, but your applause is sadly misplaced. I am even more repulsed by the thought of having a girl's thing in my mouth.
That
I simply could not under any circumstances whatsoever conceive of doing. Nor could I conceive of having my thing in her thing. Do you applaud
that
revulsion? (A young construction-worker hitchhiker I picked up a few weeks ago kept telling me, "Try it, you'll like it!," certain that if I only once experienced the joys of heterosexual copulation, my homosexuality would be "cured.") A guy sucking another guy should not be the least bit more revolting to you than a girl sucking a guy. Both should, in fact, be beautiful to you, and perhaps are. The way my head developed, both are ugly, dirty, bah-bah bad.

I went down to Norfolk to visit Freddie, my original crush, for a weekend. He lives at home in the summer and decided to have a talk with his parents when he saw that they had special-ordered
The Lord Won't Mind
from the local bookstore. In his case, the talk went well. Though his mother is convinced he is just going through a stage, she is happy so long as he is happy—and he is happy.

(Freddie's older brother is not so happy. He had married a girl, divorced her, married her again, had a child, and divorced her again. He was now unhappily married to a second girl. Was this a straight version of me and Chris? Did he honestly love these girls until he had them, had to live with them, and then, almost despite himself, turn off? Was there some connection between whatever there had been about that family's life that had made Freddie gay and whatever had made his older brother unhappily married? If so, should society feel the same repulsion toward unhappily married straights as they do toward homosexuals?)

With Freddie I met two other people who also have a bearing on what I might look forward to in the future. They were Michael and Michael, who had not made the vain attempt to obtain a legal marriage certificate and a common last name (perhaps to avoid confusion), but who had been "married" for twenty-two years. No kids. (Surely it is better for a child to grow up in an orphanage than with two people like Michael and Michael. Right?) Michael and Michael lived together in a beautiful Colonial home and were partners in a real estate firm. They were well liked in the community, whatever jokes may have been made behind their backs, and led pleasant, peaceful lives. They attended concerts together, church together, parties together. They never went to the bar in Norfolk, but they entertained and visited their many gay friends. They were as faithful to each other as my parents are, even though it may have required more willpower at first.

In my limited experience, this kind of happy relationship is even rarer among gay people than among straight people. However, my sample is probably biased, because I make no effort to meet older gay people and I tend to go to bars and parties older gay lovers wouldn't be likely to go to. Perhaps more gay people "marry" and settle down for happy lives than I imagine. Certainly, Michael and Michael are not the only example I can think of. And as society becomes more tolerant, such relationships may become more commonplace.

I wonder whether Esquire could ever settle down this way, or whether I will. I am too aggressive and egotistical to live with someone who won't defer to my wishes and acknowledge, tacitly, my wicker-weave throne. I am competitive. But at the same time, I am too impatient to enjoy the company of someone who is not as aggressive as I am—and I am not stimulated by submissiveness. What is required is a fine balance, an equality, the kind of thing I think the feminists are after. Perhaps I will learn to share and live with another person, the experience with Chris notwithstanding. After all, I was emotionally about fifteen years old when I was going with Chris. Perhaps I simply am not ready to settle down, no different from many of my unmarried straight friends. After all, there is less social pressure for me to settle down with a gay guy than there is for my straight friends to marry (the understatement of the age?). And there is not the incentive to have kids at a reasonably early age so you don't die on them when they need you. Perhaps it is natural for gays to settle down later in life than straights.

Sam Gordon is forty and hasn't settled down yet. He is like Esquire in his brilliance, his success, and his independence; but he is only average-looking, and he sees his career as an end in itself rather than as a means to something else.

I met Sam at the home of Charlie, the bashful model, and his older lover in New York. I was in town on business; Sam was up for the evening from Washington. At the time, he was a Deputy Secretary of I can't tell you what. He authored some of Nixon's proposed legislation and administered a number of special projects, some of which he has been able to describe to me in only the most general of terms because they were classified.

Some people, I know, like to sound more important than they are, but Sam's position was a matter of public record (I checked), and once he had me to lunch at the White House. (I was very well behaved.) It occurs to me that you may not believe
me,
but I give you my solemn word that nowhere in this book, and not here with Sam Gordon, have I invented nonexistent characters or events or intentionally disguised people in such a way as to make them "better" than they are. (If I made Hilda Goldbaum sound
worse
than she is, it is only so you can see her through my frightened young eyes.) Naturally, "Sam Gordon" is not his real name. Will the FBI do an extensive investigation based on my book and crack the disguise, as they no doubt could, and ruin this man's career? Am I being irresponsible in describing this man and his sex life? I think not: The FBI already knows.

Indeed, though Sam was not as paranoid as Esquire and did not take a wife for appearance's sake, he did make judicious efforts to keep his private life private. When friends called him at work, he would quickly steer them from any sensitive topic. Even on his home phone he would resist the temptation to be himself. He was careful what he wrote.

Despite his precautions, the FBI presented him one day with a taped conversation from his home phone with a prominent Wall Street financier friend who happens to be a screaming queen after hours, which was all too evident from the tape. Sam was asked to explain the tape. He said he had this gay friend whom he had known a long time and talked with on the phone regularly. Fortunately, nothing on the tape had explicitly proved Sam was gay also. The FBI said, okay, you may certainly have gay friends, and that was the end of it.