The Best Little Boy in the World (31 page)

Sam thought that might not be the end of it at all—that they might start tailing him to the bars he frequented or bugging his pillow—and he decided it would be best to avoid all that by resigning and accepting a standing offer he had with a major corporation, at $100,000 a year.

I asked Sam what difference it made that he was gay—why couldn't he just tell the FBI? Of course, I knew he couldn't, but what
was
there that so frightened J. Edgar Hoover and his lifelong friend Clyde about homosexuals in the administration? There were heterosexuals, weren't there? Sam said it was not the security risk aspect—Kissinger was as likely to spill defense secrets to a beautiful girl as someone gay was to spill them to a beautiful guy—it was the embarrassment to the administration if the traitor turned out to be gay. It would be embarrassing enough to reveal a traitor, you see, but the public could accept that. Every country has them. A
homosexual
traitor would cost a President a lot of votes, and it was the FBI's job to protect against that. Sam, like Esquire, had apparently either passed or skipped the "indignation" stage I am still going through. He just resigned and accepted a corporate job.

Sam told me that most people in Washington were, as you might expect, privately liberal about homosexuality. No one cares privately, but the public isn't ready for such things.

The media, presumably, are not down on homosexuality. Many media people are themselves gay. They are liberated, enlightened—yet though they could do so much to change the views of the country and educate the public, the media have done relatively little about this too-sensitive topic, though recently Archie Bunker and others have made some headway. (According to
Time
: "Nixon watched an episode in which Archie's attack on 'airy fairies' was blunted by the discovery that one of Archie's pals, an ex-football star, was homosexual. 'That was awful,' said Nixon. 'It made a fool out of a good man.'") What would happen to ratings of the
Beverly Hillbillies
if the network preceded it with a gay documentary called
The Silent Minority
or
Happy, Productive and Gay
? Would the local stations carry it? Could they stand the flood of mail they would certainly get, proclaiming disgust at having to watch such filthy, perverted, revolting material? The Pope, who is not at all bullish on homosexuality, might just excommunicate every Catholic at the network and would surely direct his celibate lieutenants and corporals to preach the virtues of heterosexuality throughout the land.

Considering the numbers of hours a day children spend in front of television in their formative years, I think it is hard to overestimate the long-term effects that the inclusion of black people in ads, newscasts, and TV shows will have on future generations of blacks (and whites). The
real
world has beautiful black people; black people are just as good as white people. Women, they say, are just as good as men. Well, I know you are not ready for this, but I have to lay it on you anyway: If you are going to show little children Batman and Robin, the Lone Ranger and Tonto, Superman and Jimmy Olson—six of the best little boys in the world if I ever saw them—then you ought to show what those fearless duos do after work. Is it conceivable that in the year 2050 ads will show black girls kissing white boys and being revolted by their un-Binaca-ed breath? If so, it is conceivable that in the year 2150 the same ad will occasionally be shown with two guys kissing. I mean, some of the guys who write the commercials, like as not, kiss each other. Some of the guys who film them do. Some of the guys who
act
in them do. Why shouldn't it be shown that way on TV every so often?

I got off onto a tangent about politics and social change when I only wanted to suggest that, like Sam Gordon's, my own career could be an end in itself, absorbing and satisfying.

The other reason for describing Sam Gordon is to show how one unbeautiful forty-year-old satisfies his sexual appetite. I won't be beautiful, either, when I'm forty. Sam keeps John, is John's john, and when he is horny, he has sex with John. John went from farm country into the Air "Force and from there to New York. Perhaps he was inspired by
Midnight Cowboy.
Sam met him in Uncle Edna's, or in a similar hustler's bar, or perhaps on Fifty-fourth and Third by the Post Office Building, and had an enjoyable $35 evening. They began to see each other once a week. (Sam keeps an apartment in New York for such things.) He found he could trust John, who was a simple but sensible young man, and they developed a "good working arrangement," as Sam puts it. John lives rent-free in Sam's New York apartment and has the use of Sam's second car. He does odd carpentry jobs during the day to pay his other expenses. When Sam comes up from Washington, John meets him at the airport and spends the night with him. Otherwise he's on his own. Apparently, though, he has cut out his other hustling (his own idea, not Sam's).

Is Sam hung up on John? No, he says; he enjoys the sex, but that's all. Does John look forward to seeing Sam come up to New York, or is he turned off by having to pay rent with his body—and doesn't his being turned off make Sam feel uncomfortable? (I am one interviewer who does not beat around bushes.) Sam says he thinks John is about as happy to see him as a businessman is to see one of his best customers. He is an uninhibited farm boy who does not attach special significance to what he does. It feels good; it pays good; his john's a fair, interesting guy. It's good for both of them. That's all.

I couldn't have sex, not where my head is now, with someone who didn't want to have sex with me. I would feel self-conscious and guilty, a dirty old man. As I get older and hornier, I may learn or force myself to ignore those feelings.

This leads me to the next man you must meet, a Wall Street financier whose name is in the middle of one of those famous old firm names and whose indiscreet phone call to Sam Gordon was taped by the FBI. He is one of Sam's closest friends, has been for years, and is the kind of friend I expect Chris and Golden Boy will be to me for years. Let's call him Bags, not to be cruel, but to be honest: He has bags full of money and bags under his eyes. If Sam is unbeautiful, Bags is unattractive, if you see the difference. Yet—or perhaps "therefore"—Bags has a more compulsive sexual appetite for beautiful young men than Sam does. Sex for Sam is a nice part of life. For Bags it is the major pastime, game, pursuit, obsession. Partly this may be because Bags is a member of the idle rich: His career on Wall Street is not terribly demanding, he can go no higher, and he makes money whether the market goes up or down. He was born rich, he is rich now, he will be rich when he leaves us, so he has to look farther than most of us for goals.

His goal at any given time is a young munchkin, as Chris and I call them, sometimes the very munchkins
I
have been hoping to make it with. Yet, to my great envy, Bags has better luck with these kids than I do, twenty years his junior. I see one of these kids in a bar or at a party, and I cruise, play games with my eyes, try to figure out whether I should act kinda hip/dumb or established intellectual, and more often than not, I wind up going home alone. Bags has a simpler, more effective approach I have not yet mastered. He goes up to the munchkin at an opportune moment and says: "Excuse me, young man, you're Billy, aren't you?" (He does extensive research through his network of informants.) "I think you are one of the most beautiful people I have ever seen, and I must have you. What is it worth to you?"

Generally it is worth about $100, plus a good dinner at the Ritz Carlton in Boston or the Plaza in New York or the Mayflower in Washington. Really? You mean if I wanted to part with $100, I could do it with Billy? My God, I've been trying to do it with Billy for almost two years now! No, Billy went for $350.

Of course, there are some boys who cannot be had, but Bags does his research well and generally only makes offers when he has reason to believe they will be accepted. He has developed considerable sensitivity in these things, having been at it now for some years. He generally has one or two beautiful boys living with him, whom he may use as scouts, or even as lures, to help him research and meet others.

I describe all this in the present tense—and really, I would have thought Bags was incurably addicted to this form of heroin which only the wealthiest Wall Streeters can afford—but things changed a year ago.

First I must explain that, like you, I was initially outraged at the frightening things Bags must be doing to these young people's minds. I even hesitated to include this in my story, because it takes a lot of getting used to, and I still wouldn't expect the President's Council on Mental Health to give Bags the stamp of Good Houseboykeeping. But I include it because it
is
part of the story, because I have to consider whether I might become a Bags myself, and because I am challenged by the task of trying to make you feel somewhat less' outraged.

The fact is that Bags is a gentle, sensitive person who wants terribly to do the right thing by his young friends. Bags has a Princeton education, aristocratic good manners and taste. According to his friend Sam Gordon, admittedly a biased source, there has not been a boy over the last twenty years who has not derived as much from the relationship with Bags as Bags has. Besides money.

Some of his boys no doubt are well formed, mentally, before they meet Bags and feel, if anything, that
they
are taking advantage of
him.
Three hundred bucks, if it doesn't mess up your head, isn't bad for "humoring an old man."

Of those whose minds are still malleable, it is much harder to say. Some boys may indeed be better off for having known Bags. He is not stupid, he is not evil, and he is not unaware of what he is doing: If there is a way to do what he does and leave the people he does it with better for the experience, Bags probably knows the way. Other boys, undoubtedly, have been the worse for the experience. They may think less of themselves for having done it. Or it may spoil them: Three hundred dollars should not come so easily; it takes some of the appeal out of that $2.50-an-hour job at McDonald's and may lead a boy down the wrong path.

One other word of at least partial defense: Today's eighteen-year-olds are really quite a bit different from the eighteen-year-olds of a few years ago or of the last generation. Whereas I was nearly traumatized by my experience in the American Museum of Natural History and astounded by the accident on Brooklyn Bridge, the kinds of kids Bags meets in gay bars or on gay beaches or in "sophisticated" East Coast cities are by and large a lot more together than I was. ("Isn't anybody?" I hear you cry.)

In any case, Bags is now a different man. A year ago he met a young boy named Steven, seventeen, who was unquestionably looking for a father. Steven, as enthusiastic and affectionate and genuine as any boy could be, fell in love with Bags. That is hard for me to understand, having always been looking for Tommy rather than a father and having put so much emphasis on looks. But according to Sam, Steven was not the first to fall for Bags. Bags had never quite been able to kick his habit before and so hadn't settled down with even one of these beautiful boys. With Steven it has been different. Perhaps Bags was adjusting to his ensuing middle age; perhaps the bear market pinched the family fortune to such an extent that $300 evenings were more of a bite. I think, though, it was that Steven put his foot down: The other boys had to go, the researching and luring and body buying had to stop, and this highly regarded financier had to learn to behave himself, even if he had to learn from a high school senior.

The relationship may last quite awhile. Steven is not "gay" or "straight"; he is simply a warm, loving boy. He likes boys; he likes girls; he likes people. He lives his young life in a way I can only admire, and he is a good influence on Bags, who in turn has a lot to offer Steven. Sam's guess is that Steven will some day marry and have kids but will always have a strong affection for his surrogate father. If so, Bags will not be let down too hard when Steven moves away. Well, it will be painful, but not shattering.

Will Bags ever go back to his old ways? I don't know him well enough to guess. Will I ever beckon to straight boys on the street and offer them a month's rent in exchange for allowing me to blow them? I think that is up to me: I think people have the ability to control their emotions and, to some extent, their lives. I think I will never shoot heroin, pleasurable as that apparently is, because I don't like the person it would make me become. I think I will avoid this other form of heroin because I think I might become addicted, bankrupt, and miserable.

Naturally, I am curious to know what I will be like in twenty or thirty years. And what of forty or fifty or even sixty years from now, should I live so long? When the real crunch comes. Offhand I can't think of any really old gay people I have met, at least not in an explicitly gay situation where I could hear about that side of their life.

Surely forty years from now the world will be unlike anything we know now, if it is here at all. Is there any sense in speculating that far into the future? For the moment it is sufficient for me that I intend to provide for a comfortable old age. And that goddamned Chris had just better stay around to clear his goddamned throat in that annoying way from the next wheelchair over in Sunny Faggots' Rest Home.