The Gay Metropolis (22 page)

To placate his paternal grandmother, young Walter was sent to a Catholic elementary school, and his grandmother picked him up every Sunday to take him to Mass. But his parents never went with him. “They were lolling around the house reading the Sunday
Times
. I had to uphold the religious honor of the family.”

Clemons's churchgoing created an immediate crisis: “About the first thing you're taught is that if you don't go to Mass on Sunday, you go to hell,” Clemons remembered. “I was under the belief that I was going to go to heaven and I was going to be orphaned while my parents burned in hell. So I used to sob in school. I went through the third grade, and the oppression got worse and worse, and I was taken to a Catholic child psychologist who couldn't get my secret out of me—about hell. He was a good Irish Catholic, Dr. Joe Malloy. He said, ‘I don't know. Something is scaring the hell out of that little kid in the Catholic school, I think you ought to take him out of the parochial school and let him go to public school.'
^*

“I went through various religious stages. I was very devout in early elementary school, and I became very, very devout in adolescence. I can
time it exactly because I can remember the embarrassment of being in Mass on Sunday where you kneel down and stand up and kneel down. It was at that age when you never know when you're going to get a hard-on, and you just don't know what to do about it. I think I was afflicted by some sort of religious grief that has to do with a hard-on, of being in a Catholic Mass and being deeply depressed by the music, and getting teary. So I was very religious during my initial erection stage, when I was ten or eleven. It was very much connected with sexuality. Of course, if I become very devout at the moment I'm having erections in Mass, there will be some guilt.

“I remember that as soon as I became active sexually I totally lost interest in Catholicism because I found that I could not go to confession and say I was sorry. I became a hardened sinner.” He also became an atheist. “I think the religiosity was a substitute for sex. It's a fervent emotional experience, and then I didn't need that anymore.”

In high school, Clemons read Freud. He had the classic experience of young gay people all over America from the fifties through the eighties. “I read that it was an immature phase in sexual development, so I thought if I could just hang on, the grown-up stuff would start. I knew it was a bad thing.

“My picture was in the Houston paper because I won some kind of an essay contest when I was in high school and I got an anonymous telephone call from a guy who'd seen my picture in the paper and had read about the award. We chatted for a while, and then he asked, ‘Are you gay?' I don't even think I was aware of the term
gay
until some years after that. He must have thought that since I was an essay writer, I must have been an incipient fag. I sensed what he was talking about, but I said, ‘I don't know what that is.' But I did know. I told people at school that I'd had this peculiar phone call, and that he said, ‘Are you gay?' I told them I didn't know what to say, so I said, ‘Oh yeah, I have a good time.' And made a schoolyard anecdote out of it. I should have kept my mouth shut.”

Until he read James M. Cain's
Serenade
as a teenager, Clemons encountered nothing gay in the culture, although he was aware that he was attracted to male movie stars, like Dana Andrews and Errol Flynn.

“I also had a very vivid childhood nightmare that I blush to even remember. It was a dream about nighttime at a deserted circus ring, and there's a group of elephants, one of whom filled his trunk with water and stuck it in my behind. If that's not a sexual dream, I don't know.”

A student two classes ahead of him at Lamar High School was thrown out after the rumor went around that he'd been caught doing something
in the shower. “He went and finished at San Jacinto High and then came back to receive his diploma at Lamar. He walked out on the stage and was met with thunderous applause—a generous ovation. It was very brave of him to come back, and everyone was sorry it had ever happened. This was in June 1945.

“I remember when I first got laid [with a girl], at sixteen, and somehow the word got around. I remember a football player friend of mine with whom I worked as a lifeguard said something to the effect of, ‘Gee, I've always been kind of shy around you because I never knew you would do anything like that. I feel a lot more comfortable with you now.' And I was crazy about him. I just thought, Well, how sweet. I've made the grade! I'm in with the guys now.”

Clemons got his first short story published in
Scholastic
magazine while he was still in high school. He chose to go on to Princeton “because of Scott Fitzgerald and Edmund Wilson and wanting to write songs for the Triangle Show.” His dream came true: “I was the musical director of the Triangle Show.” He was a tall, blond, good-looking Texan, but he went through college without ever having sex with a man. Then he won a Rhodes Scholarship, and he didn't have sex at Magdalen College in Oxford, either. “There was all sorts of activity at Magdalen. Sort of everywhere but nowhere. I don't know if anybody was actually doing anything, but there was a lot of affection and flirting and all that. I was in no position to know if anybody was getting it on. But surely they were. I would have been so racked with guilt if I'd done anything, and I'm sure they were doing it all without worrying about it. I'm sure many of those people went through what I had read about: they did it and then it was a passing phase. They went on and got married. I have often thought that if I had had a passage of homosexual activity in my teens I might have been much more comfortable. Who knows?”

The Korean War was on and, after Oxford, Clemons would have been vulnerable to the draft. But during his final six months abroad he was diagnosed with diabetes. He took a job as an ordinary seaman on a boat in the Gulf of Mexico which was surveying the gulf's bottom for oil-well drilling.

“I had some very close friends among those men, and a particular friendship with one of the most wonderful guys I ever knew, perfectly straight, very affectionate and physical. His name was L. D. Harris.

“L.D. was my age. He was draped around me at all times, and, to my horror, one of the older guys said, ‘There are two guys that ought to just fuck each other and get it over with!'

“I just froze. And my friend hugged me, and said to this guy, ‘Oh, toilet-mouth, you'd say anything!' He didn't have the slightest worry about it. That was really one of the happiest moments of my life.”

L.D. was a particular kind of male heterosexual cherished by gay men everywhere: someone so confident of his orientation that he never feels threatened by the homosexuality of anyone else. “He was, therefore, very affectionate with me,” said Clemons. “He was a terrific fellow. He was tirelessly heterosexual and a very cute country boy.”

Arthur Laurents recalled many similar experiences. “I have noticed that straight men who are secure in their sexuality are
very
affectionate, very often physically,” said Laurents. “They feel no threat. They are the ones who really hug you. They kiss you. And there's not a slight whiff of sexuality about it. They're not afraid of themselves, is what it is.”

Most of the crew on Clemons's boat came from one little Texas town north of Dallas called Quenlin. The total population was six hundred. “They would fix me up with girls, and I would fuck one of the local girls and I was one of the gang,” he said.

Finally, on a trip home to Houston, Clemons had his first gay sexual experience. “I was doing some work in the public library, and there was a men's room at the bottom of the public library where I discovered that guys were exhibiting themselves and tempting the passersby, and I simply went down there and picked somebody up and went back with him to his room at the Y, where I fucked him and he fucked me. And I said that I had never done this before, and he didn't believe me. I said, ‘No, I'm telling the truth. I've just imagined it.' And he said, ‘Well, you've got
some
imagination!' He was a very nice man and I never saw him again, although I often think of him as some sort of lucky first encounter.

“After this first experience, I went over to my girlfriend's house, just dazed. But my thought was, I've done this once and if you don't do it again it will just be an experiment”—another typical reaction to an initial encounter. “I abstained for a solid year after that. I continued with this girl, with whom I became impotent with guilt. I think I was so full of conflict that the relationship began to fall to pieces. And then I didn't want to fuck her anymore.

“It was no longer possible for me to continue the fantasy that I would outgrow this. It didn't seem possible for me to continue a relationship with a woman with whom I would probably be unfaithful. And so I gradually just withdrew from it.”

After a year at sea, Clemons had accumulated enough money to go to Europe, so he lived in London and Paris for a couple of years before
moving to New York in 1958. In London, he was cruised on the streets of Chelsea. He began to think “that queers had funny eyes. I was afraid that I would get to look like that. And I only gradually worked out what it was. It's the cautious homosexuals that looked at you without moving their face. In order not to be caught looking, you're suddenly aware that you're being looked at by a face that's frankly not looking at you at all. So the eyes look very peculiar. It's a kind of snake-eyed look.”

His short stories were published in
Harper's Bazaar
and
Ladies' Home Journal
, among other periodicals. There was nothing gay about any of Clemons's fiction, and many of his straight friends were unaware of his orientation. He was an elegant man, with the understated air of a patrician from Texas. He had great confidence in his own intelligence, but he was never boastful. After he moved to New York in the sixties, he escorted many of the city's most elegant women. He did have one long-term relationship with a man he adored, but many of his closest friends never met his companion: like so many members of his generation, Clemons would always lead a compartmentalized life. But while he remained very discreet, by the time he was thirty, all of his inhibitions about having sex with men had disappeared.

FOR MORE THAN
thirty years after World War II, beginning with the widespread availability of penicillin and other antibiotics, sexually active Americans enjoyed a kind of liberty that was without precedent in modern times: an almost total freedom from fear of sexually transmitted diseases. For the first time in many centuries, syphilis and gonorrhea became inconveniences instead of catastrophes. Eventually, medical advances would contribute to a dramatic change in the way Americans of all persuasions thought about sex. But because of the sexual taboos of the fifties, many heterosexual New Yorkers had to wait for the arrival of the Pill—and a whole new set of sixties attitudes—before
their
sexual revolution began.

Gay New Yorkers did not have to wait. “It was vividly exciting to sneak around and be in a black tie at a party and make connection with somebody's eye across the room and meet later after we dumped our dates,” said Clemons. And although the scene was much more furtive than it would be two decades later, on any given night in the fifties it could be just as wild as it would be seven nights a week in the seventies.

Clemons was never concerned about catching anything. “Nobody worried about it a bit. You never had a tremor: if you saw somebody you wanted, you went for it. I went to the baths. I went to the Everhard. It cost
something like six dollars. I always went at night, and I often stayed all night.
^*

“If you got a locker, you put your clothes in the locker. If you took a cubicle, you hung your clothes up in your cubicle. Then you had a little knee-length white gown to wrap yourself in, which you usually wore loose with your cock hanging out. The stomach-downs wanted to be fucked. I guess you could have sex with as many as a dozen people. There were group scenes. There was a very impressive steam-bath room down in the lower level, as well as a swimming pool and a big sort of cathedral-like sauna room. It was very steamy and you could hardly see. You could stumble into multiple combinations.”

Once he picked up a man at the baths who was “just hot as a firecracker but clearly under pressure. I went off to the bathroom and came back to the cubicle and he had dressed and vanished. I was quite hurt. Then I saw his picture in the paper the next day.” He had been arrested for hit-and-run driving.

Clemons also went to a bathhouse on West 58th Street near Columbus Circle. “Once in the afternoon, Truman Capote entered and I quickly left. I didn't know Truman Capote, but I didn't want to be in the same baths with him. Nureyev used to hang out there, and so did Lincoln Kirstein, but I never saw either of them. But the word was around. There was a rather friendly guy at the front desk who I was sort of chatty with, and he would say, ‘You don't have any luck. Nureyev was here last night and you missed him again. The best legs I've ever seen!'”

The Penn Post baths across the street from Penn Station were popular at lunchtime and with the commuter crowd in the late afternoon. Murray Gitlin remembered “a room with a lot of double bunks and a steam room slippery with slime. I was lying on the upper bunk at the end of Penn Post, and I heard this very erudite conversation, and I looked down and it was Lincoln Kirstein.”

After Clemons's collection of short stories was published in 1959, he made extra money playing the piano in Manhattan nightclubs like the RSVP, where Mabel Mercer was a regular performer. Downtown on West 9th Street, Clemons frequented a popular gay restaurant called the Lion, where he first heard an unseasoned woman singer from Brooklyn.

“It was before I went off to Rome. When her first record came out and we began to hear about her in Rome, somebody brought me the record
and I looked at that face and realized it was a much-glamorized photo of this awful girl that I had heard in the Lion [in 1960]. She was hostile and terribly nervous. She had no contact with the audience and was hunched over the microphone and made something that was supposed to be patter, but was so convoluted and interior that all you felt was this hostility and terrible resentment from this ugly girl. I remember her singing ‘Cry Me a River.' It was a very muffled act. It must have been one of her very first appearances because she was so tense. It was memorable not because we saw a great star, but because we saw this awful girl.” Despite the way Clemons remembered her, Barbra Streisand won the amateur talent competition at the Lion four weekends in a row.