Read GAY REALITY : THE TEAM GUIDO STORY Online
Authors: John Chaffetz
GAY REALITY : THE TEAM GUIDO STORY (2 page)
“IT STARTED with MTV’S Real World. I really got hooked on reality television. So much so, that I actually applied to be on Survivor 2. I knew that I wanted to be on, but figured I never would; I was too old. But I kept watching all those types of shows.
“Everything in life that I’ve ever set my mind to, I’ve been able to do. Except Survivor. Joe thinks that most of my ideas are hare-brained. While he’s very disciplined and thinks inside the box, I think outside the box. That’s how we are opposites and that’s why we work so well together.
“So, I tried for Survivor, knowing it was a real long shot. Joe was totally supportive, but wasn’t really interested, for himself, at first.”
“BILL GOT really into Reality TV, but not me. At best, I was on the periphery. Then he pops out with trying to get on Survivor. So he’ll go to Australia for a couple of months! I totally masked how I really felt by saying, ‘It’s okay with me, honey, go for it’.
“But he never heard a word. Then he started following Big Brother and checking in all the time on the CBS website. One night, he got all excited about something they started promoting called the CBS Summer Global Adventure Series.
“I promise you I know when the light bulb goes on in his head. He sees that thing and immediately thinks, ‘Perfect, but Joe won’t go for it’. The difference was that it was for both of us.
“It’s for a million dollars! World travel! The problem was who would take care of Guido?”
“FIRST OF all, let’s get this straight; I can speak for my self. Nobody needs to lip-synch for me. After all, I’m the star in the family as you can tell by the photograph on the cover of this book.
“Who do you
really
think not only thought up trying to get on the show, but starred in the video audition tape? What a relief when they actually got on. I mean who among you wouldn’t cherish an actual vacation from your folks? They’re very good to me, but everyone needs a respite once in awhile.
“And to answer a very frequent question I get, both in person and over the internet, they’re each really quite different with me. Joe is kind of the Mom and Bill is definitely the disciplinarian.”
NEWBURGH, NEW YORK lies some sixty miles north of New York City and ten miles north of the United States Military Academy at West Point. It was in Newburgh that Joe Baldassare was born and spent the first seventeen years of his life. His father earned a comfortable living for his wife and only child by owning and operating a successful Texaco station.
Now in his early fifties, Joe is 5’9”, a well-muscled 150 pounds, with wavy blond hair and a deep tan from the California sun—quite a transition from the somewhat frail, bespectacled teenager growing up in Newburgh.
By no means a shrinking violet, Joe admits to discovering alcohol at age fourteen, but never got in trouble because of it.
“I never really dated in high school or even in college, but I was the very best friend of quite a few girls and quite a few boys.”
Always strong in mathematics, it was Joe’s dream to someday design cars. Tail lights, dashboards, etc. His parents pushed him academically with the result that he entered Georgia Tech and graduated with a degree in Nuclear Physics.
“Going to college was really job training for me. I gravitated into Nuclear Enginnering and had to study my ass off. Everything was so new to me. Growing up in a small town, I wanted to get to a big city and Atlanta was just perfect.
“Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t dating, but it wasn’t all an academic grind either. Between my junior and senior years at Georgia Tech I became a pothead. In total honesty, I smoked for eleven or twelve years and had some of my greatest successes while I was high!”
The year before Joe entered Georgia Tech, the university had finally begun to admit female students, but there were only forty or so, none of whom was of particular interest to Joe.
“I was determined to earn a Master’s Degree in Nuclear Engineering and in that pursuit I enrolled at the University of Michigan. Not actually because it was a good school, it was of course, but for two very important personal reasons: It had girls and it was cold, so I could once again enjoy my passion for skiing.”
It didn’t take long for Joe to break the ice with females. “I lost my virginity during my very first week in Ann Arbor—with a girl right out on the grass. Before long she wanted to get married, but that certainly wasn’t for me. I was just into enjoying sex with a very pretty girlfriend and smoking a lot of grass. Life was good.”
NORFOLK, VIRGINIA has always been a Navy community with many a seaman stationed there at lease once during his career. Bill Bartek arrived on the scene there to become the youngest of five children. Not long after, the family moved to Tennessee, and by age six Billy and his siblings reached San Diego where his father retired.
“I lived in San Diego for thirty years and I wouldn’t have wanted it any different. We had an all-Catholic education. I wasn’t at all interested in sports, but I had lots of interests and lots of girlfriends both in high school and in college.
“My three sisters and my brother and I were really fortunate. We had parents who really cared and really guided us well. And, we had the good fortune to have a wealthy aunt who set up trust funds for each of us to go to college. I graduated from a Catholic school, the University of San Diego, with a major in art.
“Sex? I tried it and it just didn’t work. And it didn’t make sense.”
“WHEN I think back about how my true sexuality emerged, the first weird feeling, that first twinge of being ‘different’, I know it was when I went to a Beatles’ film with my sisters. I was about eight years old and I was captivated by Paul. Not sexual, but nevertheless a weird flash.”
Now tall, lean, dark-haired and fit, with memorable blue eyes, the grade-school Billy was skinny, taller than many classmates and not at all interested in sports.
“I vividly recall being repulsed by aggressive masculine behavior. I always felt like I belonged in an older age group. My contemporaries acted so immature, so I gravitated toward like-thinkers, all male, in Catholic schools.
“I’ve blocked most of it but I clearly still remember an incident that really rocked me in my freshman year in high school. As I left a bathroom, the guy in front of me made sure that the door hit me. I asked him why he did it and he turned and slapped me! I just shut up, went with the flow and stayed away from seniors like him.
“Starting in eighth grade, girls were telling me ‘you’ve got such beautiful eyes, you’ll be doing Maybelline commercials some day’. Girls liked me and I liked them. In high school I could sing and I got a lot of great attention. It was defining for me. I got away from the nerd group.
“My high school, for my freshman and sophomore years, was all male students, but when I became a junior, girls arrived! They quickly put me on a pedestal and I enjoyed it. After every class a gaggle of girls were all over me. Maybe it affected them that I wasn’t sexually interested.
“It was great. My self-worth really improved. It had been terrible and I attributed that to my not being in sports. My attitude got good. Things in general were terrific. I can remember that I was dating two girls, but I can’t recall their names.
“The first of these two really wanted to go further sexually, but I didn’t. I just didn’t have a strong desire. She loved our heavy petting and bluntly asked why we didn’t have sex? I answered with, ‘I’m Catholic and I don’t want you to get pregnant’. It was the truth. I was so careful because of my mother’s influence. I already knew that I didn’t want to get married or have children.
“Something just didn’t click.”
“WHEN I was only five or six years old I really became attached to boys. Probably in kindergarten, or first-grade, there was a gorgeous little boy who was a clone of his equally beautiful mother. They lived with her father, the richest man in Newburgh, New York. I wanted to be that rich.
“I was always the smallest kid the whole time that I was growing up. Red hair, played the piano and terrible at sports—very, very low self-esteem. If I could only look like the good looking guys I’d be worthwhile enough to have a girlfriend. But I just wasn’t at all worthy.
“You want proof? I actually had a bet with a girl in my ninth grade class as to which of us would be the first to break through and weigh 100 pounds! She won! Can you imagine being in ninth grade and not weighing 100 pounds?
“On a summer vacation, in upstate New York, when I was twelve, a bunch of Army guys were struggling while trying to fish. They really didn’t know much about it. There was one really terrific looking guy and I was so attracted to him!”
As I sit across a small table from Joe, it is obvious that this scene, despite occurring almost forty years ago, is as vivid in his mind as if it had happened yesterday.
“I hung around all day. I was falling for this guy, probably not sexually, but at least emotionally. I had already fooled around a bit sexually, but this wasn’t like that. I was coming of age. I remembered him for
years
after that. I can recall him to this day!”
“I WAS terribly naïve about sex. Not my dad, but my mom was so open and frank with me, but I just wasn’t a very sexual person. Prior to 1972 I just wasn’t into it. Males around me were all bragging about their conquests. Some were obviously lying. At that point I thought I wasn’t very smart. My siblings were so bright! Now I realize that I was plenty smart, but then I wasn’t into academics, like my family, and was into artistic things, kind of on my own.
“Girls were throwing themselves at me and then guys were too. I just didn’t get it. In 1972, it started to click. I went to Europe and started to awaken as to my true sexuality. I came back and started to go to Black’s Beach in San Diego. It’s a well-known nude beach with unofficial areas for straights and gays.
“There are men with no clothes on and women with no clothes on. The decision was easy. I was attracted to the male form.
“At last I was completely comfortable with myself.”
“I ALWAYS wanted to have an older brother. I was an only child playing with lots of kids from families with lots of children. I always missed that.
“When I was thirteen or fourteen there were a few instances of mutual masturbation with guy friends. For me, without any question, it was homosexual, but I don’t think the others were of that mindset. I know that they all eventually got married, which really doesn’t mean that they were straight, but for me it was romantic. I knew enough that I didn’t act on those feelings for quite a few years.
“In high school there was a whole gay subculture, but in those days I never even knew about it. I found out years later when I was in my twenties. I’m sure that even if I had heard about it then, I’d never have believed it.
“Throughout high school I had lots of friends, a nice circle of males and females. I finally grew a little and was getting to be a nice looking guy. I started skiing and sometimes I played golf with my dad. Girls would sometimes fall for me, but I’d run from that. I had absolutely no interest in having sex with girls.
“I studied hard, was always on the honor roll and really was a good student. Without question I was asexual. Guys would talk a lot, but as I graduated, I didn’t even know a single one who had had sex for sure.
“I thought about being gay all the time. But I was totally ignorant as to how to even strike up a gay situation. I wouldn’t know how to handle it.
“And what if my mom, or my dad, or my friends found out?”
ONCE AGAIN, as we sit beside a quiet swimming pool, I am struck by Bill’s serenity and demeanor. He is focused and so articulate. Somewhat undemonstrative, but quite obviously committed to fully and carefully answering every question. Never the slightest hesitation; no need to think it over. He knows his subject (himself) inside and out.
“I was in a theatre group at the University of San Diego when I met a guy and it all began. It didn’t last. After awhile he left me for another man. For a few weeks it was really painful. That lover was my first true sexual experience; a vivid awakening.
“What had, at first, seemed so devastating, turned out to be quite a healthy experience. I learned, for the very first time, who I really was. I fully realized that I could actually be happy within myself and by myself. Some people never achieve that totality of self-understanding and acceptable solitude.
“Throughout my initial despair the sun kept coming up each morning. Slowly, but steadily, I got past him and, after a couple of months, I started to date. But not until I graduated from college did I start into the bar scene.
“About 1976 I met a guy who quickly moved in with me. He was a dancer and we both knew that it wouldn’t last. It didn’t. Right then I decided that I’d be more careful about real relationships. Boyfriends, dating were just fine, but nothing of a serious nature.”
