Read GAY REALITY : THE TEAM GUIDO STORY Online
Authors: John Chaffetz
GAY REALITY : THE TEAM GUIDO STORY (5 page)
IT’S AN August afternoon and Bill is sitting across from me near an unoccupied swimming pool. He has finished work for the day but looks as though he is just leaving for his office. Tie in place, freshly ironed shirt, a natural GQ look.
It is my practice with interviews that I do not reveal in advance what subjects will be covered. I want to see the immediate facial reaction, eye twitch, body language and I want to hear that snap response. No trickery is intended, I just strongly believe that someone’s first reaction/words are so very revealing, so very candid and even, perhaps, politically incorrect.
“Tell me about Gay Pride.”
“You mean the parades?” says Bill. “We actually went through those in the ‘70’s. Now I think, for the most part, it’s the young gays wanting to experience it for fun. I don’t think the base motivation is to push the envelope any more. It’s to have fun—like Mardi Gras or July 4
th
.
“When I did it, I was really afraid that a television camera would catch me. In the 70’s there was
real
fear. Now it’s more of a celebration than a political statement. Now, on purpose, the cameras just catch the flamboyant side. They don’t show the tender parts. The good doesn’t get on television.”
“Can you understand why many straights find it so offensive?” I ask.
“Of course. We’re ashamed of lots of it. But the other stuff is far too boring to put on the air. Gays are the most apathetic genre. The wild stuff is all orchestrated by the young, carefree gays. There’s not much anyone can do about it. Sponsors see it as a money making thing. Bars, hotels and restaurants exploit it for very big money.”
THE THREE of us are heading to Utah from our homes in Southern California. Outside the searing desert heat goes about its summer’s work, but we are unaffected by it. At the wheel, I guide the discussion with a very relaxed garrulous Joe. Between his feet, in his stylish green carrying unit, sleeps little Guido.
“Talk to me about gays and how they pair up.”
“Gays tend, overwhelmingly, to pair off with those similar to themselves”, says Joe. “Masculine—masculine, feminine—feminine, athletic—athletic, etc., etc. Some don’t, but that’s rare. Now that’s really in contrast to lesbians. Lesbians, you know gay men really don’t understand lesbians, but they’re not at all like gay men. Far more often than not, a feminine lesbian is with a real butch as a part
ner.”
“What attracts gays to each other?”
“I’d guess that no more than 40-50 percent, and I’m probable high on my guess, of gays have had sex with a female. And some of those tried, but it just didn’t work—literally. They didn’t get it up, for whatever reason. At the very heart of the situation was they just weren’t attracted to the female.
“Gays have individual attractions just like straights. I’m very attracted to Asians who are usually smaller than me, fit, and somewhat exotic looking. Billy, on the other hand, is not.”
“How about racism?” I ask.
“There is very blatant racism within the gay community. Blacks rarely are seen with whites and almost never with Asians. Inter-racial mixing is really quite rare.”
THE OTHER passengers and I seem like bobble head dolls as our Jet Blue 737 begins its bumpy, rock and roll descent into JFK. I’ve spend most of the cross country flight thinking about gays in America. Their plight, their quest, their vulnerability and their pain. Some of the overt ostracism seems to make no sense at all.
A timely musing: the battered, bruised, and beleaguered Catholic Church seems to be far more vigilant as to disavowing and shunning gays, than it is about cleansing itself of the horde of pedophile/sexual assault types within its own priesthood and those in the hierarchy who calmly overlook this criminality.
IT IS early September as I drive up a pastoral, heavily tree-lined street on my way to meet Joe’s mom. The leaves have not yet begun to turn and landscaping still says summer, as I pull into the driveway of her unpretentious, comfortable looking home. I am not even out of the car when she bounds out the front door to greet me.
“Well, you finally got here!” she chirps.
“I’m five minutes early”, I answer.
“No matter, I’ve been waiting for you!”
She’s a sprite, a ball of energy and a real cutie pie. Maybe 5’2”, trim, with a pixie haircut and an electric smile.
She ushers me into her immaculate house, the décor of which has undoubtedly remained the same for decades. Her charisma is unending and her patter, interrupted only by occasional giggles, is a true delight. She is closing in on 87 years of age, yet has more vim than many who are less than half her age.
In answer to some preliminary questions, she has lived in this house for all of its 48 year existence. It sits on a beautiful acre of land for which she and her deceased husband paid $1,000.
Rather rapidly she spins through her resume. “My mother came to this country from Warsaw, Poland when she was only 16 and she really struggled. My father worked in a factory for 10 cents an hour. That’s bad, but when I started out at IBM in 1942, I only was paid 50 cents an hour.”
She is a little hard of hearing, but in no way is her enthusiasm bridled by that. I speak a bit louder and enunciate more clearly, but sometimes her response is not to the question that I actually asked. It is obvious that her world is exclusively focused on her deceased husband and her only child, Joe.
We sit across from each other in the living room. She’s in a rocking chair, dressed entirely in black except for white socks. Her feet are up on a footstool. Story after story rolls out, each with precise dates and details. She is a slightly larger Dr. Ruth.
“I didn’t want my husband to die young, so I made him retire early. I didn’t want to be a young widow. He died right there on that couch.”
It’s an easy interview. She just keeps on talking, with little prompting from me. Occasionally she injects a mild epithet, but if you saw her it would not bother you at all.
“After Joe was born I wanted to adopt a child as well. They were hard to get back then! My husband and I talked it over and I decided to give up on that and just give Joe the absolute very best—and I did.
“Joe wasn’t a genius, but he was a damn good student; got good grades. You know he got degrees from Georgia Tech, Michigan and UCLA!”
I ask when she first became aware that Joe was gay.
With just the slightest flinch, she raises her voice a bit and says, “I don’t believe in it. No way. I can’t believe it. I know girls he went out with. I do not believe it—at all!
“I know his friends who knocked up girls and they didn’t care and left them. I told Joe if you do that, you’re the father and you marry her!
“Today, things are so different. Everything is ‘gay’, ‘homosexual’, ‘bi-sexual’. What the hell is this? Movie stars get married, have children and all of a sudden they’re gay. What’s going on?
“If you live alone, you’re gay! I live alone, am I gay?
“I never heard of any of this while I was growing up. Women today want a guy for sex, they want his money. That’s it, just money. No, they don’t really care about sex.
“Joe told me right on that sofa, he sat right there, and said that he was gay. He asked me if I’d hate him if he was gay! I didn’t cry; I didn’t carry on. I looked at him and said, ‘You’re my son and I love you and that’s that—period!”
“WHEN I was in San Francisco with my first lover, Randy, we had a major blowup. It was in 1978 and I was pissed at what had happened. So I went out and in one day I bought a condo in Sausalito.
“AIDS was terrifying to me and I was really on guard against it. In fact, it wasn’t until ‘83 that I met lover number two, Roger. I truly believe that my two years with Roger, one in Sausalito and one in Salt Lake City, saved me from dying of AIDS. I very much believe that.
“I don’t even know why I was with Roger. He was a waiter, going nowhere, and even the sex wasn’t very good. But lucky for me, I was out of circulation and I’m sure that saved me.
“When Roger and I broke up I actually never had sex in this country for two years. It was my mental state, I was alone in Utah, plus the scourge of AIDS was terrifying me. That combination really affected me as far as my abstinence was concerned.
“Eventually, in Salt Lake City, I met a little Latin guy named Mark who I sensed was gay. After a period of time, several weeks as I recall, we obviously were attracted to each other, so we had like an afternoon date. He came to my place and eventually it got sexual. He took off his shirt and it stunned me.
“He had ten, or so, lesions. Blood red, raised and like bruises, but hard like shoe leather, on his arms, legs and chest. No way could he miss my shock. I could tell that he wasn’t going to even mention it. So I brought it up and realized that he was in complete and absolute denial.”
‘I don’t have ‘it’, this is something that’s in our family; my uncle had it’, he said to me. ‘I’m dating a girl who’s training to be an Olympic skater and she’s perfectly okay with it’, he added. “Was it true? I have no idea.
“So there I was, in Salt Lake City, all by myself, twenty miles from the nearest queer, and all I see are Roger’s friends. I kept thinking, shit, I could have had sex with Mark before he had visible lesions! And maybe I’d be dead by now. It was 1986 and I was scared to death!”
“HEY JOHN, when are you going to get to the part where I become a star? Get your priorities in line, please.”
“YES, I am very independent. I had five kids in fourteen years; lots of diapers, but I’ve never had a clothes dryer and I don’t want one.” Margaret Bartek is quite comfortable speaking to me and, true to her word, does not avoid answering anything that I ask of her.
“Bill is still a Catholic and a good Catholic. I know that he still loves God. I do think he and Joe should be going to church.
“My husband was very hurt by Bill’s homosexuality. He never really talked to me about anything; I mean anything—through our whole marriage—until six days before he died. We had a very unusual relationship. We’d only been married for four months when he left for duty in the Pacific. He didn’t come back for three and a half years. That’s when he told me he was going to make the Navy his career.
“Although my husband never, ever, talked to me about Bill’s sexuality, I sensed that he knew. He wouldn’t say anything to me, but he waited until both of his sons were with him at the hospice. When they showed up, then he died.
“When Bill knew that I knew about him, I had to swear to him not to tell anyone. I’d never break that promise.”
“WHO THE hell is the priest to tell you what to do? I don’t go to confession, I don’t believe in confession. I don’t give a damn! But I’m a good Catholic, I go to church. I pray. I give what I know that I can afford.” Joe’s mom is a feisty, pistol if there ever was one. She shoots from the hip on any subject. But the word adorable also flits through my mind. Questions about religion have struck a chord!
“I’m a lifetime member of the Catholic Daughters of the Americas”, she proclaims as she pops up and brings me a certificate that confirms just that.
“But, like I told my sister, no priest needs to, nor can tell you how to have sex—or when—or where. That’s just crazy.
“Nowadays it doesn’t seem like there’s anything like love. I worked hard, saved money, paid my debts. You had to get along and I got along. These days how many people really do that?
“I don’t know if my husband even heard from Joe that he’s gay. But I personally don’t believe it!”
TALL, BALDING, with gray sideburns, well-built, John Daley is one of Joe’s oldest and dearest friends. An employee of IBM for some thirty years, he is gracious and garrulous, cerebral and humorous, open and talkative.
The two of us are sitting at the kitchen table in Joe’s mom’s home. It is apparent that John is like a second son in Joe’s family.
“Joe and I met in a tenth grade gym class; we were part of a rather uncoordinated group. We really didn’t get to be real friends until eleventh and twelfth grades. Joe was at the top of our class, his parents really pushed him hard, and I was in the middle. Joe, a guy named Bill Lewis, he became a Navy Captain, and I got to be real buddies.”
I ask him to trace Joe’s emergence as gay. “Well, there was this high school pal, a guy whose folks had some money. He had a pool, there weren’t many back then, and he was gay. He would invite straight guys over to ‘do stuff’, you know like circle jerks. They really were straight, I think they just did it as a way to get off.
“The guy told me he was going to invite Joe over to swim because he sensed that Joe was gay. I told Joe about it and Joe really got defensive and didn’t go.
After that incident, the subject just kind of got dropped and it was a few years before we ever talked about it again.”
