My Husband and My Wives: A Gay Man's Odyssey (10 page)

Well, of course the drama played out as youthful romance must. He changed his mind, stayed at the university, eventually stopped communication, while I sat in my lodging in a rooming house at 115 West Eighty-fourth Street, and cried. I had gotten myself a job as an office boy at Producers Representatives in the RKO Building for $27.10 a week after taxes, paid $9 a week for my room, ate a lunch daily at the counter in Woolworth’s Dime Store; 55 cents would get me their lunch plate special—brisket or some gray piece of beef, covered with gravy, mashed potatoes, green beans, with a cup of coffee. I usually ran out of money on Thursday night, sometimes with enough left for an evening meal. I skipped Friday lunch waiting for the secretary to hand out the pay envelopes at the end of the day.

I had two sisters in New York. Holly, eight years older than I, was a serious lefty, and like so many of that era considered homosexuality an expression of bourgeois decadence. Her husband, David, like most artists of the period who hung out at the Cedar Street Tavern, did not “believe in” homosexuality, as though it were a religious stance. Marvelous Barbara at twenty-two was more fun, and her first project was to take me to MacDougal Street in the Village to visit the gay bars. Queer bars, I guess they called them back then. Barbara was the only family member who openly acknowledged that I was actively in pursuit of a sex life with other males. Odd as it may seem, she had to explain to me what such a bar was as she took me inside and sat there through my first half hour.

I took up the culture of gay bars very timidly. The conversation, the presentation of personality, the attitude, were all so stylized, so aggressive, so intense that I was at first speechless, frozen into a seat at the bar, unable to do more than order a beer, which at age eighteen had just become my legal right. But, if I may pretend to objective analysis, I was quite a handsome kid and, what is more, new to the scene, always a treat to a bar’s habitués. One thing I realized soon enough: I was not in Iowa anymore. These men were older, many of them Europeans, men who had escaped from Hitler, others American-born, who had escaped from the wrath and fury of small hometowns. For the first time in my life I did not need to proposition anyone. I was in demand, and, as an object of so much lust, was able to demand as much satisfaction as I gave. At first I was in ecstasy. I thought that at last I would find the means to do the queer equivalent of sitting in the drugstore like Mickey and Judy drinking a soda using our two straws. But after a month or so I was not making any progress in that direction. These men did not want a relationship, they did not even seem to want straightforward sexual satisfaction. They wanted games, poses, positions, erotic logistics, sex as a work of art, perhaps. I found it boring, even though I was only eighteen and hormonally alive; it left me with a barren feeling that made me feel so lonely. I guess I just wanted sex without having to be clever.

I missed the simple virility of my high school friends pumping their orgasms into me while we huddled in the backseat of my car. One night I was walking disconsolately away from MacDougal Street when I caught the eye of a man glancing my way while he was in conversation with another fellow. He quickly came over to my side to introduce himself and ask if I needed a ride anywhere. He was a curly-haired man, short, stocky, and swarthy, and his companion was a taller, muscular black man. With the recklessness of the young I accepted a ride to my rooming house with both of them. As we pulled up before my address, he asked if he could come in, telling the other fellow to explain to his wife that he was “hung up at the gym.” It turned out he was a boxing manager, a “deeze and doze” James Cagney tough guy such as I knew only from the movies. He never explained himself but clearly enough he went for wrestling around naked in bed with a young guy, getting blown, jerking the other fellow off. I liked his smell, liked his muscles, his roughness, directness, humor. Of course, it was a moment in the night, but I could not stop to think of the difference with the sex I had been having all that fall. I know it is perverse, but there is a certain kind of “guy-guy” who turns me on; I leave it to the shrinks.

By chance, during roughly the same time, I took to spending Friday evenings in a midtown bar featuring a Dixieland jazz band with a beautiful woman friend of mine from work. The money I spent on beers guaranteed that I would go hungry after Thursday noon, but I reckoned the music and camaraderie were worth it. Shortly thereafter the bar became our place for a pickup routine that with an essential variation was a staple of a host of comic films of the time, the ones in which some beautiful woman is out on the town with her plain-Jane girlfriend and they bump into a handsome guy, more often than not a sailor, and his ordinary friend searching for fun and romance. The narrative arc has the two lookers falling for each other, with their sidekick friends turning to each other as consolation prizes. We played that film routine one Friday night after another. The bar was frequented by the military and by college students. My woman friend was a real beauty who easily attracted first-class sailors or university students to her side, which left their buddies to talk with me. As the night wore on and libidos raged, the good-looking guy would confess that he and his friend had not thought to get themselves a room for the night, whereupon my friend would invite the guy home, which left his friend out of luck until he reluctantly accepted an invitation from me. On the surface of it the invitation produced no particular hesitation. Strange men sleeping in the same bed was not the aberration then that it would be now; the Depression and the war had made doubling up a commonplace. Two men lying side by side in their underwear, however, can go just about anywhere they want to take it. Most nights I lucked out; otherwise I practiced discretion. Mostly it was lopsided sex, me giving, them taking, but I liked the companionship in it.

I met and hooked up with plenty of gay men here and there on the sidewalks of New York, but as far as negotiating the bars and the gay scene, I seemed to be a failure. As luck would have it, a case of gonorrhea forced me back to Iowa, back where I knew doctors who would give me discreet treatment, and where I could go back to the university. There were plenty of sympathetic doctors and clinics in New York, obviously, so I must have wanted to go home. The noble experiment was over. “Noble” I say with irony, thinking of all the brilliant gay youngsters who came to the city and stayed to make a name for themselves. Was I a simpleminded wimp or was this the way it was supposed to be? To this day I cannot decide.

Back home the doctor who treated me required that I give up sex for six months, and so I turned all my energies to study. At this point my intellectual self had been formed from my extensive reading as an invalided youth, the many classic films I saw in the MoMA film series shown at the State University of Iowa throughout my earlier teen years, and the rigor and discipline of researching and writing on all conceivable subjects for college-level term papers. I enrolled in Intensive Ancient Greek, which with doubled class hours and extended assignments brought the student enough mastery to move into second-year coursework after one term. And why Greek? I had hated Latin in high school, although I did well enough in it. The previous summer, however, in shopping at registration for courses I discovered something worth only two credits called The Love Poems of Horace and Catullus. It sounded like an easy A, and I enrolled. The instructor that summer was intellectually seductive enough that I followed him into Intensive Greek and thereafter into courses in the literature of Greek, and from there I went on to be a classics major. That was the summer term of 1949. Almost half a century later I was to retire from my endowed chair as Distinguished Professor of Classics at the City University of New York, author of six or seven books and maybe fifty articles, mostly on the subject of ancient Greek literature or the civilization. I had found my life’s work; what is more, I had found in me a passion, an obsession, really, that for years rivaled what riveted me to another human being. I guess I might say that it was the Great Love Affair of my life. And, having sympathetically listened to so many young people flounder about trying to figure out what interests them, I am deeply grateful that I found a life’s calling, and so early on. Perhaps it made me narrow in some ways, because it wasn’t until I retired that I really started to study other matters in some detail, European history or economics, for example. But for decades my absorption in the study of antiquity, particularly ancient Greek literature, gave me real coherence and purpose.

I ran across Dottie, my initial term-paper client, who introduced me to a male couple. Dottie’s friends were the first two men whom I had ever encountered who were committed to each other and obviously in love. Somehow I had lived in this small town all my life and never fully recognized that there must be a pool of potential lovers on the one hand and a place where they congregated on the other. These sweet guys recognized me for the naïf I was, and promised to take me to the gay bar that sat on the street bordering the campus. For over two years I had been a regular at the bar next door, owned and run by a father of a high school friend, but somehow never noticed that a very different clientele was patronizing its neighbor. I suppose they wouldn’t serve minors, so I never entered. It wasn’t exactly a gay bar, but rather the bar where the university’s students of drama, writing, and music congregated, which tended to include the gay population as well. So it was a bar in which one could wave one’s hands, flit about, in general behave as differently as possible from the patrons of the bar next door, where townies like myself and the fraternity and athletic crowd hung out.

Thus began the second phase of my life in a gay bar. I guess I went to the Uptowner, as it was called, almost every night of the week, and usually came away with someone to sleep with. Not for the night, surely, because I was living at home while attending university, but for a few hours in a dormitory room or rooming house. These were fellow students, for the most part, Iowa boys, with all the virtues of small-town rural life, that is, basically friendly, not aggressive, easygoing. Just the same, they had an edge, they were wounded people with all the tendencies to lash out, nurse grievances, and feel inferior that came from the knowledge that they were freaks and pariahs in the minds of the larger population, sinners, of course, to the Christian community, which would generally include their parents and other family members.

I found them so different from the men I had met in the gay bars of Manhattan, who were mostly older, more experienced, for whom the mere act of homosexual intercourse was no longer a psychic challenge. The Iowa boys, by contrast, were at the very beginning of their careers as homosexual men and as such working to shape what they perceived to be their identity. At this stage their sexuality was the all-powerful defining aspect of their sense of self. Simply acting on it consumed them utterly, because it made them; it had to be that way if they were to develop any self-respect, perhaps only dimly understood. I think that the hostility and opposition that they sensed everywhere, and often enough confronted more dramatically, made them fight back as hard as they could with the self, their identity they were shaping, which meant in this environment a life lived by thoughts of homosexual sex and its enactment. Most of them did not think beyond the orgasm to the possibility of a relationship with the man who had helped them to it. They needed first to be comfortable acting out their erotic selves and at the moment it took all their time.

I have always believed that their capacity for focusing on the sex act per se was encouraged by the fact that their partner was another male, equally focused. My prejudice is that women are instinctively attuned to creating relationships out of any sexual encounter; heterosexual males are encouraged or forced to think beyond the immediate sexual act because their partners are female. It’s the tired old “commitment” discussion yet again. I know that theories of biological destiny are out of fashion, but there we are. Women are stuck with what comes out of their womb and they jolly well want someone around who will look after them. In the same sense the human race needs to produce new generations and so society invents systems that force people into raising children like a church that calls divorce a sin, like a religion that stones adulterers to death. In a sense, males who attach themselves to a woman have no choice. Left to himself, a male can have an orgasm and get on with his day without thinking; young males more often than not include masturbation as much a part of the morning’s ritual as shaving or brushing their teeth. It is all over in a matter of seconds. Two males working at it together can still complete their mission in minutes and be back on the road or into the office or whatever in no time. Who even remembers? The stupendous incidence of promiscuity among gay males relative to straight males derives in my estimation from what I claim is a biological truth rather than the gay male’s incapacity to make moral judgments.

The fall term of my junior year at the university I had sex with more good-looking, clean-cut, nice young men than ever before or since. But we did not do repeats. And I learned very quickly from my mistake one evening of trying to make the first night a necking session so as to “get to know” him. When I met that particular guy the subsequent evening, he turned away from me, and it was only from friends that I learned how disgusted he was that we had not gone the whole way as we should have when we were together the first time. Years of hanging out with the girls in high school, sharing in their fantasies of love and romance, had conditioned me to believe in certain silly courtship rituals that had absolutely no place in gay life, and indeed seemed to most guys as completely ludicrous. What a fool I was! How obtuse. And yet I had met Dottie’s friends, a loving committed male couple. The succeeding months into the winter and thereafter left me alternately depressed at not having a relationship and hopeful that there were the ingredients for one out there somewhere.