My Husband and My Wives: A Gay Man's Odyssey (28 page)

We remained a couple for two years, until the late summer of 1981. Then it was that he told me he was not sure he could find a body so old as mine sexually exciting enough to continue. Poor fellow, his early deficits left him always monitoring his performance. I applauded his honesty, however, in this and everything else. He was an important teacher for me, all of twenty-five years younger. I learned so much about theater, Antonin Artaud’s great declaration, “No more masterpieces,” for instance, which he lived by; about art, about the importance of Odilon Redon, about Giacometti, about Beckett, about Monteverdi and his predecessors. For this overeducated classicist trained to know nothing else, he was a continuation of what my first wife, Mary, had done for me, not to mention the architectural education I got from Penny. We went to New York theater, we saw everything; we went to the museums, not the obvious MoMA or the Met, but the small museums that I had never heard of. His conversation was constantly intelligent, if sometimes tiresome in the way young people can be who are determined to tear down everything before building anew. I can honestly say that he enlarged my intellectual horizons profoundly. At the time, I was writing my Apollonius book, where in the preface I thank my Boston University seminar students, but on every page there is the uncredited influence of this remarkable young lover of mine who made me rethink what literature was all about, what antiquity was, and how I related to it.

He and I continued to live in the same neighborhood, although he almost always spent the night at my place. We did not broadcast our relationship in the neighborhood. I have mentioned that he was my “nephew” to the storekeepers, whether it was a euphemism or a case of their naïveté. About six months into our affair he decided to tell his parents that he was gay and use our continued sexual relationship as the proof. As I described earlier, he said, “I do not want them to go to their grave not knowing the truth of me, for then our relationship will have been incomplete.” Well, of course, I thought of my mother and our awful one and only conversation on the subject, but at least from the time I was sixteen until her death she knew the true, whole me. At first his parents were enraged, and told him—just as I expected they would—that I was an evil monster who had perverted him. Needless to say, they never spoke to me, instead surrendering to such high drama as standing to the side and ignoring their son when they encountered the both of us in the lobby of a concert hall.

It was my first experience of a young person starting to identify himself as a gay male after he had discovered that same-sex relationships were natural and instinctive for him. He was eager to go to gay bars, the only one in Cambridge being a rather dreary spot next to MIT. I went there once, but what is there to say after, “I’m gay, I’m gay, I’m gay”?

Friends gave me a black-tie dinner for my fiftieth birthday. It was fun, from the hors d’oeuvres and champagne through to the baked Alaska at the end and beyond, when the guests gave brief testimonial performances and I gave a giant twenty-minute drunken response. Among the guests were old friends, three of my four children, and the three young men I have just described. As I reflected later about the evening, I was struck by the disquieting fact that my three children were the only guests present who did not know that those men were my lovers past and present. My young man’s recent determination to tell the truth to his parents made my silence all the more painful. In one of life’s great coincidences my older son had recently written to say that he was angry at my silence and evasion about the marriage in the years when it was fracturing. His letter seemed to demand a new truth. And so it was, when I knew that the children were spending Christmas with their mother on the ancestral farm, I wrote to him there asking him to share the contents of the letter with his siblings. I wrote that “I have been a practicing homosexual since I was fifteen,” named a number of so-called family friends over the years with whom I had been intimate, revealed what role these three young men played in my life, sealed the envelope, sent it off, and waited for a reply. None came.

At roughly the same time, when I girded myself to tell some dear friends in New York—they were a couple I had known through Penny from her undergraduate days at Radcliffe-Harvard—about this wonderful young man and of course at the same time revealed my sexuality, they were congratulatory, enthusiastic, and kind. Encouraged by this, I began telling people piecemeal; but it was difficult for me and for friends of long standing to look at me, the twice-married father of four, and now grandfather of one, and see a gay male living with a young man in Cambridge. One woman, a very old friend, whom I encountered at a symphony performance, gave me an embrace because she had not seen me for a long time, then turned to notice the young man at my side and could only manage, “Well, yes, hmmm…” before turning away into the crowd. It is extraordinary how many people had trouble with this change in my public identity for years, until at last I invited them to a church to witness my wedding.

My children, however, came around easily enough. There was no answering letter from my son, but after the holidays, when my younger daughter was staying with me before going back to college, we went out to dinner, at which point she looked me in the eye and asked, “Well, do you want to know the reactions to the letter?” They were (1) Penny’s: “He has cheapened our marriage by telling you”; (2) oldest son: “I don’t want to know”; (3) second son: “No way! He taught me how to have sex with a woman! But, oh, my God! All those young guys hanging out for the night in his house? I never thought!”; (4) older daughter: “I want to kick myself for bad-mouthing all those gay guys in front of Dad, the ones I worked with last year. It was just because what I was wanting were some cuties to date me”; (5) and my younger daughter said nothing. My older daughter, moreover, then set out to learn about homosexuality, joining the gay support group on her campus and making friends in the gay community. With all the children there was always awkwardness, more, I think, because my lovers could easily have been their siblings, perhaps also from the fact that, as those things go, I had a stronger attachment to them than to my own flesh and blood, at least in some ways and for certain moments in time. I wonder if my children have been hurt by that more than they will admit. Still, I was blessed with their love as they all worked to understand their father in a new way.

Now everything was in the open at home, but not at work. There were many faculty in those days, the beginnings of the eighties, who were comfortable identifying themselves as gay. It was so ironic that I, who had once been so open, now was hesitant, at least in office situations where people knew me as a divorced professor with four children. People I had to deal with at the university were not enough well-known to me to bother explaining the permutations of my emotional life. It was just the beginning of a great shift in thinking: people could be married, or formerly married, and they could be gay. This was preceded by the devastation of the AIDS epidemic, which brought gay people widespread attention that they had not had before, and perhaps as much sympathy as opprobrium. For instance, when I went to my fortieth high school reunion in 1988 as a divorced man, seven years after the first case of AIDS had been identified in 1981, several classmates made an effort to tell me of young men in their neighborhood who were sick and dying of AIDS. I figured it was their way of acknowledging that the teenage boy whom they remembered as the queer, the fairy, the cocksucker was now endowed with a certain dignity known as “gay man.”

My young lover, in addition to having doubts about continuing to find this fifty-year-old man acceptable as a sexual partner, was also chafing at the fact that I was the only male with whom he had had sex. As he began to move about in gay circles he discovered the widespread promiscuity that was and perhaps still is the norm of the gay experience. He and I wrestled with the interesting question of whether gay males act out a promiscuity that is inherent in their sexual predilection or whether heterosexual males would be far more promiscuous than they are if they were not bound to a wife and children. When we talked about gay baths, I told him that I was not psychologically up to having a partner whose other outlet was serial sex in evenings at the baths, although what was more powerful was my inability to hear of a companion telling of his exploits. My belief is that sexual intercourse is either a love-filled experience designed to bind two people closer together or it is more in the nature of a bowel movement, designed for much-needed physical relief. As the latter, it need not be commented upon or even mentioned, for that matter. At the time I had been reading about what they were calling the “gay disease” that was spreading in San Francisco, which made me cautious from a new perspective. I had only twice in my life gone into baths. Obviously it was a different experience from making out with one’s high school acquaintances in the backseats of cars, and more like picking up hustlers from street corners and bringing them to one’s office. From the two times I was in a bath I would say that the difference is the anonymity, the fact that one can move from one to another naked body and indulge as one chooses without any personal involvement.

Oddly enough, the first time I went into a bath was in the seventies, in Boston, and remarkably after a Classics Department reception at Harvard to which I was invited as an alumnus. There I met a former student who was himself a classics professor at one of the nearby institutions. We both got drunk and left the party together, when, to my great surprise, he suggested we go to the baths in downtown Boston. I knew him only as a thirty-five-year-old conventional married male, so this was really a shock of adjustment. We rolled around naked with a bunch of guys there, then took showers, put on our clothes, and went home without commenting on this novel experience together. A few months later when I was having coffee with him I was startled to hear him tell me that he had been back to the baths. In the rigid theater of my mind I could not cast him as a gay male, especially since he did not in any way change his manner or voice from the conventional fellow I had known forever. Where was the mask? The facade? I have often thought of that. He and I were old friends, intellectuals sharing the same knowledge, both married with children, and, as the evening at the baths showed, both at ease with same-sex experiences. Why didn’t I build on that evening? Why didn’t we become lovers? Wouldn’t that have resolved problems of married life in Brookline?

My introduction to a sexual life had been with boys I knew well; I knew their families, where they lived, often their history, and it was from that context we could talk together before and after our encounters. That was my model for interaction with men who prostituted sex; some of the most interesting conversations I have had in Europe have been with young men postcoitally sitting and smoking a few cigarettes and describing their lives to me in answer to my questions. I could recount meeting all sorts of interesting young fellows here in the States. I don’t think you get that kind of chatting in the baths. But the issue of the moment was that I was too old for my young friend, soon to become my ex-lover. He needed a greater validation of his sexual habits and of his body and person as performing elements in a sexual drama. So our breakup was all for the best for him. Good luck and God bless. We remained friends.

The fourth of the young men with whom I had serious romantic relationships was a student I noticed on the day of the inauguration of Ronald Reagan. It was also the first day of second term and he was sitting in my class. He used to make jokes about the coincidence of the first day of class and the inauguration, which is why I remember it. I remember picking him out of a class of twenty-five or thirty because he was ruggedly handsome and ugly at the same time, not to mention the unusually surly and unhappy look he could assume. Even when he showed his attractive side it was remarkable how glum he looked. I became more curious, even alarmed, and at last contrived to stroll with him from the class in the direction of the library, where we were both heading. We stopped at a bench on the way and chatted. I managed to get around to his unhappiness. He came from Colorado, had followed a girlfriend to Boston University, no sooner enrolled than she had left him to start up with another fellow. He stayed on. It was his second semester, he “guessed” he liked his classes; it seemed clear he was not an enthusiastic student, although his conversation marked him as intelligent. It was his first experience of the East Coast, which he did not like. He particularly did not like all the Jewish girls at Boston University; they weren’t like girls back home. I could just imagine what the girls were like in his suburb. It was mostly Catholic, he said. He was an indifferent Catholic becoming more definitely lapsed. He was particularly repelled by the gay boys in his dorm and at the gym, where he played a lot of pickup basketball; they were always trying to hit on him, he thought, when he was showering. All of this was said in an angry voice, which was his most common mode, I could see. He used to work for a gay man at a newspaper in Denver, and once he and the guy had gotten it clear that they were not going to get it on, they were easy with each other, but these gay boys in his dorm, in the showers, he claimed, would not take no for an answer. He found it disgusting.

His Marlboro Man western swagger, gruffness, and angry tone, combined with the inevitable boyishness of being twenty, I found particularly charming. I contrived to talk with him whenever I could. As the weather turned warm I planned to install some used lumber as a fence at my property in Cambridge and asked if he would like to earn money helping me. He abruptly volunteered to work for free. Our work together on this project was, I am sure, what most fathers and sons experience, although my sons and I had never gotten ourselves into this. He and I fought over every detail. I am by nature a controlling figure; in this instance I was twice the age of the man who was working for me. The young guy had a westerner’s contempt for effete easterners, and it was all too clear that he thought I was a typical effeminate literature professor who did not know a hammer from a nail, and there was something personal in these daily disputes too. We each wanted to control, natural enough for two males working on such a project, but it was more that we wanted to insist upon our personalities and identities in the confines of this two-person arena. So the matter of the argument—should the board slant this way or that? should the hammer pound down or up at this point?—mattered all too much. It was entirely funny, we were sniffing each other out, there was some kind of attraction that had nothing to do with the fence-building. I recognized that I found the kid attractive, that I would not mind jumping into bed with him, but of course I would never suggest it, because he would pound me, that was clear. His anger I just chalked up to the fact that he was that kind of person, maybe because he was from Colorado and cowboys all have that tough manner in the movies. Still, we became friends from talking during the lunch breaks I provided. It was clear that we liked each other. I told him he had beautiful eyelashes, to which he just looked glumly down at his half-eaten sandwich, and I felt silly.