My Husband and My Wives: A Gay Man's Odyssey (31 page)

Since I held a position of such prominence, and hence power, and was a “real American,” a “gringo,” I could get away with vamping it up quite a bit. I well remember one night talking to a woman during a break in the three-hour class who was introducing me to her husband. She was Hispanic, maybe thirty-three or -four (already a grandmother!), and he was Arab, nervously exuding a possessiveness as to make one wilt. Suddenly another woman student shouted a greeting to me across the hall, and I went over and gave her a kiss on the cheek—we had that kind of relationship. When I resumed my previous conversation, the Hispanic woman asked jokingly, “Aren’t you going to give me a kiss too?” and so I did, at which her husband was clearly incensed, although he tried to hide it by smiling in a most peculiar way. Suddenly I was infuriated, so I asked in the sweetest way possible, “What’s the matter? Do you want a kiss too?” and all he could do was grin as the crowd in the corridor hooted with laughter: “
El profesor está haciendo el gracioso de nuevo!
”

I was decidedly put off by the vociferous and frequent expressions of hostility and contempt for gay males that emanated from my African American male students. Nothing was directed at me, but they never missed a chance to make a negative comment about male homosexuality real or inferred anytime it cropped up in the discussion of whatever was the subject matter of the course. They insisted, of course, that AIDS was God’s punishment for gay men. Since we were not having a class on the idea of god, or god’s vengeance, or anything to do with the Christian religion, I held my tongue, although one time, following news reports of the fatal destruction of a bus full of children coming from a Christian camp, I insisted that if the same reasoning were applied here, one would have to say that God punished these children for going to a Christian camp. The idea was so shocking and heretical, my students digested it in silence, and no discussion ensued. On another occasion it was all I could do to hold my tongue from saying that perhaps these black males were thinking of relatives of theirs in prison who either submitted to or aggressively pursued male-to-male sex, which made them prejudiced against males genetically homosexual.

It was during this time that I had an amusing moment of opening the closet door a crack when I was invited to give a prestigious endowed lecture at a university in the American South, after which there was the usual elaborate drinks reception at someone’s grand mansion. The bar table was manned by a number of exceedingly nice-looking young African American males, impeccable in their white jackets. I was suddenly in a private conversation with a grotesquely drunk writer of some national celebrity who observed in a voice loud enough for the nearby servers to hear him, “We shoot niggers like these down here.” Shocked, angered, and humiliated for those young men, who could do nothing about this, I could only respond in an equally audible voice, “Really? Well, I would prefer to go down on them.” The line of servers could hardly control themselves for their laughter.

About this time I discovered the kitchen of God’s Love We Deliver, an organization set up to provide nourishing hot lunchtime meals for people with AIDS who were no longer regularly ambulatory. With the assistance of three professionals, volunteers manned the kitchen and cooked, boxed, and delivered the meals throughout all the boroughs. What began with thirty lunches was up to a thousand by the time I left the place. I worked there three mornings a week from six to nine, and it was one of the most satisfying jobs I have ever had, partly for the delightful mix of people who were attracted to the kitchen, needless to say, most of them being the most outrageous, theatrical funny men one could ever meet, but here and there sad parents of now dead or dying young men. When I moved back to Boston I naturally sought out the equivalent organization. It was, however, principally staffed by men on a stipend who were parolees, most of them black, and essentially hostile or at least grudging to the gay male volunteers like myself. So fuck them, was all I could think.

At the time of the catastrophe of September 11 the so-called religious leader Jerry Falwell announced that the collapse of the Twin Towers was God’s vengeance for the United States’s sin of homosexuality. I was interested to note that not one religious leader, or political leader, for that matter, took to a national forum to refute or speak out against him. One could think back to the early days of the rise of the Nazi party when no leader spoke against their vicious anti-Semitism. If I were given to speaking in a national forum, I would not be able to stress strongly enough to my fellow gay males that they are living in a fool’s paradise if they believe they are not totally vulnerable to the Christians. Some of the current politicians with their strategy based on an anti-gay agenda may seem to be a joke, but it is a dangerous one. Think back to the laughter directed at Hitler in the very earliest days. Democracies are so vulnerable to politicians who work to focus the voters’ instinct for hatred. It is hard to believe that the tolerance won with such a struggle through the fifties to the nineties is being so quickly eroded in so many parts of the country, gradually surrendering to the perverted thinking of evangelical Christians. How far removed from hate and psychic murder was the wonderful, loving world of God’s Love We Deliver.

In my other life as a professor I decided that Natasha, with whom I was on the most cordial and intimate terms, needed some romance. She was at loose ends after a failed relationship, and when I surveyed the males who were in the graduate program at the Graduate Center, I saw that they were either gay or rather dismal, except for one Greek guy in my Aeschylus seminar, who was not only good-looking but bright and very funny.
Aha
, thought I, and planned a dinner party. In order not to rouse suspicion, I also invited a kind of sidekick of the Greek, a Pakistani student who I could see was clearly gay. The party was for Washington’s birthday, and the theme was a kind of campy Americanism for three foreigners. That would be the pretext. I even made a cherry pie. Everything went as I had hoped. While the Pakistani and I compared notes on hair gel and other gay ephemera, the other two sat at their end of the table, staring into each other’s face, talking nonstop. Before too long they were in a relationship, and, a little later still, moved in together.

Two major events occurred in the next six months that turned my life around. First, I became the director of the Classics Program at the Graduate Center, where I not only taught a seminar but oversaw the formation of a consortium of the classics graduate programs at Fordham University, New York University, and the Graduate Center. It meant going to work on the fifty-second floor of the Grace Building, which fronts Bryant Park on Forty-second Street. It was amusing to ride up in the elevator with all the suits, lawyers, accountants, financial people, almost all of them male, whom in three years of shared rides I never heard speaking of anything but baseball scores. The offices and seminar rooms opened onto breathtaking views of midtown architecture. When I used our seminar room at gloaming I would always enter, stop everything by turning the lights off, and command the students to gaze at the incredible beauty only Manhattan can give at that height. There was the Chrysler Building, its art deco pinnacle shimmering in the sunset or twilight or night lights, whatever the time dictated. My God, it was gorgeous!

Forming the consortium meant hours of discussion, which went slowly or fast depending on the principals in various days of negotiation. Academics are attuned to the sounds of their own voices; some never seem to get over the ecstasy of listening to themselves, while others can move along with brief statements. I am not a patient man and was not at all so good in the role of mediator and administrator as I might have been. Proof of it all is that the day I stepped down from the position of director, and two years later the evening when I left the building after teaching my last class ever as a professor, no colleague said goodbye. I am sure they were opening champagne later in the evening in the Classics Program at the Graduate Center. It doesn’t matter in retrospect. The fact is the mission was accomplished, but more important was that I met some wonderful students, many of them friends for life.

And still more than that, I met my future husband at the graduate school. That was the second major change, more than a change, of course, but a dramatic rearrangement of my entire existence. He arrived in my life about two years before I moved into the executive officer’s position at the Graduate Center, actually at a Christmas party for students and faculty, which I attended because after Christmas I was going to be teaching a seminar in Virgil’s
Aeneid
. Richard was in his forties when he came to the graduate program, just another guy trying to resolve the midlife crisis we all go through. His career of teacher and administrator in a foreign language program of a private school in New Jersey was coming apart as he and the head tangled over goals and achievements. It seemed a perfect time to step back, go on half-pay, and try to earn a PhD in classics, since Greek and Latin were both well-known to him and the literature was something he had already studied. He was born gifted with that special something that allows some people to learn, retain, and speak foreign languages securely and easily. I am still amazed that Germans and Italians, when they hear him speak their language, ask him where in their country he was born; his Spanish is also first-rate, and, though he pooh-poohs it, so is his French.

He had met Natasha at the Graduate Center, and she related to me with some amusement his announcing, in order to forestall invitations for a date or for a drink, that he was a “homosexual and a recovering alcoholic.” That anecdote was delivered in the midst of a gossipy conversation about the graduate school in which she also described the pleasure she was having with her new beau, which motivated us to ponder how I had no one in my life, and from that, well, it is obvious I am sure, she mentioned this Richard Deppe, for that was his name, as a possible lover for me. She had grown to know him better, and they had gone from discussing classics to their love lives, and he had told her of his recent breakup. We thought up a scheme in which she and her beau could get Richard together with me. It was early December and the Classics Program was going to be having their annual Christmas party. They would invite Richard for a supper after the party, and then that very evening I would, as it were, be invited as a last-minute idea, so he would not suspect that there was a setup. Richard is such a guileless person, and by nature so optimistic that he never, ever suspects plots, schemes, and subterfuges.

Everything went as planned. We had a spirited meeting at their house, talking of, among other things, the course I was to teach on the
Aeneid
, which Richard himself was taking. If he had been a youngster I might have thought twice about pursuing a relationship with someone who was about to become my student; there is too great an imbalance of power. But since we were, as I saw it, both of us professionals, already ensconced in careers, there did not seem to be any serious conflict of interest. I have always wondered if the gossipmongers and scandal-bearers in the department had wanted to make something of this as well, but I guess by the time they realized that Richard and I were an item the course was long since over, and he had decided not to pursue the PhD. At the dinner party I was the first to leave, and after the Greek boyfriend kissed me as Greek males do, and then his girlfriend did as well, Richard stepped forward and deposited his own lips upon my cheek. Aha, thought I, and departed.

I returned to Boston for Christmas, from where I wrote Richard a letter ostensibly to continue an argument we had begun at the dinner, but in fact to invite him to go with me to a fund-raising dance for a gay seniors organization in mid-January. He countered by saying that he would if he could bring me earlier in that same evening to a party that the foreign-language teachers in his New Jersey school were holding. The evening went perfectly. He arrived to pick me up five minutes early, foreshadowing a life of bliss for two people always anxious, always early, and aggressively intolerant of tardiness. The foreign-language party in New Jersey was amusing, as each one of the participants drew me separately into a side room to tell me how wonderful Richard was, just like any church group promoting one of their own as husband material. The dance was a revelation of the fact that Richard and I dance the foxtrot very well together, and can take turns leading and following with equanimity—remarkable in two such controlling males. In the middle of the evening the organization paused to auction off a week trip, airfare/hotels for two, to Puerto Rico. Richard immediately put in a bid, and stayed in as the dollar amount rose. I knew perfectly well that he was on half pay and not much of that in any case, so I insisted he stop this romantic foolishness. Then I suddenly thought that I was going to be sixty in March, had been thinking of something celebratory, had even thought of hiring a hustler to take on a trip. Now, much, much better, there on the dance floor I invited Richard to come as my guest for a week in Paris. It would be his school’s spring vacation, the Graduate Center would be on break as well, and off we would go. He accepted.

Since we had met in circumstances where men do not necessarily rip off their clothes directly thereafter—unless they possess the raging hormones of the very young—we had continued on our progress of getting acquainted in similar social situations. Before the trip to Paris, however, we had to sleep together. At last he invited me over to his apartment in New Jersey for dinner and the night. I was understandably nervous, since I had been away from male companionship for several years, and had said, “Thanks, but no thanks,” to the gay cop who had wanted to help. Richard and I both had to confront a sexual experience unique to each of us: neither had been to bed with another man who was older than thirty, and now a naked male age fifty-nine was face-to-face with a naked male age forty-six. You know the advice to the novice swimmer? Just shut your eyes and jump in. I think the equivalent is avert your eyes and start hugging.