My Husband and My Wives: A Gay Man's Odyssey (5 page)

Although I got along well enough with the boys at Andover, I certainly did not like an all-male environment. They were a boisterous lot, the boys of Rockwell House, sometimes erupting from their rooms in flights of enthusiasm and jollity, running up and down the corridors bellowing at full voice, playing tricks on each other that verged on physical mayhem. Having been raised among women, I was put off by teenage male high jinks. When I went home for Christmas I began a campaign to convince my mother to let me come back home to City High.

The Christmas visit itself convinced me that Iowa City was the best place of all. My mother had encouraged me to host a dance during the holidays. I called it The Caribou Stomp, don’t ask me why. Invitations were printed up and sent. It was to be formal, there would be the forties equivalent of a disc jockey putting on and taking off the 78 rpm shellac records every three or so minutes. I had dance cards printed as well. It was certainly flamboyant, maybe pretentious, with maybe even a hint of the ridiculous, veering toward camp. Who knows what goes on in the brain of a fourteen-year-old about to blossom? The dance was a great success. All the many friends I had made in junior high school were there, as well as the old friends from my earlier school days. It was a moment in my life that I would never visit again. Yes, there have been other gatherings, other outpourings of affection over the years, but never again would I know the pleasure of blending into the crowd, of being at one with my peers and colleagues. Within a short time I would come to know affection, when affection was there, blended with amusement, or condescension, or acceptance, or forgiveness—take all the vocabulary for the attitudes with which one views a freak, an anomaly. In every other gathering in later years I had to hold the crowd at bay; whether dancing, dining, toasting, laughing, telling stories, flirting, charming, I was always cornered.

TWO

SEX, LIES, AND HUMILIATION

Charles Rowan Beye, Class of 1948, Iowa City Public High School
(Kadgihn Studio, Iowa City, Iowa)

By the time I came home in June after my Andover year, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had died in April and the Germans had surrendered in May. These were dramatic changes—Mr. Roosevelt had been president almost my entire short life—but nothing compared to the personal upheaval I was about to undergo in the following months. At the moment I was just happy to be back with my friends, most of all Bob, whom I had met when I started in junior high school. Now he and I started a summer job working with the public school maintenance crew refinishing floors. Despite my mother’s support for the highest ethical standard in the school board’s dealings, she was not above a little nepotism, although her capacity for ignoring conflicts and unpleasantness did not desert her here. She managed to describe the job as something the school Buildings and Grounds Department had brought up all on their own.

While I thought everything was the same, I was radically changed, although at first I was completely unaware. It is hard at this distance to imagine my naïveté, my innocence. The reason I did not register that I had an unusual sexual interest that was a crime or a sin in the eyes of most people was that I had lived a sheltered life. Up to this point I had never heard anyone talk about sexual matters, period. Hard to believe, but true. Boy-girl relations were founded on the Judy Garland–Mickey Rooney paradigm, at least in my blinkered sense of things. I remember once a girl in my sixth-grade class talking about seeing what must have been a spent condom floating in her parents’ toilet bowl, about which she was snickering with classmates. They did not enlighten me and I did not ask. I was probably not particularly dim-witted; in my earliest years I lived in the nursery, the lone male among women; later my father was dead and my brother was either off at football practice or had headed east to college. I didn’t play sports, so the only male who crossed my path with any regularity was our gardener. Neither of the two boys with whom I’d had sex at Andover remarked on its being unusual or perverse. They simply accepted it and enjoyed it, except when Warren had had enough. In his angry rejection of me, however, he never said anything like “freak.”

Over the course of the summer I had three important experiences. The first occurred on a night when I invited Bob for a sleepover and he brought his friend Billy along, another neighborhood kid, who had transferred from parochial school. The little cottage out near the cherry orchard had two beds in it, and we arranged a mattress for Billy on the floor. After a bit of conversation Bob dropped off to sleep. Billy climbed up to my bed so we could go on talking without waking Bob. The next minute we were fingering each other. My experience at Andover made me ready for something more erotic, so I asked Billy to suck me off. I thought he would refuse but then ask me to do him the favor. Instead, he laughed at this as though it were a joke, so I laughed too. Then he climbed down to go to sleep. Moments later he knocked on the wood frame of my bed. I thought he wanted to masturbate and wanted to assure himself that I was asleep, so I kept still, curious to hear him. I heard nothing.

It’s a long story, my relationship with Billy, but I think it all began that evening. When the outcry over my behavior became the talk of the town, Billy was in the forefront of angry denunciations and threats, sometimes even with a band of his former classmates from the parochial school. Years later when the dust had settled, so to speak, and we must have been seniors in high school and he was more or less a friend, he invited me for a sleepover when his parents were out of town. Odd that I went, odd that he asked me. In any event, there were a couple of other guys as well, old friends from parochial school days, and the four of us sat in our underwear in Billy’s bedroom playing poker until finally we went off to bed. Which room the other two went to I do not remember, but I chastely slept the night with Billy, who rolled himself in and around me, in the deep sleep of someone drugged. I saw him thereafter at all the high school reunions, and he was always especially cordial, almost sentimentally friendly.

Do I say to myself rhetorically,
Go figure
? No, I say, after thinking about this for years, that on the fatal night in the playhouse Billy had knocked on my bed because he had suddenly figured out—he was a little slow on the uptake—that an invitation to a blow job could go either way. His reputation in high school was of a horny young devil (women at the reunions were always remembering his unwanted attentions), and I think if he and I had made out that night, he never would have erupted into the angry censor of the next few years. The jury is still out in my memory chamber as to why we four were playing poker in our underwear the night of Billy’s sleepover. From other experiences I had in those days I would have said the boys thought they would get some action but were too nervous to ask for it; by then I had moved along enough in my relationships with other boys to wait for a definite hint, if not an outright request.

The moment of crisis occurred in the summer months of 1945 when I propositioned two boys, which set off the incendiary gossip that destroyed my reputation. They were neither of them boys I knew, other than by sight as classmates. The one, Joey, was finishing at the urinal in the men’s room of the town recreation center when we stared into each other’s face and in this locale, reminiscent as it was of the bathroom where I had first encountered Warren, I was inspired to suggest what I did. It was late afternoon, we were both of us on our way home from our summer jobs, and needed to pee. The recreation center was open but deserted at this hour. Joey was quickly satisfied, and left with no more words than a quick goodbye. The other, Tom, I encountered walking on the street near my home on his way to his own in a section of town that lay beyond geographically and at an even greater distance socially. Something about Tom and me in our walk and talk inspired me to allude gingerly and obliquely to sex between boys. He responded alertly enough that I invited him to come with me into the grounds behind my house, past the cherry orchard to the clubhouse at the top of the small barn. On the way I made a quick detour into the house for some Vaseline, because Tom had implied something more complicated than the quick exchange with Joey. Tom and I went about the business with scarcely a word exchanged between us, although the silence was certainly not threatening. Afterward I led him back down to the street, and we parted with a brief smile.

One day Tom called to ask if he and Joey could stop by together. This was out of the blue, but by chance I was free to say yes. How do I account for the fact that I was alone at home that evening? My little sister must have been at camp, my other siblings had all moved on in life, and my mother, very much a social person, was no doubt out. The boys came by with only one thing in mind, and I invited them for the same reason. Within minutes we were naked on my bed, Tom penetrating me from behind, Joey in my mouth. This produced a new charge of sexual excitement for me until I heard one of them say to the other with a snicker, “Hey, this is better than the whores down in Davenport.” The other laughed in response as I froze. Every illusion I’d had died instantly as my basic paranoia and distrust took over. Rigid with fear, I brought them to their climaxes. Their comradely salutes upon departure did not reassure me; trembling, I took a shower, masturbating mechanically to rid the pressure of arousal, and sat in my towel in the darkness of my anxiety and confusion, searching for a vision of what the future would bring.

It brought a lot of misery. The news of my queerness spread through the low-life teenage males of the town, and slowly infected the town athletes. I could sense Bob and the other males of my circle of friends politely withdrawing psychologically, although they had to maintain proximity because of my great popularity with the girls. These boys were forced into polite behavior, but there were other boys for whom I was a vocal object of derision, boys to whom I was personally unknown, boys from parochial school, for instance, or the boys who worked or farmed and did not play sports, and therefore, as things go in public high schools, did not sit at the “good” tables in the cafeteria. The onslaught came from all sides and intensified when school began in the fall, as I took to riding a city bus out to the high school, jammed in with a million other kids, where crowding encouraged the cowardly anonymity of an ugly shout. “Cocksucker!” I must have heard the word a million times that year, on the bus, in the school halls, in the downtown streets, over the phone, driving in my car. It made my heart stand still, or so I thought, every time. But I would not visibly acknowledge it. If I had to go downtown, I walked past the guys standing in front of the pool hall, and hoped for the best. Sometimes I did not get a rise, other times I did, but I smiled at the guys nonetheless, since most of the time only one had shouted the ugliness aloud, they had not all spoken, and I was, as a matter of public performance, their friend and they, mine. That was how I maneuvered all the dangerous places that horrible school year of 1945–46, as I went from fifteen to sixteen.

What had been a private transaction at Andover grew promiscuous and out of control. For instance, I can recall times when a carload of boys pulled over to the curb as I walked along a sidewalk and one or more would shout out the window, asking for, sometimes demanding, a blow job. It was an ugly demonstration of power that instinct told me had to be blunted instantly. I did not hesitate, but took control by stepping briskly into the car, as though it were all my idea, and off we drove to a secluded spot, where I could have them off one by one as the others stood outside the car smoking.

The wrenching agony of fear was worst when I had to respond to an anonymous call. The voice on the phone said, “Be there in ten minutes,” and there was the click as the connection ended. I was afraid not to go out to stand on the designated street corner near my home to wait for whoever it was who had called, for fear of some scandal that might be visited on my mother. They came by and picked me up, always with the merest muttered greeting. It was like a gangster film in which I was the man picked up by the toughs who goes along in silence to the place where they are going to kill him, and he knows that they are going to kill him, and they know that he knows, and there is this chilling complicity. Except that here it was all about blow jobs, and I was hoping that these boys were out for pleasure and were not hostile. My goal was to make the occupants of the car, one of whom, to my mind, had just assaulted me on the telephone, not harm me in any way, whether physically or verbally. And as we drove along I made conversation. I did all the things that I knew you are supposed to. I asked the boys about their sports, their jobs, I was giddy with goodwill and chatter. Most of these boys had rarely, if ever, encountered witty banter. It is not something males are ever good at or even know they like, particularly working-class kids. And thus I began to disarm the boys of the town.

These strange, tense expeditions happened a lot in that school year. In every instance, boys whose initial stance was hostile, whether for reasons of class, homophobia, or a combination, were tamed—I thought of them as unpredictable ferocious animals—to the extent that there was a goodwill when I left that car that had not been there when I’d entered. I exercised rigid control over my feelings, as well as forcing myself to the most powerful exertions of social interaction in which I had been taught as a child. In that car I was an object of fear, of curiosity, of gratification, but my capacity for hypnotizing conversation, the celebrated social skills of Mother’s drawing room, gave me dominance. Not once, not twice, but every time. How I remember the tension headaches!