My Husband and My Wives: A Gay Man's Odyssey (6 page)

That year and the two thereafter provided me with many surprises. There was the boy in my sophomore botany class who, while passing out lab materials, whispered, “After school, top-floor can.” I met him that day and many others, a nice quiet kid who discovered a source of sexual gratification. There was the one and only black kid, whom I ran into as we were trying to find a way to scale a wall to get into a state basketball tournament for free. When we failed at that we turned to something else, which developed into a habit, about twice a week for the next several years, because racial mores prohibited his going near white girls. He was a star athlete in our school, whose years with me, as he once told me with a chuckle when we were in our fifties and having dinner, required a real adjustment to women as they came into his life. There was the carload of three athletes who sought me out one night, one of whom was so entranced by the experience that, without ever telling his buddies, he was with me twice a week for the next few years. Our relationship in fact continued into the years of his early marriage, when he was a college student and his wife was working. Conveniently enough they lived in student housing, where I would visit him, and because for the first time we could lie down in bed, I sometimes entered him from behind, an experience we never acknowledged. Another athlete, a university school track star, sought me out, and in the course of our meetings described some anal stimulation he claimed to have “learned about in Algiers.” That led to his lying back on the car seat with his legs in the air while I pumped into him, furiously trying to finish while he kept shouting, “Hurry up, this hurts.” But, as the expression goes, practice makes perfect, although it was not for at least a couple of years that he was able to admit it, moodily confessing that he had “some kind of problem with men.” As in, maybe, he liked to get laid? Once, in an evening of sheer delight while we lay on a blanket in a secluded meadow and practiced a variety of treats, he took me in his mouth, but when I came he spat the liquid out and said quietly, “Not for me.”

Males react differently to anal intercourse and to fellatio. The ancient Greeks celebrated male-male relationships, preferably a man in his thirties with a teen; they coined the word “pederasty,” although they did not mean ugly exploitation and misuse of preteen male children. In this relationship they valorized anal intercourse. Fellatio was for female prostitutes. The same could be said of contemporary Arab culture, where males have offered to enter me when I requested sex, but generally balked at my wanting to fellate them. Once in a bath in Tangiers a married man in his late thirties who had been my guide to the city that day, and who had accepted my invitation to him and his wife to a restaurant in the evening, allowed me to use my mouth on him, but told me with amusement that he had not had such an experience since he was a youngster. In Afghanistan there is the well-attested and commonplace Pashtun custom of dressing up beautiful young boys and using them as the equivalent of female lovers; no doubt this centers on anal intercourse as well. Males have inhibitions about the masculine performance of fellatio; I remember a fellow countryman of my Turkish brother-in-law asking me for sex, and when I refused to let him penetrate me but offered my mouth, he declined.

In U.S. prisons, where straight males are often forced to perform as the passive partner in anal intercourse, one does not hear of them doing fellatio. Males who patronize transvestites in the areas of prostitution in our major cities pay for blow jobs, usually understanding quite well that the people offering their services are males in drag, but they would not seek out a self-identified male doing the same thing. Nowadays in the United States one hears that teenage girls will fellate their boyfriends. That must eliminate gay boys from the action, poor guys, although contemporary straight teens, now that they have learned the concept “gay” and no doubt think “gay” and “straight” are opposites, probably refrain from even a tiny dose of gay sex, thinking that gayness is catching.

In retrospect I feel fortunate that I lived at a time when I could enjoy relationships, however limited they may have been, with so many great guys. I grew up in circumstances where I had little access to male company. As it is, males in our culture are notorious for their repression in expressing their feelings, or any other intimacy. A chance blow job is not a moment for “sharing,” as Oprah would no doubt put it. But the repeated experience of sexual intercourse, however it is framed, with the attendant moments of before-and-after sitting about, usually in a parked car, is a psychically intimate experience. I think of a fraternity boy at the university with whom I met often, always in my car, where we graduated from the simplest oral-genital transaction to the exposure and manipulation of his naked chest, and his fondling me, albeit through clothing, and finally to long, wet kisses before, during, and after his orgasm. Our last encounter was when a friend hailed me from a parked car in downtown Iowa City, where he was sitting with his girlfriend and, lo and behold, this same guy, his fraternity buddy. Of course, I did not acknowledge that I knew him; it was obvious that my high school friend had summoned me over to exhibit one of the wits of his hometown. What was ironic was that I had a far more superficial relationship with my high school friend whom I had known for years than I had established with the other fellow.

There are those who pity me for coming late to the full realization of the various attitudes and experiences of homosexual lovemaking. I concede their point, but I must insist that when my straight partner was a totally agreeable fellow I was strenuously aroused by the correlation of anticipation, by the delight of feeling in control with males whom our culture has designated as in control, modulating their rising passion, practicing the slightest retard, feeling my own surge of power as they surrendered all control at orgasm. Once, when I was in my late forties, because of an amusing mistaken exchange of instructions and telephone numbers with friends abroad I found myself in the hotel room of a major American professional athlete. It was clear that he knew I was gay, and that it would be acceptable to act on the fact; there was no doubt that he was gorgeous, if a giant, at least a foot taller than I. His twenty-five-year-old brown body, which was perfectly sculpted, made me think of nothing so much as the Riace bronzes in Reggio Calabria. To have this huge creature thrusting into me, groaning and shouting in a deep baritone, thrilled me, particularly the moment when he erupted into paroxysms of ecstasy, when it seemed that he had lost all control and I was dominating him. Afterward in our mutual postcoital repose I looked up at the ceiling over his shoulder, realizing that I could not move out from under him without his permission, which made me consider for the first time what women experience as the norm. He was a witty, intelligent man with whom I had a memorable half day, more treasured because coincidental and unexpected. I can’t believe there would have been the commonality between the two of us, separated as we were by age, race, education, interests, if we had not chanced upon sexual intimacy. Clearly he and I both would have liked to spend more time together, but he was only passing through on his way home to his family.

My sophomore year in high school did not improve as it continued. With the end of winter came another of Mother’s bombshell announcements, this time that she had put our house on the market and we were moving. The house she had chosen was a compact fake colonial two-story, four-bedroom dwelling with the conventional one and a half baths, living room, dining room, and kitchen, set on what real estate agents would call a “decent-sized” lot. It was one of four or five homes built in the postwar development of a forested spit of land adjoining an established neighborhood, a great place for a man with two kids who had just made tenure at the university, someone on the way up. Did she feel as I did that coming from our large house on the hill we would be more or less camping out? She did not comment, but then Mother was not the kind of person to dwell on the apparatus that formed the sets for her life’s performance, nor verbalize her concerns; if I had been less the self-engrossed teenager I might have noticed what she had been experiencing: the servant class had decamped, and managing so large a house without servants was becoming intolerable. I did indeed feel guilty at my impotence watching her struggle to take the spent coal (called “clinkers”) out of the giant furnace, a task which the fragile vertebrae of my lower back made a physical impossibility. In our old house there was a lot of enforced walking about: the kitchen had the stove, the pantry had the refrigerator and sink for washing dishes; there were only two telephones, one in the lower back hall, one in my mother’s bedroom, and the recent war prohibited additional service. With no one in the kitchen always available to pick up after the first few rings, running “to get the phone” was, I am sure, one of her nightmares. I imagine our aged gardener must have come to shovel the myriad walks, stairs, and driveways that ran about the property.

I often wonder what giving up that house meant to her. It was the locus of her married life, where she raised a family and entertained on a grand scale. The new house was more the setting for the life of Mr. and Mrs. Cleaver. At age fifty-five she was going to learn again those cooking skills she had once acquired at Fanny Farmer’s Boston Cooking School. Her new kitchen, with its vinyl floor and Formica table and counters, was also the room in which we would be eating, since there was not only nobody around to cook the food, there was no one to serve it—and come to think of it, no one to make the beds and dust the floors. Since she was a tight-lipped adherent to the code of “Never complain, never explain,” I have to imagine that wartime wage inflation made the cost of a staff more than she could afford, if indeed she had found anyone in the forties who still wanted to go into domestic service. Our meals resembled what one ate at a club: a lamb chop, a steak, roast beef, calf liver, roast chicken, with a rotating selection of vegetables and a salad. I’m sure the stiff drinks she tossed down beforehand made the routine meals and unforgiving setting palatable enough.

She was not opposed to youngsters taking a drink or two. I well remember her ordering me a bourbon old-fashioned in the restaurant of the Palmer House on a shopping expedition to Chicago, and growing angry when the waiter brought up the state liquor laws. Her improbable denunciation of the poor man, claiming that he was like a Communist stooge forcing some state law between a mother and her son, led to his surrender and the arrival of the drink. Still, Mother was no fool about drinking; I remember her drawing my attention to a friend of my sister who controlled the pain of his wartime injuries with heavy drinking, using him as a lesson for me in accepting the pain I endured in my back rather than surrendering to addiction. Still, she was willing to serve me a cocktail in the late afternoon before she set out to make the dinner. Because they unlocked our tongues into a semblance of friendly conversation, I always enjoyed our afternoon cocktails, although they began when I was only sixteen and we had just settled into our new house. They became a ritual, developed, I am sure, as an unconscious response to the impasse in our relationship at which we soon very dramatically arrived.

Any honest emotional bond between my mother and me died within a twenty-four-hour period in late April, a month after my sixteenth birthday, when in fact my world came apart completely. Every detail of the gruesome experience remains with me. One day, I was sunning myself on a blanket while reading a book when Mother returned home, came to the porch, and summoned me in. The tone of her voice was a premonition; the look on her face made me steady myself to keep from fainting.

“I have just been talking with Father Putnam,” she began in the coldest, most serious voice I think I had ever heard her use. “He has told me awful things—”

Waves of reaction crashed into my brain with howling sounds. I was desperately attempting to gain a purchase as the ground shifted, swayed, opened under me. Aristotle defined that moment in tragedy when the character realizes everything as anagnorisis. The moment, for instance, when Oedipus realizes that he is not the successful king of Thebes so much as he is the murderer of his father and the bed partner of his mother, the taboo figure created by a destiny that mocked his pathetic attempts to escape his fate. This was that moment for me. I think of the scene in the MGM film
Marie Antoinette
when Norma Shearer as the doomed queen is shown in close-up after the lackey has looked at the coin in his hand and realized that Robert Morley is Louis XVI in disguise. They are in their coach at Varennes trying to flee France, and at that moment reality shatters the delusion. I think of the second act of Verdi’s
Macbeth
after the king has seen the ghost of Banquo, as the guests begin to depart the banquet hall in horror, and the king and Lady Macbeth add their voices to the choral song as they realize that their dream is a delusion, their murdering Banquo to get on with their life won’t succeed. I do not know how much I must credit to innocence and naïveté, how much to denial, but whereas I had been blind before, suddenly in a flash I saw it all. The jeers of the students, the cruel barbs I could somehow let pass me by. They did not describe for me my condition, my situation. But that cold, precise voice coming from those almost pursed lips: “That your name is written on lavatory walls. That you are doing terrible things. I don’t understand what he is talking about.” That hit home. She shivered, shook herself as though to dislodge the incubus: “Horrible, terrible.” I began to cry. Everything was being taken from me. I had no foundation any longer. I felt myself sinking into some limbo where I was alone and without shape or form. “You must go talk with Father Putnam. I will send you to a psychiatrist.” I sobbed harder. Now it turned out I was crazy!

There I sat in the living room, by the picture window, the sun cloaking me in warmth … but no, that was not it at all, no, it was the sun like a naked bulb over the culprit’s head as he is worked over by some detectives attached to the precinct. And there across from me, somewhat by contrast harder to see—or was I blinded by my shame and guilt?—stood Mother. And then she was gone. Without extending a hand toward me, without any further remarks, she left the room. We were never to speak of this again in the eight years that remained of her life. In fact, we never had another honest conversation.