My Husband and My Wives: A Gay Man's Odyssey (7 page)

How strange and sad it is that for the next sixty years I never questioned her response. That she did not sit by me, put her arm around me, tell me she loved me, cry with me over my sorrows, did not seem unusual to me then. Intellectually I have been convinced that the “normal” parent would have; otherwise I still don’t get it. Father Putnam, our Episcopal priest, changed for me into a monster of betrayal. Why did he not come to me first, talk with me, who was his acolyte at Holy Communion almost every Sunday, who was so often the crucifer at the later service, who was president of the St. Vincent’s Guild, the association of altar boys, at the church? How, I have often asked myself, could this brash young priest, new to the parish, have gone up to a woman on the street as indeed he had and delivered such information? How could he have been so blind to the limitations of understanding in a woman who was so obviously a product of a Victorian-Edwardian upbringing? One wonders at the fact that he went on to become the bishop of Oklahoma and was much praised by the people there at his death. At the risk of judging, which the Lord says is a dubious practice, I say that the swine had much to answer for when he met his Maker.

At Mother’s request—“hysterical demand” perhaps is better—I went to see him. He urged that we descend to our knees and recite the prayer of general confession together. When we got to the words, “We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness,” and I realized that he wanted us to have in mind the behavior that he had brought to my mother’s attention, I could not, would not submit to such self-condemnation. If nothing else, I knew in my heart and would go to the stake in my belief that I was without blame or sin for wanting sex with another male, of this I remained convinced, and I rose and walked out the door and I never entered a church again as a communicant.

I set off for the appointment with the psychiatrist the following day in complete terror. His office was in the psychiatric hospital, not too distant a walk from our home. It was not quite twenty-four hours since Mother had accosted me. Since then she had spoken to me in measured somber tones of trivial matters upon the occasions that brought us together. I truly felt that I was going to go mad, such was the turmoil of emotions that I could no longer identify, sort out, or manage. Most of all I was trying to resist being suffused with guilt and shame. The absolute joy and excitement of sucking cocks, of taking cock up my ass, had suddenly become dirty, degraded. God, Church, priest, Mother all called me dirty. I kept hearing Mother’s “your name on lavatory walls.” In my mind I saw the words
Charlie sucks cock
as I had never seen them before. The mechanism of denial that had protected me up to this point failed, when, as it were, my mother, our priest, and the institution of God’s Church stood beside me in the smelly men’s room looking at the grimy off-white tile wall with the pen marks on it:
Charlie sucks cock.
I had never felt so depleted; I wanted to kill myself. Before meeting with Father Putnam I had gone to the library just across the street from the Episcopal church to look up something on mushrooms, on poisons, but I was so sunk into depression that I could not even read what I was looking at. Now I struggled to walk smartly down the sidewalk that took me to the office of Dr. Miller. He, as fate would have it, looked very much like my late father: gray at the temples, a mustache, steely eyes, a severe compression of his lips when in repose. I quailed.

“What is your problem?” he began quietly and soberly. I began to snivel, and, through my coughs, stammering, and sniffs managed to mention as abstractly as possible my sexual interests.

“But, I mean, what is it exactly that you do with these boys?”

“What is it that you are doing, Charlie?” he said again when I could not speak, and I heard an empathetic tone in his voice.

“Fooling around,” I mumbled in reply.

“Fooling around? How?”

“With the other boys,” I whispered.

“How? What do you do?”

“Just fooling around.”

“Yes, but what exactly? You take hold of them?”

“Yes,” was all I could muster.

“Take hold of the penis?”

“Yes.”

“Put it in your mouth?”

And so it went, detail by detail. Slowly he drew from me explicit detailed statements about the sexual acts. The transformation in my feelings was swift. Whereas before I had been trapped, cornered, cowering before the onslaught of my mother and Father Putnam telling me that what I did was evil, suddenly I was the author of my acts as I spoke them. They were mine, and nobody could take them away from me, alter them, give them another meaning. The sentiment may not have lasted long, but its immediate liberating effect stayed with me for a long time, really forever.

There was silence when I finished my rather slim litany of the sexual behavior and positions I had so far managed. Dr. Miller puffed on his pipe, another maddening similarity to my late father.

“The problem is…” he said at last, taking the pipe from his mouth and looking me directly in the eyes, “the problem is that you need to be more discreet. You know, you are a little too emphatic, too obvious. Keep a lower profile; that’s what I would recommend. People tend to talk, you know.”

Benediction. We said little more; I departed and walked slowly home. My chest, which had felt in the last twenty-four hours as though it had been shut, turned in, hardened almost to the point of denying my breathing, suddenly opened. I was too exhausted to be happy, too apprehensive of Mother. But Dr. Miller had called me whole, had called me sane, had called me normal. It was not the substance, but the style. “Need to be more discreet.” The words stayed with me like the kindly squeeze of a hand on the shoulder.

The gay community has its stories of the ugly sessions between hapless youth and ponderous shrink as the latter tries to wrench the psyche of the former around to some kind of “normal” behavior, whether through words, shock therapy, or some other kind of demeaning resistance to what is obviously a natural instinct. I was so very, very lucky. In those three days I had confirmation of some basic truths: first, that I could never count on my mother’s emotional support; second, that I knew in my heart and soul that if there is a god, he, she, or it would want me to be as I was; and, third, that an adult, a doctor charged with healing the sick in spirit and soul, a man whom fate had made resemble my father, had let me know that there was nothing wrong with anything I had been doing.

Another profound change in the emotional landscape was that I was no longer dishonest. Perhaps my mother would never bring up my sexual orientation again, but she would know what it meant for me to stand next to a good-looking male, what it might mean to see me coming out of my bedroom in the company of one, or going off to the movies; most of all she would not be urging pretty young girls on me as date material. What I learned years later was that she sometimes talked to my older siblings about my gayness, that she confided in her favorite sister-in-law, who also had a gay son, that she discussed me with the psychiatrist more than once, but she never said another word to me. Paradoxically, a profound truth underlaid our dishonest relationship, however much unspoken. Once in the more enlightened 1970s I had a young boyfriend who, shortly after we began our relationship, announced that he intended to tell his parents that he was gay. The old fogy in me counseled caution and silence, whereupon he said, and I shall never forget: “I don’t want either of them to die without knowing me as I truly am.”

And I think of all the men and women who have lived their lives entirely as a lie with the people meant to be most profoundly intimate with them. Nothing could be sadder. I have friends who cry at the mention of their dead parents and don’t know why, but I am sure that they ache over the basic lie of their relationship. I was also lucky that I never had to experience the long, drawn-out trauma of resistance to and then surrender to the process of “coming out.” Whether they liked it or not, everyone in my hometown had to recognize me as a “queer,” “cocksucker,” “homosexual,” “different,” whatever.

Ironically enough, my school friends forced what might be called an entente cordiale, whether or not they really knew what they were doing. It is the gang—that is, the clique of “nice kids”—I am talking about. Who was this group? They were the ones who ruled the roost in the school, the ones who were never without a date at the school parties, the boys and girls who held all the elective offices, the youngsters with smooth skin and minimal pimples, the students with high grades, warm and winning personalities, the ones who were in some aggressive pursuit of their ideals and dreams. The gang was invited to some girl’s home for an outdoor badminton game followed by something to eat in the cellar recreation room. I was invited as usual. Why? Well, because, as I said, the girls all seemed to adore me. Probably the truer answer is that no one could figure out how to drop me. I was too suitable, desirable, attractive—I had the use of a car, was good-looking, a super dancer, and had lots of pocket money. There was just this one teeny-weeny dubious aspect. We ended playing badminton illuminated by the headlights of the cars parked in a circle. Then it was time to eat and the girls filed in and down the stairs. This was 1946 and the girls were supposed to cook, boys were supposed to stand around talking sports. I sensed danger out there alone with the boys and began to sidle toward the house to take cover helping to get the meal. No luck. I was cut off as the boys encircled me. This was a setup. I froze.

“Listen, you cocksucker.” That was Bill, Bob’s best friend, the boy whose knock I had not responded to the previous summer when he slept over.

“Okay, stop, Bill.” That was Bob. I was identifying voices. Partly my terror and anxiety had somehow temporarily blinded me, and the night was washing the light from the sky as well. Bill’s voice, indignant. “Me stop?” I saw him whirl on me. “He should stop, the son of a bitch.” Then they were all talking at once, and I was crying. The girls must have known what was going on, because they did not call us in to eat. Every one of those boys had a complaint against me. They could not stop using the term “blow job.” I whined and sniveled more. They wanted to “help” me, that was the thrust of this horrible gathering. I, like a dog who will lie down on its back spreading its legs so other dogs can sniff its crotch, yielded to their solicitude. It made me hate them, but it made me safe. If you think about it, it was a kind of odd coming-out party. Now all my old friends of junior high days who had angrily talked about me among themselves and practiced eyes-averted denial when they were with me, now they had finally laid cocksucking on the table, so to speak. I promised to reform, they promised to help me, not that they had anything concrete on offer. Never again did we mention it. Several of them now felt free in the months and years ahead to have sex with me. I continued to have sex with whom I chose, and they maintained a friendly stance. Oh, the joy of things unspoken!

Of course, when I married, and I took my wives back to high school reunions, it was as though it had all never happened. Then, when the marriages ended, the high school reunion crowd all had a story to tell me about a gay son of some friend of theirs. About twenty years ago I brought Richard, the Staten Island native, to give him a sample of “real America,” and the reunion banquet speaker had trouble when introducing the spouses because she could not get beyond “friend” to designate him, and I insisted out loud on “lover” or “boyfriend.” (I don’t know what she would have done with “husband.”) The whole room had a laugh over that, and one woman said later, “You know, when all this business about ‘gay’ came about, gee, it was nothing to us kids from City High. We all knew about that starting in the forties, maybe not the name, but what it was all about. All due to you, Charlie.” Coincidentally, not long ago I was introduced to a young fellow in New York City who remarked that his father had grown up in Iowa City. Further conversation revealed that the young man was gay, the son of someone I dimly remembered as a jock classmate. He told me that when he nervously confessed to his father that he was gay, the older man took it in stride, simply observing that he had known about such things since his high school acquaintance with a gay boy.

Suddenly now it was summer again, and I was free of having to hold the psychic carapace in place throughout the school day. Bob and I were back working on the school maintenance crew, he pleasant but distant, which I realized was how it had to be. He was a true friend, however, because he had done me the favor of neutralizing his friend Billy, who ceased to be a menace. They were off to their summer athletics programs, so Bob’s complete absence from my life was not so hurtful as it might have been. He lived for baseball in the summer and basketball in the winter. I can only imagine how the boys in the locker rooms must have talked about me, although I am sure that none of those who had been intimate with me ever acknowledged that fact. Some evenings I would be part of a group of boys and girls who set off in two or three cars for the public swimming pool in the town fifteen miles to the east of us. There we would be a bit later, we boys, naked in the changing room, laughing and talking together with the inevitable snapping of towels, and among them would be one or two or three naked bodies or parts I had seen on other occasions and in other settings.

The odd feature of that summer was the new gang of boys that I picked up with, a crowd that was alien to everything I had ever known before. These were the boys or really in many instances young men of my high school who could be called the “bad boys” or “rough kids” or “losers,” depending on the degree of the speaker’s contempt. From shooting hoops in impromptu neighborhood games they often had a tenuous friendship with some of the “good boys,” but never, never with any of the “good girls.” These boys did not do athletics, they all had jobs, many worked as mechanics or filling station attendants; their hands were often greasy, their fingernails were a mess, their hair needed serious trimming. They drove older-model four-door sedans that they kept in perfect repair, some restructured after their own designs, usually with powerful noises coming from the exhaust pipes. They lived in the “wrong” parts of town, some of them lived in trailers, often alone with their mothers; fathers were often absent, off on a job, in the military, or simply drunk. Some of them had been in the reformatory for juveniles, some of them had been kept back several grades. Joey, my first local fuck when I returned from Andover, had graduated into membership in this gang, and some time or another when he and I were making out in the school parking lot, one of his buddies came by for a little action. Before long I knew them all.