My Husband and My Wives: A Gay Man's Odyssey (9 page)

It was in the spring of my junior year, two years more or less since I had discovered sex, that I started a relationship with a man who reciprocated in every way. Leonard was an older man, a veteran of twenty-eight, who took me to his apartment and made love to me. It was true lovemaking, since he was more interested in bringing me to orgasm in every way imaginable than in his own pleasure. His passionate kisses were the first I had ever known apart from a couple of kids who got carried away in the moment. He was handsome, warm, and very funny, as we lay in bed talking, particularly about his war experiences in India and Burma. He made me smile inside, all through my body, and I could feel myself warming into affection and love, until he delivered the chilling news that he was married. I suddenly looked around the bedroom of the apartment to which he had brought me, and sure enough there were photographs of the happy couple everywhere. It was two o’clock in the afternoon and he, the student on the GI Bill, was getting fucked by a high school teenager while his wife worked in the university law school administration to help pay the rent. Scandalized, I kept a smile on my face, but wanted to get out of his apartment as soon as I could. My ears were ringing in shock all the way home: I might have left the Episcopal Church, but the teachings of the Church were still very much with me.

Thank God I had Dr. Miller to talk to. His advice about Leonard, the married man, was that I was not to make moral judgments about him and his wife, that I knew nothing about their relationship, that I should concentrate upon what was happening between me and Leonard. So I went back to that apartment often in the next few years, even staying with him in a hotel when he moved away with his wife and children. Leonard was a perfect lover; it is clear that he was saving himself for no one else but his wife and me. Every time that we were together I was treated to pleasuring and loving attention as never before. But Leonard sternly insisted that we would not fall in love or become emotional, and so I had the experience of unfailing attention, scrupulous lovemaking, without any love whatsoever. Sometimes it seemed as hard for him as it was for me. Because my childhood home had not been graced with a loving couple as parents, my mother being a widow, I could cope with lovelessness, although I was growing impatient with sex without feeling and playing the game of love without its content.

My discontent was reinforced by an encounter I had with a varsity university swimmer whom I had met at the home of a high school chum he was dating. He called me one evening requesting a meeting and I went to it assuming he and my friend were having “love problems” and he wanted my advice about her. To my amusement, he blushed deeply and hemmed and hawed his way through a strained revelation of his desire to have sex with me. But my smile turned to surprise when he disrobed, leaned back in the car, lifted his long swimmer’s legs to brace his feet against the car roof, and invited me to enter him. His grimace and groan made me wonder if he was a virgin at this sort of thing, but he was persistent that night. We continued this way for a year, more or less, taking turns pleasuring each other one way or the other, although he laughingly refused to kiss. (“That’s not what I do,” implying he had had same-sex intercourse for years.) Then one day he told me, as though he had just thought of it, that he was a candidate for a government position that would require his being investigated and our continued relationship seemed to him a risk. Since he, like Leonard, had been so resolute against any emotional investment, we had our pleasure that day and I never saw him again, only occasionally hearing about him from my school friend as he advanced through life’s stages of career, marriage, children. She’s dead now, so I will never get the denouement.

My introduction to romance was as flamboyant and memorable as a teenager could want, especially one who had been yearning so much for passionate attachment or its simulacrum when seeking sex. It all began in chemistry class in the spring of 1947 when my lab partner, the son of a Puerto Rican mother and a North American father, sighed in nostalgia for the island where he had lived as a child. His mother had left his father and was living in her family home in Río Piedras. His reminiscences were so compelling that I took them home to Mother, who, since she knew and admired his mother, who had once upon a time taught Spanish in the school system, eventually offered to pay both our flights to Puerto Rico if his mother, Carmen, would put me up for the summer and show me around. Carmen and I recognized we were soul mates from the moment we met at the airport. My lab mate had the Anglo-Saxon reserve and dour nature of his father; poor guy, he had no doubt steeled himself against the intimacy that inevitably develops in travel. After all, it was not your ordinary boy he was traveling with. But Carmen, this vibrant, beautiful woman in her late thirties, bored with living under her father’s roof, and looking for adventure, was all drama and vitality and crazy emotion, everything I had always thought a Caribbean woman would be like (not exactly Carmen Miranda, but going in that direction.)

She had been told I liked theater and the arts, so she produced a twenty-one-year-old drama student from the university in Río Piedras. He was dark, handsome, with a pencil mustache, attentive dark eyes, and a smile that revealed white, white teeth. As they say in romance literature, I almost swooned. Miguel took me on a tour of the university theater, guiding me along with a little pat here and a little pressure there to the arm and shoulder, gestures that by the afternoon seemed positively erotic. The next day on a tour of old San Juan we stopped at a friend’s apartment, where Miguel, as I by now had expected, took me to bed.

For the very first time in my life, after four years of sexual experience, I was in the arms of a man who was making passionate and slowly fulfilled love with me. Still, it was not reciprocal. Miguel was a type of Latin who thinks of himself as entirely straight, who treats a gay man well, gives him love, courtesy, understanding, excitement, but scrupulously observes limits. He enters his gay partner, he accepts blow jobs, but he will only help his partner get off with the friction of their two bodies. This did not matter; I was awash with romantic feeling. Carmen, who was living the affair vicariously, drove us out to places in the country down by the beach where we could dance together. Since in those days young peasant women were kept at home, males dancing together was a normal enough sight, and Carmen sat with us enjoying her drink, providing a kind of heterosexual context for what might otherwise have had too much of a homoerotic aura. How can I describe the sheer intoxication that began in the Cuba libres I drank at our table and continued on the wooden floor down near the resounding surf under rustling palm trees that shrouded the moon’s strong rays in the dancing rhythms that animated our bodies pressed close enough to sense the half-tumescent masculine energy that had vitalized our day? Whew, the memory demands the prose. The overwriting will nudge the reader to think of the summer as the theatrics of Carmen and Miguel, who, it is clear to me in retrospect, were filling an otherwise boring summer with first-rate romantic drama, produced and directed by Carmen and starring Miguel, as a kind of young Adolphe Menjou, exerting his sexual charm over an innocent from Iowa in the ingenue role.

First love usually has no compromises; I doubt that I have ever been happier in my life than in Puerto Rico during the summer of 1947. What no doubt made that happiness complete was Carmen’s approval. This was the first adult I had known apart from Dr. Miller who considered me normal. But Carmen also considered our lovemaking desirable, something to be envied, gloried in. She did everything in her power to foster the affair; she smiled widely and rolled her eyes with joy when I described my time with Miguel. We talked together of how handsome he was, what a natural lover he was. In the meantime my lab partner spent the evenings chastely talking with a sixteen-year-old girl he had met. Naturally they were always in the presence of her sharp-eyed aunt. His only liberty with this extraordinary beauty was to walk with her before supper in the plaza, a female relative always sidling along like a sinister shadow. He was forever complaining about the meager pickings, and I was meant to sympathize. As for my large-scale romance that was being conducted from the house in which we were staying and abetted by his very own mother, he never mentioned it. He talked of Miguel as my casual friend. The intimacy that arose from our sharing a bedroom would have been too compromised if he had had to acknowledge what I was doing with my body. I remember a furious argument he had with his grandfather’s cook, who was cackling with glee over having watched Miguel and me fucking one day as she peeked through a shutter. It was in Spanish but they did not realize that this gringo was sufficiently quick-witted to have picked up enough of the language to get the point. My lab mate was angrily insisting she lied. He could not accept the notion that the pristine heterosexuality of the room in which he disrobed and slept had been violated by his roommate using his own bed for sex with another man.

I came home a different man, if nothing else, a week late for the start of classes. Imagine the distress of our new high school principal when the son of the president of the school board made his late entrance. He must have heard about me, my antics in the school parking lot, certainly. Now here I was, a week late, dressed in shorts (unheard-of as street clothing for males in the forties), sandals (ditto, worn only by Jewish refugees on the university faculty, but at least with socks!), tanned (farmers in Iowa got bright red in the face; everybody else stayed indoors), with one ear pierced for a circle of gold (Carmen had persuaded me to do it). I was certainly oblivious to any dismay I caused. For the first time I felt absolutely comfortable with myself even in a setting where trouble always lurked. That there had been a sea change expressed by this moment of return was underscored when my mother persuaded my brother, back from the wars and at medical school, to pierce my other ear for the sake of symmetry.

It is odd that I never caught on to cruising for gays. I still did not really understand that such a category existed. Homosexuality was a term that I knew, of course. When I went weekly to the university film series there must have been gays in the audience, there must have been gays at least once in a while in the university men’s rooms that I must have occasionally needed to use. Once, as I was examining a flyer on a bulletin board while walking across the university campus at night, a man came out of nowhere and stood near me so insistently that I recognized it as a sexual gesture. We went into the building and up into his office and had sex. Why did I not absorb this event? Was I ignorant of the cruising glance? Incapable of recognizing it? Were the gay university students afraid of picking up a high school student? Did I look too young, vulnerable, and innocent? Photographs of the time seem to show me that way. The students were also much older as a group than college students nowadays, since they were mostly veterans in their mid-twenties. It is a mystery to me why I never met a bunch of gays then. Years and years later my nephew discovered himself to be gay as a young teenager in a remote midwestern community, and he has since told me that one of the things that sustained him was reading the
Village Voice
and knowing that he was not alone, that there was a whole community and culture out there to which he belonged.

One evening on the street I ran into a friend of my older sister, one of the many who was a regular at our dinner table when they were in class together at the university. He was another wounded veteran, and back then he had seemed so formidable, an older, big, gruff guy who exhibited a toughness that repelled me, although it clearly excited my sister, who must have staked him out as potential date material. Here he was on the street, suddenly looking at me in an entirely different way, appraising me. “Well, well, well, little Charlie has grown up!” he said in an insinuating voice—nowadays I would say in a very campy way. He invited me to his apartment and the door was scarcely shut before he began making advances. And then we were naked in bed. He lay on his back, holding his legs up and apart so that I could enter him. As I pumped away into this big, tough, gruff man, examining his graying hair, the scars across his chest and down his side, still livid and puffy, my ideas of masculinity were confounded. This was a homosexual? Afterward he was funny and mocking and then he wanted more. “Oh, do I like ’em big like you, sweetheart,” he kept murmuring. Even though I knew what he meant, I felt so small next to the hugeness of his war memories, his body, and personality. Much, much later he took me out for an ice-cream cone, and it was as if again he were the older man and I my sister’s little brother. As I watched him stand at the counter and order the cones, and looked at the big body in cast-off military clothing, I felt so distant. It was so confusing. I could not understand that he and I belonged to the same tribe.

In the summer of 1948, when I had graduated from high school and was getting a head start taking summer courses at the university, I encountered a man who changed the course of my life. We met in a way that was classic for gay males at the time. Not at the church supper or side by side at a concert, but in the bushes outside the university library, where I had followed him after catching him looking at me as I sat studying, following his gaze as he moved to the exit. Dan was another veteran, studying for want of something better to do. Shrapnel ended his dream of being a dancer, but he was determined on going to New York. We spent the summer evenings making love in his apartment and talking about Manhattan. I was determined to go too, and when I tried the idea out on Mother, she not only did not resist but surprisingly enough offered me an astounding $400, an enormous sum in those days when a workingman might live on less than $2,000 a year. As I have reasoned it out over the years, she had moved finally to accept the idea that I was homosexual, but the idea, the mental image, really, of me having physical relations with another guy—that was too much. I think Mother took the measure of my relationship with Dan and wanted me out of her life.