Chapter 1:
E-commerce
links for hardcopy of book containing this chapter (DADT 1997). The hardcopy text is slightly more explicit
in a few places.
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Note: This file is
slightly edited for compliance with the 1998 Child OnLine
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See consolidated
footnotes as updated since publication for Chapter 1.
See Section_01 Warm Fall
See Section_02 Initiations
See Section_03 House and Home, and Family Trips
See Section_04 Tribunals
See Section_05 Therapy 101
On the day after Thanksgiving in 1961, as I returned to my
dormitory room in Brown Hall at the
The note, written in neat, oversized, feminine penmanship,
ordered me to report to the Dean of Men at once and stated that the dean had
become concerned about the array of patent medicines that had been noted in my
room during "recent inspections."
I didn't know about the inspections, and even at age eighteen, I
was rather shocked that such dirty laundry would be aired for the public to
read, as if it were an eviction notice.
I
walked through a mild mist at early dusk, typical warm late fall weather in
Tidewater
Thanksgiving day itself had been sunny and fulfilling. My parents had come down and had taken me
along with a new college chum who shared my musical interests to the
But now I marched into Wren hall, the oldest academic building
in the
The office was dark, almost clandestine. I recall a little green
lamp on his orderly desk. He started by
thanking me for coming by immediately. I
reassured him that the "drugs" were harmless patent medicines¾neo-synephrine
nasal sprays, Rolaids, and especially iodine and glycerin for sore
throats. I had always been a high-strung
hypochondriac. We then talked very
quickly about my studies¾I had all A's at midterm.
“A couple of B’s probably
wouldn’t hurt you, he said, his voice still oddly somber.
“Your grading scale is actually easier here than it was at
Washington-Lee.” I still wonder how I
had made valedictorian, when one had to make 95% for an A and 81% for even a
gentleman’s C.
. The dean was not to be sidetracked; he moved quickly to obviously
more sensitive areas.
“Bill, please tell me, how do you think you are getting along
with the other boys in Brown Hall?”
For five whole seconds¾far too long to wait for a
car’s oil pressure light to go off ¾ my mind churned about two
adjectives, “latent” and “overt,” used to modify “homosexuality” as discussed
in a supposedly innocuous psychological self-help book[1]
right next to our 1950 World Book Encyclopedia,
so satisfying with its colorful topographical maps of all the states, in our
den bookcase at home. Now, I felt proud of a few of my high school friends, and
I had even come to feel secretly proud of my internal sexual arousal in their
presence. I felt good about myself by worshipping these friends! My feelings
had given me the capacity to identify and select, in my own fantasy world if
nowhere else, the best and most complete men. The other boys had visualized
their own powers as reflected in the sexual allure of girls. By courting young
ladies, they set themselves up for the tender trap of marriage; they would give
up their desultory “power” quickly.
These ostentatious boys didn’t even know about their own vulnerability, and I
wanted to teach it to them. My fantasies¾a potential verbal weapon¾were still just mental games, but they
pointed to a truth I wanted to tell. Boys cared about their own self-images and
their own bodies; they really didn’t care about women as equals (or as their
sexual superiors and their own futures) yet. After all (in subsequent military
parlance), “women are so stupid,” they’re “playthings” to dominate.
A comment my roommate had made a few days ago played through my
head like a warped phonograph record that got stuck. He had said, “I’m not
modest about my body. But I know it bothers you to go without your shirt.” It
did. We just had to be able to talk about these things.
Actually, the boys had brought it up anyway. Just a week ago,
there had been another sign on my dorm door, "Blow jobs from Golden Genius, 25 cents" (++offering sexual activity for
money+). I had quietly taken it down as if it were a Christmas ornament.
I made my announcement quickly.
"I have come around to considering myself to be a latent
homosexual," I said. With that statement, I had “pinned a label on
myself,” as my father would later put it.
"Now what makes you think you're a homosexual," he
said dispassionately, as if there were nothing particularly alarming about my
statement.
"I've never done anything, but I find myself
getting sexually excited around a few very select men that I admire, although I
don't tell anyone. It’s all just thoughts. That’s why it’s latent.”
The moon-faced dean sat very still. He maintained his calm
control by saying nothing for the moment and keeping the ball in my court.
“Oh, the boys,” I lectured. “I’m not alone with these feelings.”
They were all so curious about each other’s endowments, about where their
physical maturity put them in the male food chain. Some of the more homely (often
fat) men had suddenly become the most vociferous in bragging about their
conquests of girls (not grown women); actual performance in intercourse would
neutralize their visibly obvious inadequacies as man-likenesses. They would tease me late at night with
questions like, “Bill, what do you think of sexual intercourse before marriage?
Bill, what do you think of homosexuality?” My father had reassured me in a
letter that they must already feel guilty about taking advantage of “most
gorgeous gals.” They would soon give up opportunity, control of their own lives
and vitality to validate their “manhood” in sexual performance and perhaps by
getting girls pregnant; at least that’s how I saw them. I wanted to make them
admit it.
I realized I had talked myself into a trap. The somewhat vulgar,
dead-end male-bonding I had observed in some companions hardly approached my
own sensation of sexual urgency. I stopped.
He leaned back in his upholstered chair and spoke softly. “Well,
I had heard rumors that you’re a homosexual. Now, Bill, you don't want to think
of yourself as a homosexual.”
I should have challenged him with a contentious “Why?” Really, what’s wrong with being attracted to men? If I don’t date girls, that’s
somebody else’s problem. Then, I allowed myself to be mentally distracted by
the rumors. My roommate had said, “You put your hands on other boys’ knees,”
and I didn’t recall ever doing that.
“This is all just feelings inside me,” I protested, “and a
little talk.”
He
paused, like a jury member deliberating. “No, you’re not a homosexual. You just
can’t be. I think you just have some anxieties that we'll have to work out.”
“We all do.”
“But,
Bill, I really have to talk to your parents about this. Are they home tonight?”
I told him my parent’s weekend plans and immediately gave him
the name of those family friends in
“I don’t know the number. You can call information.”
“Well, thanks for the cooperation. Don’t worry," he said.
"I’ll track them down tonight and get us all together next week. I'm sure
we can work this out. We won't ask you
to leave school or anything like that."
I distinctly remember that promise.
It turned out to be a lie.
“Look, I’m glad you told me,” he added. “The day you admitted to
yourself that you’re a homosexual, you should have come to me.” Already, he had
contradicted himself. Maybe he knew I was telling the truth.
My parents must have been stunned to receive that long-distance
call out of the blue while they were on holiday¾these were the days before
direct dial and cheap rates, when a long distance call was a "special
occasion." But they appeared on
Monday night. None of us were very worried. I had believed the Dean. After all, I was in
the right.
On Tuesday morning, I went to the
My parents met me at the entrance to Rogers Hall, the science
building, and a few minutes later I had climbed into the back seat of the Ford Galaxie. It was
As I closed the backseat door, my father said, "This is
going to come as a blow to you, Bill, but we have to take you out of
school." He then explained that my
situation had been quickly presented to the president of the college and that
the college insisted that it could not take a "chance" of legal
problems if it allowed a "known homosexual" to remain in an intimate
dormitory environment, where there was at least a possibility of future overt
conduct or emotional trauma to other students. At the least, the College needed
to maintain order and discipline among otherwise rowdy adolescent young
men.
Being “asked to leave” William and Mary was indeed a setback.
I had
earned a chemistry scholarship the previous year, by grades and a competitive
exam at the College the previous April.
Except for $1.25 stuffed into my hand once for playing piano at a Cub
Scout function, this was the first consideration I had "earned" in my
life. My senior year in high school had
been eventful; it was the first time in my life I gained recognition in a
valuable peer group, the Science Honor Society.
I had been "initiated" into the society one pre-blizzard
December evening in the basement of my own home, as my parents hosted the
informal dinner for about sixteen of us, including a much admired physics
teacher. The "ritual" was nothing more than giving a technical talk,
which for me had been the speculative possibility of a life chemistry based on
substituting silicon for oxygen. Another
“initiate” gave a talk about the various kinds of white blood cells and talked
of “lysing leukocytes” (killing certain
immune-modulating cells), perhaps twenty years ahead of time. Before the talks,
we sat around card tables or at my undersized chartreuse ping-pong table (which
had given me a decided home-field advantage) eating fast-food fried chicken; my
friends even admired the wood-paneling my father had put into the recreation
room back in 1949, when the house was new.
Indeed, I was proud that this ceremony was held at “Boushka’s
house.” The evening concluded as the physics teacher, standing in front of a
calf-warming fireplace, spoke about the sudden importance of science in
preserving freedom.
In 1957, the Russians had
launched Sputnik, the first man-made satellite. A few weeks later, I cried when
reading in The Evening Star that the
Navy’s first attempt, the Vanguard, had exploded. Supposedly comfortably ahead
in the development of doomsday weapons, we quickly caught up with and passed
the Russians in space shots. Still, I
felt vaguely uneasy. Not too many years before, I had experienced the “duck and
cover” drills under grade school desks. I had grown up hearing “it’s a free
country” without clearly conceptualizing what “free” means; my father had said that in
Science, I had already noticed, provided a certain intellectual
shelter from uncomfortable thoughts and feelings. In biology, we had learned
about the basic functions of life: respiration, ingestion, irritability,
reproduction. Sex (whether pollination or intercourse), it seemed, could be
looked at with intellectual antipathy as no more than a natural selection
process.
The previous autumn had indeed brought a social “coming out,” as
I was around young men whose company I really valued. I would walk back to the
high school for Friday night football games with the hymn-tune from Brahms’s
First Symphony playing in my head, and then join my friends at our assigned
fund-raiser, selling cokes in the stands and during intermission. There would
be harmless jokes then about homosexuality, even my apparent homosexuality (a
“rumor” which started when I blurted out in chemistry class that a boy
shouldn’t kiss a girl “on the lips”). Once, I lightly embraced a couple of the
students as we made jokes that homosexuality was really some kind of
psychological, esoteric priesthood.
There were even lighthearted rumors that our esteemed physics teacher
was a homosexual, perhaps due to his total lack of interest in women. This was just a rumor; there had never been any kind of incident. The
teacher would suddenly resign at the end of the school year and complain about
the “social backwardness” of the
One friend, the “math” genius in the society,
introduced me to mountain hiking that next April (he used to say, “A hike in
the mountains is worth any grade”). Over
Memorial Day, we took a field trip to the
That summer, I formed a particularly close bond with another
classmate, who would that next fall go away to Virginia Polytechnic Institute (
The
The school system did an outstanding job of
teaching basic concepts of American history and government, and it started
early. In seventh grade, our
"general education" teacher drilled into us the facts about Brown vs. Board of Education (1954)
because she believed we would have to adjust to school integration in a matter
of months. That would have meant, for sheltered Caucasian kids like me, sitting
next to “Negroes” on school busses or in class, an idea that seemed unthinkable
to many people in those days. Even my father had spoken of the Bible’s “fixing
their bounds thereof...” The idea of integration didn’t bother me. I saw “black” people as different, harmless
outsiders; but then, so was I likewise not “like” everybody else. I dimly
sensed that segregation ultimately intended to preserve undeserved collective
economic advantages for us “Europeans” rather than to avoid directly the
“discomfort” of having slaves’ descendants living in our neighborhoods (but
not in our bedrooms). A few blocks from
my parents’ suburban home, there was a brick wall which separated the “colored”
(as people called African-Americans in the 1950’s) from the rest of us; the
wall came down during the 1960’s.
In grade school, the teacher would show a
history film and then order us to “write it up,” to test how well we had paid
attention. I could not imagine what the significance of all these legal and
cultural trends could be, until I started recognizing what was happening inside
me.
As early
as third grade,
In eleventh grade, I enjoyed a “Virginia and U.S. History”
teacher, himself a combat veteran of World War II, who insisted with
considerable controversy on making his exams all essay. He would require us to
explain in our own words such concepts as mercantilism, the bearing of
geographical concepts such as “the Fall Line” on settlement, the relationship
between secession and abolition, reconstruction, suffrage, the economic
depression cycle, and the differences between fascism, communism, and
socialism. He made us prepare an in-class book report on John Kennedy’s Profiles
in Courage[2]
and graded us on how much he “learned” from our comments. In the spring he
taught passionately that World War II had forced us to prove as a nation that
freedom “works.”
Since I had been born during World War II (in
1943), just before the winds of war started to turn the Nazis back, I had
already felt that I had woken up in the world at just the right time. Three
decades later, I would watch the events that set the stage for today’s version
of personal liberation on the excellent history serials of Herman Wouk’s The Winds of War and War and Remembrance. On D-Day, that stormy Tuesday morning about
fifty years ago, western civilization proved that democracy and ordered liberty
really work. Hitler had assumed that his “Folk” ¾young soldiers and workers
regimented by allegiance to the Nation State ¾ would prevail over those
“softened” by relative personal freedom. Hitler was proven wrong. Motivation to
serve family, faith, and country, and only then perhaps to indulge the self,
turned out to exceed “social” order, blind nationalism, mysticism,
hero-worship, and consequent unquestioning obedience. World War II had indeed
exploded as a conflict among “moral” value-sets that stirred passions far
beyond conventional political conflicts; a modern society had talked itself
into countenancing horrifying cruelty. By V-J day (and after Truman dropped
two atomic bombs) Americans danced in the streets on confetti August snow and
looked forward to personal rebirth and to unknowable freedoms and prosperity
ahead. In their celebration, they could not imagine how understanding of
morality, justice, and freedom would evolve in the decades ahead.
The history course had shown how the American
people would witness a full circle on the context of freedom, which had varied
from the rugged individualism and autonomy of the frontier, through a growing
grasp of community good and social justice during the many wars, back to a
modern individualism that would experiment with the form of social constraints.
Western civilization’s political dynamics would migrate back towards cultural
squabbles, away from “class struggle” or nationalistic racism,[3]
and from earlier dynastic state-system political conflicts, which themselves
had been derived from feudal times when the wealthy had learned how to build
the state to suit their own ends. Homo
sapiens, after all, had competed with other species (as dramatized when our
organism survives, minus 700 million individuals, an alien invasion on Independence Day); then races and tribes
(separated, according to Biblical lore, at the
Life had
been difficult for most Americans during and before the War, and one could
wonder indeed exactly what we were fighting for. My father had been just
barely too old to be drafted. Both he and my mother had always lived in rooming
houses until their marriage in 1940; they never knew the independence as
singles that I would. For four years, there had been nothing to do but win the
War; by first grade, I was barely able to grasp that I was living in the
sunshine that closely follows a terrible storm. In 1950, as I sat drinking lime Kool-Aid on
my grandmother’s porch, my mother suddenly said, “There’s war in
The
freedom that democracy protects for me had come to mean a freedom to excel,
succeed, and be recognized as “important”¾ having a visible position
of leadership. Theodore Reich describes this as Consciousness II,[5]
in which personal identity is enjoyed relative to “meritocratic” position in
organizational structure (or “corporate state”). In kindergarten ¾ where we were sent to learn to “behave” ¾ the teacher separated the class into
"brownies" and "elves"; I certainly did not get to be an
"elf." I saw the adult world
as one in which the smart people made it ¾ went to work in “good
clothes,” solved intellectual problems and made decisions ¾ and the others did the dirty work for them.
I vaguely knew that some of this manual labor
was downright dangerous: skyscraper iron-hangers often died, as had the
immigrant men who had blow out the tunnels for
Even
having been educated at an academic level about segregation and poverty, I
still viewed discrimination and oppression (even the witch-hunts of
McCarthyism) as other peoples’ problems. In
In my senior year, my government teacher continued the tradition
of political consciousness-raising. During the pre-Inauguration Day blizzard of
1961, we were required to write a complete comparison of Communism and
Democracy. (He should probably have asked for a third comparison, to Fascism.[7])
Then, to make a point about citizen participation, through networking as well
as voting, the teacher also made us memorize the names of our representatives
in the
House and Home, and
Family Trips
From my first memory of personal sentience at
age three, when my father showed me how to operate a Mars electric train making
a perfect circle around the Christmas tree, I had always been somewhat a
bookworm, and a mildly spoiled, but independently and critically thinking only
child. Modern psychology predicts that I will conduct my life conservatively
and always remain conscious of what I have to lose.[8]
My father, a sales representative for a glass manufacturer, often traveled from
our
I spent summers near
My father’s love of travel (he bragged he had set foot in all
forty-eight [Alaska and Hawaii were still territories or “possessions”] states)
carried over into my own adult life, when I would run around alone on many
adventures in Alamo, Avis, and Hertz cars (with unlimited mileage). Yet, in
ninth grade I did not go on a field trip to
From
about the third grade, I had always been the stereotyped sickly, "sissy
boy," so offensively described in Growing Up Straight.[10] Most homosexual men were not
"sissies" as boys and often have been competent to outstanding
athletes; the record of gays in the military has recently demonstrated this
publicly. But I did fit the cultural
notion of a "pansy" or
"pre-homosexual child,” someone who might never become “sexually
normal.” Through the first two years of
grade school, I had been regarded as a bright and pleasant schoolboy; then
suddenly, the teachers acted put off by my “problems” and refusal to start
“growing up.” We would play a game, called "soccer," based on the
rules of baseball, and one rule was "no bunts except for Boushka." Why I was physically weaker and more awkward
than I should have been, I do not know.
My parents say I was born with slightly deformed feet, which I
outgrew. The summer after first grade,
and well before any vaccine became available, I caught the measles; we know now
that this disease often causes very subtle neurological damage affecting such
areas as coordination, and perhaps this is the explanation. The other boys, who
called me “lazybones” at summer day camp, acted as if I would become a burden,
a “girl” for whom they would have to risk their own lives some day, and I
wouldn’t return the favor.
The measles event produced a curious little incident. I was
bedridden for weeks, and I remember going outside as I recovered to play in the
front yard and encountering a favorite playmate, Mike. We had sat next to one
another in first grade; one day, the teacher gave us all the “choice” between
white and chocolate milk for break, and Mike had made the “wrong” choice
because the chocolate tasted better. I had chided Mike, “You’ll get sick,” and
he had retorted, “I don’t care.” Well, he never got sick, but I often did. In just that month of my staying in bed with
eyes covered, he had grown perhaps an inch taller than me. I felt threatened
and yet curiously enjoyed a perception of his sudden dominion over me. Having
just turned seven, I suddenly knew I was “different.” He picked up on my
reaction and made a strange comment that sometimes “men can marry men.” The following year we would endure a seventeen-year-locust
summer. I would cry when seeing trees in
our backyard denuded, and Mike would notice that these insects would “sleep”
almost their entire lives, and “live” only a few weeks until they reproduced
their own kind. We noticed biology and nature early.
In the third grade, I also suddenly discovered an interest in
music and demanded to be given piano lessons.
I really don't know why, but music seemed to run in my blood. But in February 1952, my parents bought a
console Kimball piano, and I began private lessons in a basement a half-mile
away with a well-loved elderly woman. Music is a “universal language” (all the
more so than “esperanto”), she taught us in our
Wednesday classes. I developed an ear for romantic, yet logically expressive
music of European symphonic tradition. I
recall the music teacher characterizing “Allegro” as, “gay and lively.” (She also warned me that I must be a “normal”
boy.) I won several prizes in annual
solo piano competitions, called “festivals,” and remember her embracing me
after one recital in which all three judges had rated me “
I also started a record
collection and quickly developed a memory for musical literature. I can always distinguish Mozart from Haydn,
Brahms from Schumann, Mahler from Bruckner or
Strauss. Classical music, particularly European “sonata form” music which
develops and resolves otherwise conflicting motives, tends to organize the mind
to perceive connections between apparently unrelated concepts. Music, even when totally abstract,[11]
could promulgate ideas that might otherwise be unmentionable and bring them
full-circle to a conclusion through the use of thematic development and
tonality. Mozart, much more than Haydn,
associated key signatures and themes with specific personality types, often, in
his sonata movements (and operas), polarized roughly as masculine and feminine,
which did not have to correspond exactly to man and woman. By the early nineteenth century, with
Beethoven and Schubert (if not much earlier even with Bach), composers had
learned the “technology” of manipulating
counterpoint, harmony, and thematic sequence to induce mood and feeling in the
listener. European (especially German) symphonic tradition discovered that
emotional response could be highlighted by strict discipline and adherence to
rules of form, harmony and counterpoint (that is, polyphony, which means “many
melodies”). Music did not need to be “pretty” or tuneful; it had to make sense
and build up to a climax. By high
school, I would start a small classical record collection. I would ruin the
records quickly on a little RCA record player with sapphire styluses (already
an improvement over wood or steel needles). In a few years, I would graduate to
stereo and inner-groove distortion. I gradually began composing, often rather
perfunctory sonatinas with rather rollicking
repeating themes and accompanying alberti fragments.
By eleventh grade, I composed a big romantic Sonata in a Rachmaninoff-like
style. Later, I would write another Sonata in which I would exploit “atonality”
(specifically, the “twelve-tone” technique) to achieve emotional, post-romantic
effects, with no risk of subconsciously copying melodies heard before. I recorded it privately in 1991, and it now
sounds a little bit like Ives (the Concorde
Sonata) to me.
Music, in fact, would always bind together all of my
intellectual substance. Music would
fulfill the hope not for personal romance, but for romanticism, which (as we
were taught in English) is life as you’d like it to be. That was its biggest
paradox, that it demanded you get outside yourself. Leonard Bernstein, in
teaching students orchestra conducting at UCLA, would berate them for being
more concerned with themselves than with the dual themes in the first movement
of the Beethoven Fifth.
I also expressed an interest in drawing. When I was about
eleven, an older friend and I developed a hobby of drawing mostly educational
or scenic filmstrips (we called them “movies” ¾ a typical title was “The
Land of the Bible”), and invented a rather crude system of projecting them
(even in what we called a “CinemaScope” format) to a
basement audience with mirrors and flashlights. Once, we even invited everyone
to vote on our “academy awards.” Steven Spielberg, I suppose, took such a hobby
much further than we did.
In the mean time, I gradually became mildly competent in some
sports. I could actually hit a softball pitched at moderate speed and actually
became a baseball fan. I invented forms of fantasy and backyard baseball
(softball) to play with slightly younger boys in the neighborhood. Once, I had become angry when the boy ahead
of me in the batting order hit into a triple play, quite a feat in grade school
softball! I would design the rules (such as a force play at any unreached base and over the chain-link fence into a
neighbor’s yard as an out) to keep the run production reasonable; the boys
seemed to appreciate my imagination and innovative leadership even though I
threw softballs “like a girl.” During
the
By junior high school, I had established myself as a good
student; my father often urged that I follow a career in science, rather than
music, in order to be economically secure. Success in science offered the
opportunity to be part of an "elite," furthermore, I liked both math
and chemistry. But there was also a dark side to what was happening. I could lose my temper after the repeated
taunts of the "bullies." One time, I severely lacerated another boy’s
forearms when fighting back with fingernails! Also, I could be incredibly
insensitive and unaware of things I said and did. I sensed a difference in my
refusing to be like other boys, whom I saw as self-destructive through their
thrill seeking. A classmate complained that my handwriting was like a “girl’s,”
because other boys wrote “regular” (in an absent-minded scrawl).
In early June, 1957, just before the end of ninth grade and
junior high school, there occurred an incident of which I am more ashamed than
perhaps any other in my life. In another algebra class, a boy had an epileptic
seizure, which the teacher handled very capably with the proper first aid. Soon there were rumors about the incident
throughout the school, including some speculative gossip in the library that
afternoon, to which I was a party, and which the school librarian overheard.
The next morning, the boy came back to school and into our first period gym
class. When I saw him walk into the locker
room, I asked, incredibly, "Don, aren't you the one who had all those
convulsions?" During gym class, several of the other students quite
considerately counseled me about my behavior, and soon I would appreciate them
for doing so.
Today it shocks me that I could have been so cruel and unaware
of how unacceptable it was to make fun of someone else's disability. Perhaps I
had become desensitized by the taunts against me during my boyhood, but that
was no excuse for my conduct ¾ perhaps the “worst” thing
I’ve ever done. That afternoon, I was called from mixed chorus class to the
school office, not by the principal, but by the school nurse, who, starting out
with a bellicose, "I want this stopped," scolded me with the verbal reprimand
of a lifetime, as she accused me of “diagnosing” and "bullying." As the session continued, it became apparent
that she hadn't heard of the incident in gym class but thought I had been
spreading rumors among other students in the library. The incident left me
apprehensive about the potential for being suddenly called in by persons in
authority, but still comfortably blasé about the impressions inappropriate
behavior created or the harm it did. Previously, I had just resented it when a
teacher said, “see me after class.” Now I knew discipline was a real threat and
that I could do real harm without quite realizing it.
In (senior) high school, I was recognized often by other
students for by scholastic abilities, and developed an improved self-image
through academics, at the cost of becoming a better-rounded person.
Fortunately, gym didn’t count in the grade-point average; an athletically inept
student was guaranteed a C for any effort at all. (I once hit a home run in a
gym softball game and still got a C. Thankfully, they didn’t offer swimming.)
By now, my erotic fascination with the appearances of other men stayed with me
all the time. I became interested in the idea that one could be a good ¾ even great¾student with good marks and
still be "masculine," too. In
earlier grades, I had seen good marks and proficiency in certain skills
(especially verbal ones) as a girl’s “domain.”
There was a paradox about society's attitude towards women.
Etiquette demanded, “girls first.” Women
were to be valued for their beauty, whereas men definitely were expected to
keep their manliness covered up with neckties and long sleeves. Women were boxed on a pedestal, deserving
absolute devotion and protection from men, yet "girls" were objects
of derision. The worst thing that could
happen to a young man, in my fantasy world, was to be made to "look like a
girl” or to "feel feminine."
I had
already recognized within myself a process of symbiosis. Even as an
eight-year-old, I had idealized “fine young men” that I saw in the media,
whether cowboy Roy Rogers or children’s show host Billy Johnson; my heart had
pounded when I received a Christmas card from the latter. Now, I liked to hang
around young men who were simultaneously more “masculine,” “smarter” and more
popular than I was. I longed to join intelligence with testosterone, at least
vicariously. Having a connection to one of my “heroes,” who possessed the
physical qualities I wanted for myself, made me feel good about myself. This
made a lot more “sense” for psychological self-interest than did chasing
skirts. After all, I didn’t want to “be like” a girl, so I didn’t want to
“like” a girl either. My father had predicted, “One day, blue eyes will confuse
you,” and later he “reassured” me that once I began dating a nice girl, started
nesting against “her bosom” (as if she were Scarlet O’Hara), the arousal would
take care of itself automatically. It never did. For me, “dominating” a woman
for sexual or reproductive motives could never represent achievement. I had to
be satisfied with myself to control someone, I thought, until I learned that
the “control” should be replaced with “love.”
Already, I had heard of pop psych claims that women really go for men
with a fatal “weakness.”
So I played my mental game of fascination, which by now was
evolving into erotic dreams where I would wake up aroused after dreaming about
the wrestling class in physical education. Only a few years before, I had
dreaded the idea of a gym locker room, of being naked in the showers and seeing
another boy’s penis. I enjoyed the idea of being overwhelmed (by a young man
with the correct attributes) and even sensed a desire for sexual surrender
(first as a “woman” and then as a man myself); I even pretended that my
adoration of fine young men put me into some kind of special priesthood. This
was me, an identity. I could be “me” by expressing my teasingly “dangerous”
difference. No one had a right to
contest it. I could control it within
the privacy of my secret thoughts. Yet, I never even thought about the things
homosexuals “do.” I didn’t even know. As
my summer friend had implied, I was indeed naive. But I still had no propensity
to commit “homosexual acts.”
Was I born this way? I certainly inherited a sensitivity to
color and sound and to complex patterns of sensation. Once, I had insisted upon
drawing a Halloween pumpkin red in kindergarten class simply because I liked
red better, even though I knew that “pumpkins are orange.” I could detect untapped musical talent in my
own father, who sometimes would try to peck away at the piano in Tom-Thumb
fashion (not chopsticks!) I sensed that
this nebulous underlying psychological “femininity” was an asset, a sort of
hidden power behind an imaginary throne, a resource that could be kept inside
rather than be refreshed by intimacy with girls. My father’s way of putting
this had been to characterize me as a “serious boy.” Indeed, the reckless,
pointlessly risk-taking masculinity of most boys, like the kind I see when a
ten-year-old African-American kid bikes the wrong way on a major Arlington
street when there is a bike trail fifty feet away, has always struck me as a
limitation, a vulnerability.[12] Sure, I knew these boys took risks because
later they would be practically forced to offer themselves as shield for
progeny ¾ women and children. I could come to bat, literally take my ups,
when I had some personal recognition to earn; when it came to blending into a
team and risking ”getting hurt” in rough play (much worse than those awful
penicillin shots), I just sat on the sidelines and pretended to know
everything, even if I didn’t like to tinker with my father’s tools. In high school chemistry lab, I had even been
afraid to light matches! Now, I can’t
say my biological constitution alone made me get aroused around certain young
men. I didn’t need women for their
femininity, as I already owned it. I needed to know manhood, but not the
coarsened and empty kind that destroys itself in foolish chases. Indeed,
neighborhood boys had challenged me, “Wanna fight!” When I walked away, they had cried,
“Chicken!” How stupid! Once, I had even started a debate in Sunday school about
whether it was right to “hit back.” I
imagined masculinity as more powerful if it was tamed, perhaps by me. I
absorbed visual images of “male power” every day in baseball games, in gym
class, and even on quiz shows. My mind arranged these pictures into a perfect,
hierarchical virtual order, and that was exciting.
So all of these feelings ¾ hero worship and personal
sexual confusion and anxieties ¾ converged as I started at
William and Mary as a freshman in September 1961.
Tribunals
My pencil-shaped room Brown Hall was perhaps twelve feet wide. It
contained a bunk bed, two chests and desks, and very little floor space. I slept on the bottom bunk; I could afford to
fall out.
My roommate, from rural southwestern
At the very beginning, we were both filled with idealism. I
hoped for a friendship to replace the one that had been suspended by my leaving
home. He found my braininess useful; in the coming weeks he would often ask me
how to spell things.
We both valued the William and Mary Honor System. My high school system had already taught the
importance of academic and professional honesty, and, with term-paper
assignments, the liabilities of plagiarism. On cheating, the French teacher had
said, “Everybody does it, but that doesn’t make it right.” I can say I have
never cheated on an exam. One time in high school, however, one student thought
I had cheated because I correctly predicted a question on a government test
(define “institutionalism”). Officials at William and Mary handed out a booklet
explaining the Honor Code, which defined Honor in terms of the following four specific
violations: “lying, stealing, cheating, and failure to report and infraction of
which one has first hand knowledge.”
“Failure-to-report” an incident of mendacity directly contradicted
playground or “recess” honor, that one not tattletale or snitch! The booklet
offered this rather awkward explanation of the honor concept: “there must exist
two forms of social control: one is inner morality of the student resulting
from religion, education, and public opinion, and the other is an outer law.
For the vast majority of students, the Honor Code takes the first form, that of
a set of personal ideals or code of conduct.”[13]
Later, I would wonder about the finer points of honor codes, such as whether it
was ethical to study college notes summarizing literary works rather than dig
the meat of these opuses for ourselves. The newspapers carried stories of
minuscule honor violations at military service academies, such as “quibbling.”
Today, it strikes me that our elders really
struggled in sorting out moral precepts and that the renowned “established”
essayists we would study in English class (such as Mill, Arnold, Fromm,[14]
Huxley) had also struggled with their ideals about identity, love, honor, and
society in complicated, equivocal prose. We underlined passages in these
assignments as we studied them for quizzes; we hardly knew how they would one
day apply to us as grown-ups. Since my roommate wanted to become an actor, he
could relate to these ideas in real people’s talk; I would only gradually
appreciate the (even commercial) value of inductive reasoning and ethical
principles as I watched my life unfold on a mental movie screen. Today,
word-processing software goes off the scale in evaluating the “reading grade
level” of pieces like this.
My roommate seemed to want things to be simpler, more emotional
and more natural. Personal morality,
even honor, seemed buried by these collective global struggles, and constant
talk of war ¾ now it was the Berlin Wall ¾ and the threat of not just another Holocaust
but of male machismo bombing us back into primitive, Luddite
existence. Morality seemed to have a global aspect that transcended our
relations to others.
I had already dabbled in politico-morality once in high school,
in tenth grade English, when I wrote a short story presenting a swimming pool
lifeguard with a puzzlement. Should he save a drowning victim when an air raid
siren was going off and the instructions were to “duck and cover”? This was,
after all, the era of Dr. Strangelove.
My
roommate and I also started “revealing” slowly our psychological
self-discoveries of having just “grown up” and left home, of suddenly dealing
with deeper friendships and relationships. We both “emoted” at seeing
(separately) the wistful film Splendor in
the Grass. But, quickly, it became
apparent that his awakening had been the discovery of intimacy ¾ psychological more than physical ¾ with girls, whereas mine
had not. “A boy and a girl can share
things that mere friends or roomies never can,” he insisted. Soon, he began to
drop hints that he suspected I was a homosexual.
At times, he seemed to tolerate his suspicions and tried to let
me “teach” him my little world. One night, I made him sit through the Brahms
Symphony #2 in D (with its ponderous yet pastoral nature and slow tempi),
playing from the constricted speaker of his clock-radio (the subject of his
first English theme, a C+ effort). He hated it and told me a story about how
some redneck in his hometown had badgered the city council about a license for
a classical music FM station because one would have to flip through it on the
way to finding a rock station. For stage plays,[15]
he preferred no music at all!
He also tried to sell me on his “old time religion,” and this
threw me a bit. I had grown up in a rather formal, high-minded church, and had
seen church more as a place to learn to “be good” than to develop a passionate
faith. This church, The First Baptist
Church of the City of Washington, D.C., was located a few blocks north of the
White House, and many presidents had attended it. I had watched the new
sanctuary being built and opening on Christmas Day, 1955, when I was fascinated
by the stained glass windows, the classical (rather than gospel) choral and
organ music, and even the crisp sounds of wooden offering plates being stacked.
The Church had been affiliated with both Baptist conventions but tended to be
decidedly liberal and tolerant; during the new construction the congregation
had met in the Jewish Community Center across the street. Dr. Edward Pruden had preached progressively about “spiritual progress
as well as material progress,” and especially about the importance of judging
people by their characters rather by than their skin color, gender, or
religious professions. Once, he had written that the indifference of
established German churches in the 1930’s to practical social issues had
facilitated Hitler’s sudden, totalitarian seizure of an entire nation.[16]
Pruden’s gentle, humble style of teaching tolerance
and inner reflection as moral values downplayed the social controversy he could
otherwise have caused. A month after the new sanctuary’s opening, I was
baptized (after my own conscious decision) by immersion with my mother. My
parents had become celebrities in the Church; my father actually took out a
mortgage on our house to help fund the building. My father had also
participated in the Freemasons, a cultural fraternity, and my mother had earned
recognition in Eastern Star. I had also experienced after-school religious
instruction in Arlington public elementary schools (this had remained legal
until 1962), and on one occasion, when asked by the teacher to confide a secret
in our personal notebooks, had nervously scribbled, “I have idols,” as I
believed I was violating (in my thoughts) the First of the Ten Commandments. A
lesson from a vacation Bible school sticks in my mind: “Jesus first, others
second, me last.” A much more
constructive Sunday school lesson, befitting an open Baptist tradition, was
“personal responsibility for one’s own acts,” as well as some good moral
metaphors, such as “bribery bridge.”
I would bring up some Sunday School lessons that had puzzled me.
On adultery, my roommate insisted that unfaithfulness in the heart and desire
is as much a sin as an actual sex act. On judging others, his proverb was, “You
shouldn’t say, ‘You shouldn’t do that.’”
My behavior was sincere
and earnest, yet bizarre and always provocative. I guess I wanted to test his limits. My wardrobe may have provided my roommate
with the first opportunity for a taunt. I often wore brightly colored shirts,
sometimes garish solid colors that had demonstrated retinal fatigue in high
school science classes. Perhaps, like some male birds with their plumage (or
like the privileged dreamer Joseph showing off in front of his brothers in
Genesis), I wanted to attract attention. My roommate would charge, “When I see
a shirt like that, I say, there goes that homosexual down the street,” and then
a few minutes later state that the one word no one could dare repeat is
“homosexuality” (sure, like Clive Barker’s “Candyman”).
Then I provoked him with an English theme I wrote early in the semester. We had the same English teacher, for
different sections, and were asked to write a theme around the concept of
"definition." I had already
teased him with my father’s question: “Why would a man ever want to teach English?” I chose to develop the notion of
"friendship." I don't have the
theme now,[17]
but I was quite explicit about the degree of emotional investment required by a
"true friendship," especially a same-sex one. A man would really miss
his friend (but not an acquaintance), especially if he was afraid the friend
might never come back (or come back too soon).
A man would keep friend on a pedestal. Men can talk about things they never mention to their girlfriends or
wives. I got an A- on the theme, and now
it frankly began to upset my roommate with what he called its “implications of
homosexuality.” The teacher, a handsome
chap from Australia, didn’t help matters by dwelling on the erotic imagery from
T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,”
particularly the passages about lying “etherized on a table” apparently
(according to the instructor) sexually impotent. I teased my roommate further by
proposing that maybe some other student really would get an A on a theme that
started with “I am a homosexual.” After all, he had started this! He fueled our
growing confrontation by smuggling girlie pictures into the dorm and claiming,
“You should be hard as a brick” after looking at them. I wasn’t.
But local politics was going on in our dorm room and in our
freshman class; I was pushing some hot
buttons. Most bizarre of all my antics was my skipping out on Tribunals. Freshman boys were supposed to attend this
initiation “ritual” on the last Friday night in September. Perhaps its aims
were more complicated than the military’s practice of turning all plebes into
“maggots” on day one, in the name of “unit cohesion”; but since this wasn’t
quite the military, I could get away with playing AWOL. One widely quoted rumor was that, at
Tribunals, “they” would shave the boys' legs and that for at least one such
Tootsie,[18]
the hair would never grow back. Now,
this sort of legend would be intimidating in any environment that is mostly
male and, in particular, almost entirely Caucasian; it wouldn't work
today. But there was probably a deeper
psychological point to this "ritual" ¾ as boys became young men,
they were supposed to give up excessive concern about themselves (and looks of
their own bodies) and prepare for adult lives centered around starting,
raising, and protecting families. Young men go through a phase of believing
that a man’s standing ultimately gets down to the “power” he can project from
his physical presence, as if only one alpha male could reproduce. Men are
supposed to outgrow this satisfying fascination, forget other men’s qualities
that they may cathect, accept what God gave them, and
manage to carry on the species. Marriage and parenthood will become the great
equalizer for middle-age ¾ believe it! Well, maybe
Jacob in Genesis couldn’t carry on the family birthright without cheating.
Actually, men are expected to accept the rule that, prudishly dressed in
mid-life in gray suits and long socks, they’re supposed to compete simply by
what they can do. Male cardinals are supposed to become mockingbirds, trading
color in plumage for function, singing more. Men become “defeminized”
by being temporarily feminized!
My roommate began to cart out the old wives' tales about
homosexuality: that homosexuals can’t whistle; that a homosexual would attack
other men in his sleep and take on this unstoppable "super strength"
in the quest for male semens. I honestly had never heard of fellatio before
he brought it up. He would tell “ghost stories” of teenage boys being
"ruined" at summer camp. He didn’t realize that his own helplessness if confronted by a
homosexual actually exposes his own vulnerability as a man. The other boys would follow their dorm-room inquisitions
about sex acts with false rumors that I was “getting friendly” or putting hands
on other boys’ knees. [note
Y1]
I would sometimes soliloquize in the dorm shower ¾ when there was no one else in sight ¾ that I was a “homosexual on the loose.” Just recently, in a scene from the French
film Wild Reeds the appealing
“anti-hero,” disturbed by his boarding-school crush on a soldier, looked at
himself in the bathroom mirror and muttered, “I am a faggot,” repeatedly.
I got to talk to the dean one more time that morning before the
sad ride back to
I knew there was a state institution nearby. Desperately, and with comical naiveté, I asked
if a psychiatrist at the local institution could "check me out."
"No, you don't want any
Before the drive home, I remember stopping at a cafeteria and
suddenly feeling a sense of panic, that some kind of incarceration was about to
happen. I also remember that as we
packed up my gear from the dorm room, a couple quirky things happened. My father picked up the mattress and showed
it to me, the evidence of still moist, discolored stains. "See, that
proves you are not a homosexual."
In fact, my parents arranged an appointment with a private
psychiatrist in
My parents contacted the Dean of Admissions at
My parents gave me this one very stern warning: that I must
never mention the subject of homosexuality again, to anyone. For no really good reasons except to shelter
the sexual comfort of “normal” adult men (particularly younger men still primed
to “grow up”) and to protect the family and all others constructively
associated with me, same-sex attraction and eroticism ¾ “deviance” ¾ would have to stay forever
off my table as a mentionable subject. I had settled down now. I no longer felt the pressure to overcome the
self-deception and consequent teasing from dorm-mates, so I listened. If I somehow got kicked out of school again
over this issue, "my college days were over" because “no college
would take me,” and I would definitely be doomed to some kind of marginal
existence. Instead, my parents could have made me work my way through school!
In the mean time, we told most friends of the family that I had gotten “sick”
down at William and Mary and had to come home to recover. My father would also counsel me that from now
on, I must be concerned about what “everyone thinks,” even if I might be right.
The Christmas season was cheered by visits of old friends. My father
had warned they would all desert me, as we offered the euphemism about
returning home to seek “medical advice,” but that did not happen. My chum from
the summer, returned from
In the mean time, the private therapy continued, partly because
I thought it was a way to get my scholarship back. On a psychological level, it went
nowhere. The doctor would reassure my
father, in front of me, “No, the problem isn’t homosexuality.” He thought I was using homosexuality as a way
to "step on their toes," to hit back at people like those who had
taunted me, people like my roommate who at least pretended to believe that any
"real man" could be deflowered and rendered impotent for life by a
homosexual. “You seem to be unaware of the consequences of things you say and
do,” he counseled. But, then, why were these “normal” men so vulnerable to
exposure? The therapist wouldn’t answer; he didn’t know. I wasn’t about to let my individuality become
erased by “liking girls.”
In April, the doctor suggested that I be admitted as an
inpatient at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), where there was a study
being funded of students who had experienced difficulties "adjusting"
to college.
I went to NIH for the interview, which was held in a very
clinical-looking scrub room, and where I was a little more open about my fantasies
than I had been with anyone previously.
The government psychiatrists presented the program in glowing terms: the
new, "liberal" Kennedy administration was very concerned about the
competitiveness of American college students, particularly (I presumed) as the
Cold War escalated.
My father told me that
therapists had related to him that I was “very sick.” I didn’t want to believe
this. “You don’t see people as people,” he charged, “just as foils.” Yet, in
subsequent family therapy at NIH he would come to my defense, half-praising me
for being a “stickler” for definitions and accurate (if dangerous) usage of
words.
I could pretend that participating was an almost patriotic thing
to do. Maybe, it would to be a way to be part of something important. More to
the point, we all thought a “dorm-like” living experience, even in a controlled
“hospital” setting, would convince the powers that be that I was capable of
leaving home again for college.
I was admitted to Ward 7-West on
They were definitely playing hospital in the mental health
units, and I guess I could pretend the
I
quickly distanced myself from the “sicker” (by my assessment) patients. I was allowed to go home on weekends and to
attend evening classes at GW; sometimes
to Record Sales in downtown
I would sometimes upset the other patients with my talk of going
back “on the outside.” Some of them had
achieved personal comfort in dealing with a constricted, model-railroad-like
world, closed off by the geographical, Vatican-like boundary of the unit and
containing only a few other people. They
didn’t seem disturbed when disciplined by the unit’s one form of “punishment” ¾ restriction to the unit. Although I had
resented my father’s insistence that I learn to do certain manual chores his “right” way, I now longed for the
pride of a job, even if it were only on Saturday mornings. I went and talked to
a “butch” woman at the Department of Labor, who screamed, “What, you’ve never
worked before?” and then hinted that she knew all about us “patients” at NIH,
as if the
Going to individual therapy was like putting off learning to
swim, still clinging to the edge of the pool as I kicked.[19] As each twice-weekly session approached, I
nervously anticipated whether I would “tell” all my fantasies. If I did, would my brain download from heaven
some insight that wiped away these dark clouds of self-dislike? Nonsense! If I told, I risked unveiling the eventual
emptiness of my future adult life, of what my “friendships” would come to. I
needed reassurance there was a real city beyond the fantasies.
Of all the recent “tell” books written by prominent gay men
(including those recently challenging the military ban), none cross a certain
invisible line in discussing the explicit details of sexual fetishes, of what
makes their sexuality “tick”; as with politicians running for national office,
it eventually gets just too embarrassing (for the audience) for the author to
bare one’s soul. My mild interest in male body hair, a “part-object” that I
thought men have and women don’t, would jump-start an erotic interest in
attractive men (much as do women’s breasts for heterosexual men) which, I would
gradually realize, could then be triggered by an appropriate man’s legitimate
interest in me. I would play games with the therapist, by divulging the
fantasies, which I had no intention of giving up, in the smallest pieces.
Individual therapy sessions dwelled on “How do you see yourself...” and with my
discomfort over my own body and recursive belief that I was somehow
“defective.” “You feel very guilty about your homosexual thoughts and
feelings,” the therapist would repeat. Even now, he insisted I didn’t really
believe I was a “homosexual,” even if I enjoyed the mental games playing cat
with other young men’s secondary sexual characteristics. He answered my
newfound concerns over “working” to earn my own way by claiming that “facing
these feelings” would be real “work.”
I obtained my NIH patient records through the
Freedom of Information Act, and pieced together an interesting perception the
staff had of me from microfilmed diazos of some
rather crude, manual typing. I was seen
as bookish, self-absorbed, and a bit gawky and "unattractive." 1962
was not an era for self-driven geekolators. One
comment referred to my restless mannerisms, which were claimed to resemble
"genital manipulations," in group settings. My gabbings in
group therapy and in Friday afternoon “unit government” meetings were characterized
as “pedantic” and as “separating feeling from principle.” I liked to substitute
fantasy for real interaction with others.
In their clinical writings, the psychiatrists hinted at the
old-fashioned view that, for men, heterosexual interest was part of
"growing up," a necessary condition for participation in a world
where one's adult identity could be constructed from meeting the real needs of
others in a socially supported way. They noted that my relationships with
girls had always been of a “most casual sort,” and they seemed to imply that my
lack of heterosexual interest related to some deep self-centeredness. They
suggested that my disinclination to mate really constituted a defect, a kind
of partial soul-death. If I didn’t give up my childish fantasies, I would never
want to be a dad myself; I would never really live. Their official diagnoses of
me varied from “schizoid” or “compulsive” personality to almost normal. My
parents, however, had a few reclusive friends and acquaintances, whose
eccentricities seemed acceptable as long as they did not have to be
explained.
The
nursing staff (although not the psychiatrists) occasionally commented on my
tendency to watch perhaps two of the young men that “interested” me, with a
measure of unwarranted admiration, which I thought was a sign of really
caring.
I actually did enjoy the respect of these more intact male
members of the ward. Over time, some of the men did share with me what had
“gone wrong” for them, and their problems dealt with motivation that went way
beyond any concerns with sexual identity.
Sometimes they would listen to my playing Liszt and Chopin on the spinet
piano in the solarium. Once, I organized a ping-pong tournament; to the
consternation of some patients, I won most of the games with a “passive”
strategy of keeping the ball on the table and letting my opponent beat himself
with uncontrolled, missed slams.
I tended to resent attempts by the staff and other patients to
persuade me to see myself as part of “the group,” which I saw as a most artificial “family,”
the stuff of make-believe and baby play. I steered group therapy (everything there ¾ art, work, family visits ¾ was
“therapy,” wasn’t it!) discussions into my need to recreate myself away from
the hospital, in a world of real emotions and real events. About a week before
the Cuban missile crisis came to a head, I teased the other patients with the
idea that the rapid destruction caused by war, even if
After about seven months, I grew impatient with the whole
situation, and in the spring semester of 1963, I left the
Eight years later, in 1970, I would be invited back to NIH for a
“post-treatment” interview. On this occasion, the researcher still wanted to
know why my fantasies were entirely homosexual, as if in the intervening time I
should have “grown up” and become heterosexual. “You still need men,” he
conceded.
In the summer of 1963, I decided it was finally time to go to
work and prove I could at least pay part of my own way. I had already taken a Civil Service test
(which had actually contained a unit on manual dexterity), and I got a job as a
lab assistant in the rheology (viscosity) lab at the
National Bureau of Standards, which at that time was located on Connecticut
Avenue in Washington in a campus-like setting. I had thought nothing of the
government’s asking (on Standard Form 171) the usual loyalty questions about
membership in the Communist Party. But
the second day of work, I had to take a physical, and was required to answer
questions concerning previous psychiatric treatment. In a panic, I called my father for
"permission" before "telling" the doctor what had really
happened at William and Mary.
Surprisingly, the government doctor noted in the records, "thought
he was a homosexual," but approved my employment because I had never
actually done anything. However, the
pattern for the future was clear. I
would have to explain this mental-health history time and time again.
A few months into the job, I would read the Civil Service
regulations of disciplinary offenses that could result in “removal,” and one of
these was “sexual perversion.” A pre-med friend from
Sixteen years later, in 1979, I would be forced to wait three
months for my health insurance associated with a new job at Blue Cross and Blue
Shield of Texas to kick in, after I answered honestly questions on an
enrollment form regarding past history of psychiatric treatment.
As the early and
mid-1960’s passed, through college and eventually graduate school, I half
forgot that I had ever called myself a “homosexual”; all this stuff in the
psychology books about “overt” and
“latent” homosexuality was just a way to sound clinical, or to speak with
authority over others, the kind of power teachers once had when they took names
for detention. Homosexuals hung around urinals in YMCA’s, scribbled obscene
graffiti inside bathroom stalls, and got (like Johnson administration official
Walter Jenkins) arrested. I wasn’t like that. I just kept my imaginary heroes
to compare others to; but that did make me different! I could look forward to a
world of heroes and achievements without a special place for “queers.” But even
if I kept my mouth shut from now on, just to get along, others might not be
fooled. Some people wanted to buy me a new brain, because they didn’t like who
I was. My roommate had called me “a fine
fellow,” until I opened my mouth; then he acted as if I had deceived him and
would somehow use my sexual interests against him.
I dimly knew now that
most boys had been explicitly taught to fear any homosexual feelings. Like me,
they might have noticed differences among themselves in their emerging external
trappings of manhood; but, unlike in my upbringing (which had been so totally
silent on homosexuality throughout high school), they had also been impressed
that curiosity must never evolve into sexual interest, that as they grew up
only women’s looks, not men’s bods, were supposed to
“matter.” Perhaps, like my roommate,
they half-feared that giving in once to passive sexual enjoyment would render
them impotent. Eroticizing other “superior” men might just remind one of his
own limitations and possibility of failure. Homo-sexuality, at best, would
always get in the way of man’s work; at worst, it could “ruin” a man for life.
There
were great, musical thoughts and ideals within me. But I was still childish, juvenile, and in
need of new loyalties.
Perhaps I did not yet appreciate the adventure and independence
of exploring those endless worlds, leagues away from home.
There was one way to redeem myself. Who makes things happen? Who has power over the lives of others? Who
could make me back into a man?
The United States Army.
[1] Evelyn Ruth Duvall, Facts
of Life and Love for Teenagers (New York: Associated Press, 1956).
[2] John F. Kennedy, Profiles in Courage
(New York: Harper, 1956).
[3] In a manner similar to Nazism, even the
Japanese Empire before World War II had invented theories that Mongoloid
peoples were biologically “evolved” at a greater distance from the apes.
[4] Published by Garden City,
1928 and 1936.
[5] Theodore Reich, The Greening of America
(New York: Random House, 1970), pp. 59-86.
Consciousness I had been preoccupied with an almost Luddite
survivalist and religious values.
[6] Sony Classics Pictures, Across the Sea of Time (1996).
[7] As shown by the three
columns of “Comparative Government” of the 1950 World Book Encyclopedia.
[8] See Frank Sulloway, Born to Rebel (New York: Random House,
1996), Sulloway predicts that younger children learn
from their siblings and take more chances and often turn out to be more
politically progressive (or, at times, collective)..
[9] A model railroad exhibit on
I-76 near Scranton, Pa.
[10] Peter Wyden, Growing Up Straight (New
York: Stein and Day, 1968).
[11] “Program music,” such as a
lot of the tone poems of Liszt and Strauss, attempts to “tell a story”;
abstract music follows established forms and communicates feelings in a
structure. Opera, of course, is the most programmatic of all music.
[12] Rick Weiss, “Scientists May
Have Identified a Cause for Anxiety; Gene Seems to Influence Whether Bearers Are
Chronically Worried or Confidently Calm,” The
Washington Post,
[13] The College of William and
Mary, 1961.
[14] In “The Art of Loving,” Fromm had already characterized my kind of hero-worship as
“symbiosis.”
[15] In my own high school English,
we had actually memorized the eight parts of the Elizabethan theater, including
the proscenium doors! Another teacher
admonished us, “Learn your facts about your authors!” as if we needed them for
a popular children’s card game.
[16] Edward Pruden,
Interpreters Needed (Philadelphia: Judson Press, 1951), p. 29. But the
main factor, besides economic hardship and scapegoating,
was probably Germany’s inexperience with constitutional government.
[17] The closest I can come to it
is Merton Thompson’s poem, “True Friend,” on p. 106 of Poetic Ramblings
(Nebraska: Morris Publishing, 1994).
[18] Tootsie, a 1982 film starring Dustin Hoffman; directed by Sidney
Pollack.
[19] I eventually learned to swim
the width of the YMCA pool in GW’s gym class; in better
public schools today, swimming is mandatory PE and nobody gets out of it.