DOWN THE YELLOW BRICK ROAD

When My World Was Young 1945-56     Yellow Brick Road 1956-60     What a Wonderful Town 1960-61
    Wonderful Town (pt. II) 1962-66     The Gay Sixties 1966-71    The Juicy Life 1972-76
    Juicy Life (pt. II) 1976-80    Losing Alexandria 1981-87   Losing Alexandria (pt. II) 1988 - 1990's

Down

the

Yellow

Brick

Road

1956 - 1960

FRESHMAN YEAR: COLLEGE DAZE

1956 is the year that the Supreme Court strikes down segregation on public buses. It is also the year that Alabama outlaws the NAACP, and in Clinton, Tenn. tanks are used to keep order during school integration. Autherine Lucy, a black girl, enrolled in the University of Alabama and her attempt to attend precipitates riots that rivet the attention of the entire country.

I went to Syracuse University, located in the city of Syracuse on one of the Finger Lakes in central New York State. The city had a population of 220,000, and the university had a combined undergrad-grad enrollment of about 12,000 as I recall. The student body was almost exclusively white. Tensions usually shaped up along religious lines between Christians and Jews, or Protestants and Jews against Catholics. (Protestants were the religious majority - S.U. was nominally a Methodist school, but there were a large number of Jewish students, while Catholics were the smallest group.) There was also a divide between those students who came from small towns or rural areas and those from the metropolises and suburbs of the Northeast. (Most of the Jewish students fell into the latter category.) The Greek fraternity/sorority system was a dominant presence in campus life, and Greek houses were almost always either exclusively Christian or Jewish (and for many the exclusivity was part of their written charter.) Independents (those who did not belong to a fraternity/sorority) may have actually been a majority, I can't remember. There was a passionate struggle among the Greek houses for control of student politics and organizations, but in my experience Independents didn't give a shit about their jockeying to be King of the Mountain.

Freshman year was deja vue all over again, as they say. My roommate is this incredibly good looking, polished guy with all the right Ivy League clothes, and an older brother, a senior, who was in the best fraternity on campus; across the hall is a Marlon Brando look-alike who lifts weights; next to him is this Italian macho jock whose body looks like he modeled for the Farnese Hercules...and on it went. Or so it seemed because my roommate became the guy everyone wanted to know, plus he got a steady stream of his brother's fraternity brothers as visitors. But where did I fit in the middle of all this??! Of course I was probably surrounded by other guys who were feeling pretty much the same way I was, but when you're chewing your finger nails to the bone and sitting there feeling like it was high school gym class twenty-four hours a day, who gets beyond me-me-me?

I found out real fast from my roommate that if you were the slightest bit cool you did not listen to R&B/R&R, you listened to jazz. (I should have thought, Ivy League, Shmivy League - What can he know about music, he comes from somewhere in the armpit of New Hampshire.) You did not get too friendly with Jews. (My best friend in high school had been one of the three Jews in our school. I could see already I was off on the wrong foot.) Older Brother showed up a few times and made no attempt to hide the fact that he was inspecting me. He - I was loftily informed after his first visit - was no longer living at the fraternity house ("never say frat!"). He had an apartment with a "woman," not a girl - a woman! (Yeah, I get the difference.) But I was impressed, not just by him but by the whole nine yards.

Syracuse University quad

With a Farnese Hercules or a weightlifting Marlon Brando look-alike standing next to you, shower time was an exercise in embarrassment and eyeball control. On the other hand, I was not only still going steady (and having sex with) the girl back home, we had it all doped out that we'd be married after I graduated. (Right! "What fools we mortals be..." and so on, and so on.) Meanwhile, I had some platonic dates with a very non-threatening girl in a freshman cottage where a classmate of mine from high school lived.

And - because you were supposed to do it if you wanted to be really in the swing of college life - I rushed fraternities. How could you not do it? (I was too much of a sheep to actually entertain that question before I got involved in the rushing process.) I got invited to pledge the fraternity that was the rival to my roommate's brother's Best-Fraternity-On-Campus. I was told later that some of the brothers had thought that I was good-looking enough to become an accomplished "ass man," and thus a star in their crown. (Good grief!) I bridled at the enforced camaraderie and the clubby atmosphere. And I really loathed having to dress up in a suit and tie for dinner just because the House Mother was in attendance, and the unbelievable apeing of something akin to country club elitism that was the heart of fraternity/sorority life. I soon hated it, but felt I should stick with it. I was still very, very far from having any independence or self-confidence. Never mind that it was about nothing that mattered to me, and about some things I found disturbing. These guys wanted you to dance attendance on the fraternity every free minute you had, they wanted to know who your friends were, were as demanding about my wardrobe and haircut as my parents, and wanted to know if you dated and who you dated - a little problem here, you see the girl I was dating at my friend's cottage dorm was Jewish. This fraternity (as did most others on campus) had a no-Jews/no Negroes policy, and some of these guys liked to push it even into the realm of dating. A couple of days before initiation, in a sudden panic, I dropped out.

[In the autumn of 2005 Delta Lamdba Phi, a national fraternity of gay, bisexual and progressive men, had their SU colony formally approved as a campus fraternity. To say that this is all but totally mind-blowing comes close to understatement.]

I was now what was referred to as a GDI (God Damned Independent), a takeoff on the Greek letter identifications of fraternity people, like DKE for members of Delta Kappa Epsilon, etc.

Most of the former fraternity "brothers" gave me the silent treatment after that, or barely acknowledged me with a hi or a nod of the head - except for one upperclassman, Andy, one of the most handsome and popular of the upperclassmen brothers, who continued to behave pleasantly when we crossed paths.

The academic part of college life was a pleasure, and meeting up with Wallace Steven's The Emperor of Ice Cream under the guidance of Miss Sweeny, a grad student instructor in English 101, started opening doors for me. But then I also took two semesters of geology in order to avoid having to fulfill a math requirement. The lab instructor in the second semester was a slightly older than usual grad student named Hank. He was nice looking in a somewhat rough and sloppy way, with a blunt and sometimes crude manner, and he had already been married and divorced. The girls were wild about him. When we went out on field trips those students who wanted to could go out barring with him after the class time was up.

Chittenango Falls

One of Hank's favorite sites for field trips was Chittenango Falls in the country outside of Syracuse. The village of Chittenango was the birthplace of L. Frank Baum, author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz...an appropriate place for the beginning of my own trip down the Yellow Brick Road.

The boozing sessions with Hank began as brief stop-offs at far-flung college hangouts or country taverns that he knew, but soon they stretched out and we would end up late at night in more offbeat places in the city, with only three or four of us still hanging on. The Brown Jug was one of these, Syracuse's valiant attempt at a jazz bar, but then he took a couple of us to the Penguin Club in the black ghetto, which was the neighborhood that separated the hilltop campus from Salina Street, the main drag. And one night we made a quick trip into a place called the Bell Room, a gay bar - though I didn't quite get what it was at the time. I had an uncomfortable sense that he had some interest in or attraction to me - and I for him - but I pulled back from even trying to look at it.

He asked for my home phone number at the end of the year because he was going to be manning an exhibit at the county fair near my hometown. Late that summer he did call one night and was very anxious to get together, but my parents had a hair across their collective ass and I couldn't get away. Was it about what I only half allowed myself to think it was about, or was it just going to be another night of bar hopping? Don't know, never saw him again.

Summer was factory work, R&B and DooWop music, and sex with the girlfriend. It was not only a vacation from college studies, which I by and large liked a lot, it was also a relief from college social life, in which I hadn't found a comfortable niche.

SOPHOMORE YEAR: BILL, THE BEATS AND THE CHURCH

1957 is the year the Russians sent up Sputnik - yikes! You could "duck and cover" under your desk from a Red A-bomb (sure, you could), but how did you hide from one of these things? Senator McCarthy, his career in rapid decline after his censure by the Senate, dies of the complications of cirrhosis of the liver. Governor Faubus's resistance to school integration requires the National Guard 101st Airborne Division of the U.S. Army to enforce it. The craze for pink flamingos as lawn ornaments begins in a small town in Oklahoma.

Sophomore year I elected to live in one of the old turn-of-the-century clapboard houses that the university still used to house some students. These were called cottages, and housed twenty to forty guys, and they had a far more pleasant atmosphere than the large dorms that housed thousands of students. While I still had the girl back home, I started having a boozy affair with Carrie, a remarkably talented girl and an already published poet of works definitely not in the adolescent slush vein. There was only one bar on our officially dry campus, the Orange, which was on a commercial street in the heart of the campus. We used to go there, and sit in a booth in the back room, which had a dance floor, sucking up cocktails and listening to current hits, such as Prez Prado's Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White, and Nina Simone's Little Girl Blue and Mood Indigo. (While not prohibited, women were discouraged from hanging out in the Orange's street level bar downstairs.) We also visited her friend Casey, a grad student of hers, who kept a piranha for a pet. Carrie and I sometimes shopped goldfish for its dinner at the five and ten cent store just for the malicious enjoyment of watching the store clerk’s reaction.

Me in Bill Curry's room, 57/58 (photo Bill C.)

BILL AND BILL

But I also started sleeping with guys again - actually just one. I met Bill Kenner in one of my classes, and at some point a pass must have been made. Soon every Saturday that his roommate was playing in the band at the football games, we were having sex in their dorm room - and for the first time I was kissing a guy! Except that I don't remember the actual first kiss. But with the addition of "necking" and "petting" as part of having sex with a guy, I knew I had crossed a very important line. Bill lived in a wealthy suburb of New York City, and he had an older gay friend/sex partner that he used to meet when he was home, though they didn't go into the city often. It was from Bill that I began to get some hints about "gay life," although he enjoyed doling his information out in tantalizing bits and hints. Farther down the line I came to understand that he'd actually had very little involvement in it and was playing at being far more informed than he was. Also, Bill was from a very, very wealthy and sophisticated social background, and it amused him to play on my diffidence.

Bessie Smith Billy Holiday

But there was also another gay Bill in my life. Bill Curry, the son of a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal church, was one of the few black students on campus. This Bill lived in my cottage, and he had a program of jazz music on the college radio station. I spent a lot of time listening to music with Bill and talking to him, and we got to the point of cautiously admitting our homosexual inclinations to each other. He was the first person I met who liked Bessie Smith, and he gave me the course in Billie Holiday 101. (I am completely at a loss to recall why after the year was over there was a hiatus in our friendship, perhaps because I moved to another cottage the next year.)

THE BEAT GENERATION

It was at Casey's apartment with Carrie that I first heard Odetta's great album, The Gate of Horn, as well as Leadbelly and the Weavers' Carnegie Hall album (and learned about the latter's troubles because of the Red Scare.) Milhaud's La Creation du Monde bowled me over. This may have been the year that Dakota Staten brought out her unbeatable vocal version of Erroll Garner's Misty. And Billy Holiday again. I can remember going down to Olmstead's record store on campus to listen to jazz and folk recordings with Carrie in the lean-in listening booths there. She also introduced me to the recordings of female impersonator Ray Bourbon’s giggly, smutty comedy. And it was from her and Casey that I first learned of the Beats.

Although I'm not sure how it came together, I was getting an inkling of "gay" as more than a furtive footnote to "real" life. Some of this had come from Bill Kenner, certainly, however my exposure to the literature and legends of the Beats also weighed in. The Beat Generation was broadly characterized by an identification with and romanticizing of the world of drugs (speed, marijuana and heroin); bisexuality and homosexuality; involvement with Eastern religions (though sometimes very poorly understood, I’d say); identification with Negroes (no "blacks" back then) and the oppression of Negroes and other fringe groups, including gay people. Be-bop jazz (Charley Parker was a cult hero) was the musical taste. The Beats loosely constructed, self-engrossed novels, and far better poetry were already commanding attention outside of bohemian circles. This movement probably started in San Francisco and Venice, Calif., and then found a home in NYC's Greenwich Village as well, most especially on the eastern edge of the Village, which was a Ukrainian and Polish neighborhood rapidly turning into a Hispanic ghetto. Nevertheless, it's important to remember that it was about rootlessness and alienation, hence the importance of being "on the road."

Burroughs Huncke

The putative godfathers of the Beat Generation were William Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, and Herbert Huncke, Times Square junkie and unknown writer - both were unabashedly gay.

Publication of Kerouac's On the Road in 1957 marked the Beats debut for most Americans. There was a tremendous outpouring of writing from the likes of Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlingheti, Allen Ginsburg, Gregory Corso - and many others then less well known. Neil Cassidy, though not a very productive literary talent, occupied an iconic niche: a wild man/free spirit/lunatic/druggie ideal. He was also bisexual. Most of these men achieved their reputations as poets, though Kerouac is more famous as a novelist. Ginsburg's long poem Howl enjoyed great underground popularity (and was the focus of an obscenity trial) and the novels of Kerouac, such as On the Road, Dharma Bums and The Subterraneans rattled a great many establishment literary critics. Most of these works had bi- and homosexuality entwined in their plots. I still have my marked up copies from these years of Howl and Kerouac's book of poems, Mexico City Blues, both of which continued the work started by Miss Sweeney with Wallace Stevens in English 101.

1959 cover, Signet paperback

For many teenagers of my generation "Rock Around the Clock" and Rebel Without a Cause had made major impacts on our youthful selves, and for some Howl amplified their reverberations a few years later. Of the Beats it is Ginsburg's work that has had the most staying power over the years - as did Ginsburg himself. He sustained an interest in Buddhism, and more than three decades later, in the late 80s, I met him at Tibetan Buddhist gatherings in the East Village.

This counter-culture was not politically confrontational, but was marked by individual lunatic bursts of sexual and social conduct contrary to the prevailing norms, indicative in part perhaps of drug paranoia and the frustrations of the 50's Cold War atmosphere. This movement's influence on gay people was limited to college campuses and enclaves in NYC and San Francisco, as far as I know. But it was out there, and its voice was liberating to many who heard it. And its refusal to treat gay sexuality with shame gave something like a fragile "validation" to homosexuality. It's probably the case that the Beat phenomenon was more widely accepted as an inheritance by gay men many years after it had peaked creatively, though the fictional world of Rechy's hustler protagonists that began with his 60's novels seems like an early gay descendent of the Beats. However, for me at this time the Beats were something like the biblical "voice crying in the wilderness," or in this case "howling."

This was the time that the Evergreen Review and the Village Voice (a far different journal then than the pretentiously intellectual chi-chi of later decades) became part of my reading.....and later even One, the homophile magazine the Mattachine Society, which had begun appearing in 1953.

Learning about the Beats, while sniffing around the edges of jazz and the incipient folk music revival, however interesting it may have been, was also part of a self-conscious search for a direction ("definition" or even "image" might be better) counter to my Freshman year attempt to conform to fraternity expectations and so-called Ivy League styles and attitudes. There were some wardrobe innovations, as well. I sent away for a catalogue from the Village Squire in New York - which had been confirmed as a gay store, which I had suspected - and I parted with a chunk of my summer earnings to purchase a few definitely non-collegiate items. These were a couple of new style tapered tee shirts (one "tomato" and the other black), a blue and white striped, boat-neck French sailor's jersey and a pair of black jeans. But if these purchases suggest "bohemian", it was definitely more by way of the Hollywood musical An American in Paris than the Beats. Next, my very short cut, brushed flat hairstyle was allowed to grow out - and grow out - until it came as close as I dared to being a length that suggested it could be combed into that most non-collegiate item of all, the DA or ducktail - pure high school and James Dean.

And, as a personal affirmation of my new, but not at all confident, outsider status, I attended a rock 'n' roll show in a downtown arena that fall. Except for Big Joe Turner - and the no-show of Fats Domino, the headliner - this second, and last rock 'n' roll show of my life has left no enduring memories. It did bring me, however, about as far from my previous year's college adventure as you could get - in addition to being too teenage from a college student's point of view, racially mixed R&B shows and movies were getting a not entirely undeserved reputation for violence.

'57 Buffalo event

In the era of the button-down Ivy League look or the hardly less conservative campus alternative of "traditionally" styled clothes for the more provincial young adults my Village Squire acquisitions would have stuck out like the proverbial sore thumb. They ended up for the most part, as I recall, being worn after classes to the dining hall or for hanging around in my cottage residence. If these changes suggest that I should have been hooking up with the campus bohemian fringe, derisively referred to as "bohos," the most easily identified ones were from the New York City area and as remote and intimidating as if they'd stepped out of a UFO. And despite my exposure to the influence of the un-conventional Carrie and Casey, or that of my two gay friends Bill Kenner and Bill Curry, I wasn't the stuff that flamboyant rebels were made of.

SODOM 1/CHURCH O

I was raised in an Catholic Irish-American family, and my own religious faith and practice as I grew up were much stronger than that of either of my parents. However, in addition to having a devotion to the ritual life of the church I also had a rather legalistically toned intellectual interest in it as well. I had had doubts, of course, about points of doctrine or church history, and I was not afraid to bring them up - priests were not people I was raised to be afraid of. As I was pretty bright the parish priests would let me borrow books from their libraries or have informal discussions with me. Thus far, I had been able to resolve my doubts, or live with them more or less comfortably.

Near the end of this school year I came to the conclusion that homosexuality was an ineluctable part of my nature. Despite past years of confessing the sin of committing homosexual sexual acts and promising sincerely to attempt to avoid repeating them (followed at one point by an interval of over three years of having heterosexual sex exclusively - a far easier sin to confess to), here I was again screwing with a guy. And this time - perhaps because now it included kissing and caressing, as well as an incipient understanding of "gay" as opposed to the clinical gruntings of the "homosexual" - I knew that this was an essential part of me. It clearly was not just the euphemistic "bad habits" and "bad companions" of priestly counseling. However, it was indeed sin in the Church's eyes and the rules of the game were quite clear.

Once it sunk in that this was not just about things I was doing, but about who I was, I also knew that it was impossible for me to go into the confessional and declare truthfully that I had sinned, profess contrition for those "sins" and affirm that I would do my utmost not to repeat these sins. The alternative, of course, was to simply say nothing at all about sex with other males. However, in this case I was hoisted on the petard of my legalistic bent toward the Church. If having homosexual sex was a grievous sin, another was to withhold or lie about actions which one knew were ranked as major sins, and to deceive the priest in confession and receive absolution through deception. To do this was to defile the Sacrament of Penance (the rite of the confessional). And if one then received communion with the mortal sin of homosexual acts on one's soul, compounded with the major sin of defiling the Sacrament of Penance - well, you had now capped off this miserable progression with gross sacrilege against the Eucharist, i.e.., the Body and Blood of Christ. Very heavy stuff for a believing Catholic - akin to taking a crap on the Bible or Torah for a Protestant or Jew, perhaps.

It is important to remember that this occurred in the mid-1950s. There was no public discussion or questioning to provide a basis for doubting the traditional view that active homosexuality was one of the gravest of sins in the Catholic - and entire Christian - faith. And popular culture certainly reflected that view in secular/profane terms. There was nothing remotely like the gay or lesbian support groups, which might have helped people through the process of self-acceptance, including any spiritual dimension. I was out there twisting in the effing breeze on my own.

A Saturday evening finally came when I trudged to the Catholic chapel on campus and sat in the back until everyone else had gone to confession. I went into the confessional, recited those offenses I recognized as sins; then - after a long pause - I told of having sex with Bill. The priest did his best to counsel me against this sin, and then came the crucial words to the effect that I must express sincere contrition for these sins and promise to do my best never to repeat them. I then put the elephant on the railroad track.....I replied, "I cannot." This little announcement stopped the proceedings, and I might have believed the entire world as well so momentous was this declaration to me. The man was not a fire-breathing monster, and he did his best to explain the matter to me from the viewpoint of the Church. But I could only respond that I was certain that being homosexual was "the way I am" and that I was not prepared to live a celibate life, nor was I willing to profess the required contrition for something I did not believe was a sin. The priest, of course, could not give me absolution.

R.C. confessional

In a subsequent discussion in his study he explained what I already knew: that I was automatically prohibited from receiving the sacraments, which most importantly meant receiving communion at mass - without committing damning sin. But hadn't that been exactly the line of reasoning that had brought this confrontation about in the first place? He strongly recommended therapy (with a Catholic therapist), but I demurred again. Though I had been dealing with homosexuality in religious terms, it seemed immediately right when presented with this suggestion that just as there was nothing to be forgiven for, so there was nothing to be cured of. Thus, in all respects we were back to square one, except that I looked to be turning in my game token.

This stand would essentially reduce me to the position of passive observer in what for Catholics was the most important part of their religion, the mass. I have always been grateful that this priest talked to me calmly and treated me with courtesy, by doing so I think I was probably saved from an enormous dose of resentment against the Church, which, from what I have seen over the years, is an energy-sapping dead end for many ex-Catholics. When I left he shook my hand, wished me well and said he would pray for me. No, I have never thought that he was a closet case. Just a decent person.

(For those few who might remember this era on the S.U. campus, the priest was not the Catholic chaplain of the time, Fr. Ryan. Ryan was a witty, urbane man, but also more than a bit smug, extremely hostile to the "neo-pagan" influences on campus, and steadfastly opposed Catholic students having even the most superficial involvement in any inter-faith doings. The priest who heard my confession was a visiting one from nearby Lemoyne, a Jesuit college. Had I had this experience with Fr. Ryan I have no doubt that it would have been a far, far more negative one.)

I can clearly recall leaving and walking down the street in a kind of daze, with my strongest feeling being one of immense relief. Understandably, I think, I was reacting to this as a one off event, the "well, that's over with" reaction. I had never intended to stop attending mass on Sundays, but sitting there the next time, I felt completely reduced to the role of an outsider. I experienced sadness, relief, resignation, longing and more - totally confused currents of feelings. I began to sense in the days and months afterward an increasing feeling of being uprooted. Coming to the point where I had been able to cease denying the combination of Me & Homosexual had been, to some degree, a kind of romanticized expansion of myself - and, perhaps, not entirely divorced from a prideful and masochistic enthusiasm for religious legalism. Now I felt like there was a tearing in my life - in me. I was pulling loose (or being pushed away, I was never sure which) from something that was a deeply embedded part of my life. I was very soon to endure another such event that was to be terribly painful, this time with my family. It would take a very long time to find other landmarks to reckon by.

I did not even think to "come out" to my family, of course. The number of gay people who told their parents of their sexual orientation was miniscule during this era. There were almost no tales of this news being accepted well, usually it signaled severe and long term ruptures in family relationships. Most of one's energies went into camouflaging the fact you were gay - attempting to pass was the norm. (In any case, the expression "coming out" as it was used in the late Fifties had a different meaning. It referred to a person admitting their sexual orientation to themselves and beginning to participate in gay life - like a debutante coming out to Society.) However, like other gay guys, I did confide in a straight friend. My best friend from Freshman year, Dick, was a guy I was still friendly with. I told him I had something important that I wanted to talk to him about, and we met in the early evening and went for a walk. When I finally managed to get to the point and said I was gay, he said that he was afraid that was what I'd been getting at. Dick's reaction was more strongly negative than I had expected. I remember that he said that it was bad to be homosexual - a "sin"; "dirty" was the most painful word. He was quite upset. I had suggested we turn into a park, because I thought we would avoid bumping into anyone we knew. Suddenly he seemed panicked, and said something like, "Let's get out of here. I want to leave." He practically fled from me. Though I didn't see him often, we did remain friends - or at least friendly, though we never mentioned my being gay again.

It probably bears emphasizing that in the America of a half century ago there was almost no maneuvering room in regard to homosexuality - and the same was true of pre-marital sex, unwed motherhood, and interracial dating/marriage among other things. These activities were patently wrong as far as the overwhelming majority of people were concerned, and furthermore, they were deeply wrong. Whenever possible people often preferred to deny that such things were true about people they knew even when it was blatantly obvious they were; the alternative was to ostracize the offender in ways which were so customary that they required no overt considerations or discussions of how to go about it. Expressions of sympathy (rather than pity), much less anything so positive as to approach tolerance, provoked disapproval and censure, ensuring that most people wouldn’t stick their necks out. To hear that so-and-so had "left town" was many times a euphemism for the exile that the offenders chose - or were forced into. Good people "moved," bad people "left town."

I understand now what I had barely begun to grasp then. And it echoes an observation that a Japanese woman made to Donald Richie regarding his lifetime in Japan: I was to discover the benefits of being an outsider. And I would not have had I not been excluded. The stigma of homosexuality, I would discover, was a much a baptism as a burial. And, I am inclined to think, it is exactly this that has made gay people outstanding contributors to the mainstream society - the empowerment of being in a world, but not of it.
Catholic Worker protest poster

I think this was the year that I joined the SANE chapter (Society for the Abolition of Nuclear Explosions) on campus. There may have been a couple of dozen members, though I never saw that many at one time. Organizations like this were suspect even though the McCarthy frenzy had peaked some years before. My participation was close to nil; however, through it I was exposed to the life and work of Ammon Hennacy, the Catholic-anarchist-draft-resister-you name it. (And Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement too.) I certainly didn't follow in the footsteps of the master, so to speak. But it was the first time, I think, that I had been attracted to any kind of political or social thought that was out of the mainstream. I wonder, but there's no knowing, of course, had I not already felt myself moving beyond the pale by virtue of my homosexuality, would I have been as receptive to Hennacy - or to other thinkers and ideas in later years. I doubt it, I think I would probably have been too eager for acceptance and approval.

Summer vacation was back to factory work again, but this time on late night shift. My schedule was a great stroke of luck on two counts. First, it collapsed the amount of time I was with my parents to the minimum. Since getting through the rocky adjustments of my Freshman year and settling into the less intense living situation of the cottage environment, I was beginning to feel what I guess was a nascent sense that "home" was no longer where my parents lived. I had learned to live on my own and I was liking it - in fact, the change was wonderful. I knew full well that I was in no way the person they thought I was, and far less so than before. Second, there was no escaping that a big plus of this work schedule was that it pretty much reduced the time available to spend with my girlfriend to weekends. The relationship had changed for me. The whole idea of marriage and family was becoming a vanishing blur, and sex an obligatory performance. But after a lifetime of unquestioningly internalizing conventional views, plus a largely happy four-year relationship, I was in a kind of paralysis of cowardice.

It seemed that I didn't have a secret as much as I was a secret. I no longer felt at home in any aspect of what had been my own community. I liked working through the night, sleeping all day; getting up in time to have dinner with my parents, and glad as it got dark to be walking down the streets to the factory again.

JUNIOR YEAR: THE GAY UNDERWORLD

1958 is the year Pope Pius XII died. This man had been Pope since 1939, and his austere figure had been a major presence on the world stage during WW II, and in the post-war period he had become a symbol of opposition to Soviet Communism. And he certainly epitomized the Catholicism I was raised in. In the more mundane world the first "gold" records are given out, stereo recording is in and the cost of a first class letter skyrockets to four cents.

This year I moved to a Queen Anne style cottage complete with tower, in the commercial part of the campus. The Orange was located just down the street on South Crouse Avenue. Some gay students did hang out there I began to suspect.

Queen Ann style house

One night when I was sitting at the bar alone another young guy sitting a couple of stools away looked at me a few times, and then he moved over and started a conversation. His name was Joe Livorno, and though he was from Jersey City he was now only a part-time student and worked downtown as a ballroom dance instructor. He invited me back to his room a few blocks away, and though we kissed and groped each other for hours we didn't have sex. Not then or ever. However, Joe turned out to be not only more worldly-wise about gay life than Bill Kenner of the year before, he was also a much more straightforward guy. Joe was my first real gay friend. (And to this day I remember him with gratitude and fondness.)

It was about this time that I forced myself to face the fact that I had to end the four-year relationship with my girlfriend. Her expectations were the same as they had always been; mine were being overturned tumultuously. There was no way in the Fifties, not even the thought of it, that I could tell her what had happened with me. It turned into a miserable breakup for both of us that extended over several weeks, and for me it was a guilt-ridden one. She was extremely hurt by it, and baffled at how my affection for her could have just vanished. And I had no way of telling her that there was nothing she could do to make things better again.

On my side, my life had been all laid out in my imagination - marriage to this girl, children (four or five, as I recall); quite possibly a job in a city near my hometown, but in any case, an adulthood and old age lived in a similar place, happy and securely middle class, as my parents had not been. But now what? I really didn't know. Straight life - as I had learned about it, and accepted it - was full of slots, and by and large people found this one and that one without much problem, and even changed some of them over the course of time. If one's life was not totally predictable, its course was usually socially acceptable - even if the sloppier moments caused strains. All of this reassurance disappeared. Being gay erased almost all of the content of my future as I had imagined it, and there really was nothing in my head that gave me a clue what you did with a gay life. The nearest thing to a clue was the life of a straight single person, but this was a melange of recollections of people I had grown up with, social stereotypes and romantic tales. Once you discarded the Lawrence of Arabia type heroes, what was left was neither attractive nor particularly helpful. Yes, I knew about blackmail, gossip, criminality, etc., but if you held that at bay - and the likelihood of life as a disaster has about the same reality to a young person as death - what the fuck did you do? Where were the maps? I do still clearly remember that at this point I was quite puzzled by this, but sometimes more than that - something closer to intimidated, maybe awed.

Not too long afterward that fall I had another encounter in the Orange. This time a guy who was sitting in a booth with two friends kept looking at me. Finally he came up to me at the bar and asked me if I wanted to join them. His name was Tom Ripton, he was a grad student. He and his friends were from well-heeled families and tony suburban backgrounds. They were totally involved in the Greek fraternity system, Tom even belonged to that best-fraternity-on-campus. And as it came into the open through innuendo and in jokes that we were all gay, I learned Tom and his friends also had some experience in the gay worlds of New York and Philadelphia, and they even knew about a gay club in London (The Rockingham?) and one in Amsterdam too. Crouse College at S.U.

(By the way, I have, rather surprising to me, seen the question raised several times in print - even by Larry Kramer of all people - whether "gay" and "gay life" were terms used in the Fifties. They were certainly in common use by all the gay people I met during these years.)

Later Tom asked me to leave with him, which I didn't get the drift of right away, and everyone burst out laughing. After we'd had sex - which turned out to be an unsatisfactory business - we smoked and talked in bed quite awhile, then he remarked as he got up to make coffee, "I'm going to get married, but you'll always be gay." I did not need to call Daniel from the lions' den to tell me that I had been weighed in the balance and found wanting. But it seemed to have nothing to do with not-so-great sex. I had gotten a large dose of what is now termed internalized homophobia. It was never far below the surface in Tom's crowd, and other guys in this clique sometimes made references to lives that would eventually include a wife, kids and a house with a white picket fence, and the country club, of course.

Tom introduced me to my first gay cry-in-your-gin album, and it was not Judy Garland, but Judy Holliday's Trouble is a Man. And he also played Satie's Gymnopédies, which I had never heard before. I still enjoy both, so this unpleasant hook-up wasn't a total loss.

Despite the ill-omened beginning I began joining Tom's group when I went to the Orange and found them there. Joe worked evenings so we couldn't socialize much at night. One time, however, he came in when I was in a booth with Tom and his group. Joe took a seat at the bar, I went over and invited him to join us. He looked over at them, then said to me, "No thanks, they're not nice people." Before I went back to join them he added, "Be careful of them."

And he was right.

At first I'd thought the group was Tom; another grad student, David (Tom's recent ex-boyfriend) and Greg, who was a junior as I was. However, it often included two girls - Lynn, who claimed to be bisexual and had the disposition of a scorpion enduring a root canal, and Shellie, who was straight and had a crush on David and whose defense against Lynn was to fawn on her. They too came from well off suburban families with professional or business backgrounds. A few grad student fraternity brothers of Tom's would join us sometimes - but not if Lynn and Shellie, were part of the group. The combination of Tom, David and Greg, plus the two women always had a very nasty quality - a kind of free-floating maliciousness - that I never understood, and was often the target of. Probably I was a natural for it in this group: I was the only one from a small town, the only one with a Catholic background and an unsophisticated kid who knew shit about the gay world.

Through these guys I discovered there were other little cliques of gay students, separate groups of two to a half dozen friends. These groups were diffident about each other in the bar and inclined not to mix. I think there may have the notion at work that a few guys hanging out together drew less attention. Whereas, if one or two guys were identified as gay and they were part of a large group, then everyone would be labeled. Contrary to the popular saying, it seemed that in this case there was no "safety in numbers," but rather the opposite. Thus, gay life on campus was very, very furtive. The majority of gay guys went to some lengths to date and appear to be unquestionably straight, while a few dropped out of mainstream campus life to live as they chose to - very quietly - and avoid having to live double lives. Joe had taken this latter route, and there were a few others I knew of.

The bar at the Orange, despite its small size, was a favorite drop in spot for many students, and it was often extremely crowded; thus, the atmosphere was very uptight for gay students: You had to be concerned about being overheard, and also, at any point someone's straight friends might come in and sit down with you and the guys you were with. Either of these events killed the night for any gay socializing. Often gay men who knew each other to be gay, e.g. through a mutual gay friend or from seeing each other in a gay bar in New York, took pains to avoid even the slightest mutual acknowledgement of their shared sexual orientation on campus. There were two bartenders, Harry, a plain-faced man in his forties or fifties with beagle-eyes, and Fergie, a Korean War vet, I believe, and while a student (as I recall), he was older than most. Both were straight, but totally aware of the suppressed gay life that was going on in the place. To this day Harry remains my picture of the consummate bartender -- affable, intelligent, always seemingly absorbed in one or more conversations with customers, but almost preternaturally aware and on top of every vibe in the room. Fergie had not been the second bartender when I first started going to the Orange, but arrived on the scene in my sophomore year, perhaps. He had intense, hawkish eyes and was a tall, big-shouldered, broad-chested guy, and to me he looked very on edge - and unfriendly - behind the bar at first. However, his demeanor changed - under Harry's tutelage I suspect - and he acquired his own version of bartender's "cool."

Nevertheless, some extremely careful cruising and picking up went on at the Orange: that was, after all, how I found myself in one of the gay cliques. And despite the fact that this little group was often unpleasant and very caught up in money and social class, I continued to join them because they were the only group I had an entree with.

INTRODUCTION TO CAMPING 101

Almost immediately I learned about something very strange called "camping." Greg, though the youngest and most recently out, was its most eager practitioner. Camping as practiced by Greg was a demonstration of stop-time choreography. First, he raised his eyebrows to his hairline while rolling his eyes heavenward. Next, he flapped his hands in what looked like an imitation of the pterodactyl taking flight in Prehistoric Women. Finally, in a rasping kind of mantric invocation (it was the voice Bette Davis, when it wasn't Tallulah Bankhead, I learned later) he would utter, "Get-you-Ma-ry." This it turned out was only camping's essence - something like Om in other contexts, perhaps - and this style could be applied to almost any put-down to increase it's humor and sting.

I also learned that camping plugged into something like a collective gay consciousness, consisting of particular (mostly) female film stars and their movies and anecdotes and stories related almost exclusively to the world of entertainment. Much of the content was familiar to me from the hours and hours spent in the local movie theatre as a kid (and the old films on late night TV), though I really wasn't quite "getting it" in this context. Camping drew deeply on the stereotype of woman-as-bitch.

Along with this I found out about "Miss Eisenhower." She was not a mad daughter Ike and Mamie kept hidden behind locked doors in the attic of the White House. "She" was President Eisenhower. Ol' straight-laced Ike! Okay, got that one. Rock Hudson and Tab Hunter were also "Miss," as were an endless number of other male Hollywood stars and celebrities, all of whom were really gay. (Almost every famous person who came up in conversation, whether adored or hated, was really gay I came to learn.) And it seemed that every gay man was "Miss" So-and-so, whatever his surname was, and often blessed with a female sobriquet as well. Finally, any man one disliked could be brought down with a "Miss" and a "she."
"Get you, Mary."

Forgive me, I cannot resist saying it: I was not a happy camper. But camp I did, because that was what you did if you were gay.

This was not something that Joe had been into, though Bill Kenner I realized had come close to it. I found it pretty disorienting. One of the hardest parts of growing up had been the business of believing in myself as a guy (for lack of a better term) even if most of the details of the more aggressive images of maleness didn't fit me. Possibly the last part of that business was to be able to be my own kind of a "guy," but a gay one. But this group of gay men strongly reinforced the image the straight world had of gay men: men who were, or wanted to be, women. The arch "femaleness" of the argot brought the whole business into question again, in addition to which the unrelentingly negative tone of camping had a deeply depressing effect on me. The last straw was that everyone in the group seemed to accept (though it was not discussed at length) the idea of homosexuality as something that had gone wrong, incurable perhaps and therefore to be lived out, but nevertheless, a kind of medical deviancy at least. The assumption I had made while talking with the priest that if I wasn't a sinner, I wasn't sick either looked to have been a case of jumping to the wrong conclusions. I mean, shouldn't these guys know?

Greg seemed quite pleased with the Oedipus complex, and certain that it was the overweening influence of his mother that had produced his condition. Several years later there was a graffito in the men's john of the Lion, a straight bar on Christopher Street: My mother made me a homosexual. Someone had written below it: If I buy her the wool will she make me one? Unfortunately by this time I had lost track of Greg.

I mean, rilly, Madge, why is it called gay life!

The work of Dr. Evelyn Hooker, which began to undermine the medical profession's stereotype of homosexuals as sick people came out in 1957, however, I did not hear of it until the 60's; nor did I read Donald Webster Cory's (Edward Sagarin) The Homosexual in America (1951) until the 60’s either. Either one would have given me a broader and more positive view of gay life than the one I was getting.
cover of '57 paperback edition

Greg seemed almost obsessed with the "she-ness" of it all, and though Tom and David were a great deal less so, the predominate tone of the group's modus vivendi was unrelentingly catty when not just plain bitchy. The gay world looked to be a bizarre and mean-spirited place. Over time I discovered that my experience and my feelings paralleled those of many, many guys who had a similarly claustrophobic introduction to gay life.

LIFE IN THE CITY

There were two gay bars in downtown Syracuse that we went to once, maybe twice. One of them, Bersani's, was a dark, sleazy dive, and sometimes small groups of straight students (usually all guys) would go there to look at the queers. But not a few times someone in the group was discovering his own homosexuality and really trying to get a sneaky look at the gay scene. What a way to get it! Bersani's gay clientele were living beyond the edge -- very effeminate men and a few butch women, drinking themselves into oblivion with flamboyant acting out that veered from misanthropy to self-hatred. The other bar, the Bell Room, (the place Hank the geology instructor had briefly taken me into) wasn't dingy and was patronized by seemingly more together people in comparison. Perhaps because it couldn't as easily be distanced as a carnival freak show this bar less often got college guys coming in as voyeurs and was, thus, a bit safer to go to if you were a gay student.

There was a third gay bar in town, a private "club" on the main drag that had all the appearance of having been a speakeasy or gambling club at one time. The entrance was a metal door between two stores; when you opened it you were faced with a long flight of metal stairs, at the top of which was another metal door with a shuttered peep hole. Opening the door downstairs tripped a buzzer as I recall, but in any case just walking up the metal stairs was announcement enough and the shutter snapped open and your approach was watched by a pair hard, dark eyes. These belonged to Rose, a huge Italian-American bull dyke, who was always dressed in flower print house dresses.

The place deserved to have been recorded by a Toulouse-Lautrec, but one with a good dash of Georg Grosz in his temperament, perhaps.

The majority of its customers were working class lesbians, a group of whom worked in commercial laundries - and these were women not to be trifled with. There were gay men too, a somewhat more varied assortment: some of the “flamers” from Bersani's, a few from the other bar and the occasional odd ones - like a couple or three wide-eyed college students, or some polished-looking slightly older guy with a professional job.

DAISY

And then there were the totally unique individuals, one Daisy certainly being the most memorable. Daisy was probably what would have been called a bag lady decades later. She spent a lot of her time in a cheesy cafeteria, and I am guessing that since little groups of the town gay guys would use the same place as a late night rendezvous point that that's how she found the club. She was a very corpulent woman in her sixties, always under the weather or maybe just not "right in the head," but a gentle decent soul (for the most part), who was good-naturedly tolerated by everyone.

She carried a clutch of shopping bags, and her scrap books. The latter were filled with memorabilia from Daisy's days as a stripper in the 30's - and when the mood struck her she could be quite insistent about sharing them.   Daisy had another mood that could come over her.

The club was one large room with booths and a dance floor (dancing and privacy were its biggest drawing cards) and through a door in the back were the toilets and an unused kitchen. This door was actually a small open archway, which on the side facing the bar and dance floor had an ornamental roof that projected out over it.   Perhaps its design suggested a stage to Daisy. Whatever the reason, there were several times when she disappeared - presumably to the bathroom - only to slowly emerge from the darkness of the kitchen, undulating her way toward the archway and the bright lights as she discarded her clothes. I doubt that Sally Rand unleashed such delirium among her fans. However, Jimmy the bartender was not a party to it. But it was no easy task when Daisy was possessed by Terpsichore for him to bring her back to the world of shopping bags and scrapbooks. Sometimes the two of them would get in a serious tussle before she could be forced back into the kitchen - and her clothes.
                    (no, not Daisy herself, but similar to her photos)

The first time I was there was when the little group of us from the Orange went downtown, and I was introduced to the city gay bars. However, later on Greg and I went back by ourselves. He got involved in a flirtation with the bartender, and I got to know the dykes. Just how that began I can't remember, but after a while I was dancing with them - even little Dotty, who was Rose the Doorman's woman. Dottie was often out of it. I think working a hard manual labor job all day long and then trying to booze and stay up with Rose on her job was more than she could handle. She usually dressed in jeans and a pea jacket, and often ended up collapsing into sleep in a booth. A few times I saw Rose watching her from her post by the door, then come lumbering over in her huge flower print dress to bend over and literally lift Dotty out of the booth with both hands and hold her up like a doll. She covered her with kisses, Dotty would briefly come to and smile, then Rose would plunk her back down in the booth and to sleep again.

I don't know if the place was licensed or not, but it did serve hooch after hours. I saw two uniformed cops come into the place one night (scared the piss out of me) and they went into the kitchen with Jimmy. They came out very soon with a couple of small paper bags. Sometime later Jimmy told Greg and I that the cops came in for "lettuce sandwiches." Huh? Sandwiches from a non-working kitchen? Oh, right..."lettuce."

Though Syracuse was more than a hundred miles from my hometown, one night in this upstairs place I ran into the brother of a young woman I had worked with during high school. I was really surprised as I would never have thought he was gay. Although he was big, brash Sicilian guy, at least half a dozen or more years older than me, he'd always been friendly and I was glad to see him. He, on the other hand, clearly wished he were dead. Immediately he begged me not tell his sister he was gay if I ever ran into her. I would never have dreamed of doing such a thing, and it would certainly say as much about me as him if I were to do anything that cruel. I told him this, but he didn't seem very reassured and asked me at least twice more not to say anything to her. My being there had clearly ruined his night and scared the wits out of him.

Joe, who was a part-time student, didn't do well first semester, dropped out and went back to Jersey. Later in the year I ended up meeting Dominick, an older undergrad student who had bowed out of the Catholic priesthood and was beginning his education all over again. Once he sneaked me into his room at the Y downtown.

The Syracuse YMCA

I also got picked up in the cafeteria of the dorm I was eating in that fall by Ken, one of the grad student Resident Advisors in that dorm. He invited me to his room, where we had nervous groping sessions. (The first time it happened he was sitting in his underwear on the bed with a blanket pulled over his legs up to his waist. When he took my hand and pulled it under the blanket, putting it on his erection, I was shocked out of my wits. Not by what he did, but because I hadn't had a clue in the world that human cocks were ever that huge! I had encountered my first donkey dong.) We only had sex once, in a motel in Ithaca while we visited some friends at his undergrad alma mater for the weekend, and he was terrified we would be found out. He was convinced that if we (two men) soiled the sheets that the motel would contact the university. While both of these guys were very decent, they were extremely concerned with cultivating as straight-appearing a social life as possible - and in the case of Ken, the Resident Advisor, so paranoid about being discovered that he was literally developing ulcers. The level of defensive play-acting that permeated their lives was unbearable to be around. Without actually making a conscious decision, I was about to move rapidly move to the fringe of campus life.

Nevertheless, at the moment I was hanging out in the Orange with a group of gay "friends" who treated me like a Mickey-the-Dope, and I'm going along with it. Not good.

There was one gay faculty member, a graduate French instructor, who hung out in the bar on a daily basis. John was known as a queer and took no pains to pretend to be otherwise or deny it. He was a tall, pinched, unattractive man - very bright, but with a disposition like a rusty razor. He was "popular," (e.g. with Harry and Fergie, the two bartenders who were older, hip straight guys,) but with some few exceptions it was mostly the dubious popularity of a freak. John was almost like an exhibit, but he regarded the gawkers and fawners with open contempt, and sometimes he was involved in very nasty, nearly violent scenes - not a few of which he provoked.

Some of John's friends from off-campus would stop in briefly to chat with him at the Orange once in awhile. These guys had jobs in town, and perhaps for that reason acted as cautiously as we gay students tried to. Once the four of us were invited to a party one of them was giving. I was a bit puzzled by how concerned they seemed to be that I in particular would be sure to come. When we arrived on the appointed night, the host immediately pulled me aside: there was a certain out-of-town guest he wanted me to play a kind of verbal cat-and-mouse game with for a few minutes as a joke. It was the minister of the Baptist church in my hometown.

John later committed suicide by throwing himself out of a window while on a visit to New York City.

In retrospect the attitude of the two bartenders toward the gay scene has come to seem more curious to me than it did at the time. The Orange was not, at least in my estimation, a routinely easy bar to handle, like a neighborhood tavern might have been. The clientele was mainly guys in their late teens or early twenties, many dealing with an unlimited supply of booze for the first time in their lives (legal drinking age was 18 in NYC, but 21 in most parts of the Northeast), and often they were as full of attitude, insecurity and lack of judgment as they were full of booze. Throw in, then, a couple of co-ed patrons on a night, some of whom seemed to really get off on playing vamp roles as corny as those out of a Forties movie, without quite grasping that they were perceived by most guys as nothing more sophisticated than plain ol' "cockteases." Finally, add the occasional presence of some of the campus's more notorious malcontents and non-conformists, mainly from the drama department or the student newspaper. With this mix, who needed queers!? Provocative comments, loud arguments and hostile confrontations were not nightly occurrences, but they could be on tap in an instant - along with the much rarer sudden escalation to physical violence. It was a crowd that often required deft handling - and a lot of watching. Why, I wonder, tolerate a regular trade of student homosexuals, or John - who was a magnet for fag-haters, and even the few gay guys from the city (most of whom drifted in because they knew John) when nothing - but nothing! - inflames drunken straight men like "homos." Though the total number of gay men on any night was usually a very small part of the crowd, the potential for a serious problem was high...was there enough money made off them to be worth it? In an era when homophobia was the norm, the bartenders could have frozen out gay patrons easily. My impression of Harry was that he was a very decent, and sophisticated, guy; maybe the answer is that simple: He wasn't a shithead. Still, I wonder about the situation now.

PASSING

I think that the metaphor of the closet - with the passivity of its prepositions locating one "in" or "out" - completely mischaracterizes the situation of most homosexuals in the Fifties and Sixties. Perhaps by the time these locutions became popular American society had changed enough in its view of gay people, and gay men and lesbians had changed enough in their view of themselves that owning a public gay identity, however difficult, may have seemed like a matter changing location. Not so in these years.

American society in the Fifties was virtually monolithic in its opposition to homosexuality, and prey to the frenzy of witch hunting as well. The power of custom and law was a mortar and pestle used to grind down the lives of homosexuals, escaping these required a fierce and unceasing energy. It required work! It was nothing less than the construction and maintenance of a phony you, with unswerving attention to the minutia of its factitious life so as to never betray the duplicity of that self that was not oneself. The lives of most gay people were not about being passively "in" some comfy ol' closet. For most homosexual men and women it meant the sheep putting on wolf drag every day and running with the bloodthirsty bastards fast enough that they'd never find you out and chew your throat open.

"In the closet" fails utterly to capture what was going on.

It was the fearful task of a life of passing. In the 1950's several movies - Imitation of Life, Pinky, Lost Boundaries - had dared to gingerly touch on this highly charged topic. Those people of black African ancestry, with a physical appearance sufficiently similar to European-Americans, who chose to take the chance of passing for "white” opened for themselves a multitude of doors that were shut to them as "Negroes." The negative side of this venture demanded high costs in self-loathing, separation from "Negro" family members and friends, the vigilance of preserving a duplicitous autobiography, bending to the ultimate hypocrisy of joining in the mechanisms of racism and oppression, and finally, the great fear of discovery - the unmasking, which would not only destroy whatever had been gained by passing, but which could call forth extreme punishment.

Fifties paperback

It is likely that only a small proportion of people of African-American ancestry were able to consider passing as an alternative in their lives, and probably even fewer who chose to do so. However, during the Fifties and Sixties passing was, without a doubt, the modus vivendi attempted by most gay men and lesbians. The majority of gay people did their best to appear to conform to the prevailing societal norms because most of us felt that we had far too much to lose by asserting our deviancy from those norms.

The ultimate passing strategy was marriage to a person of the opposite sex. This was often done in the spirit of denial rather than deception, or in the mistaken belief that there was a kind of mystical coital cure for homosexuality in the act of heterosexual screwing; however, some gay people did quite calculatingly marry for the protection it provided against accusations of homosexuality.

However, a small number of people went clear in the opposite direction and repudiated the appearance of conformity.

If you couldn't or wouldn't get involved in trying to pass what life seemed to offer was a few occupations which were more or less safe for "fairies," e.g. hairdresser, dancer, sales clerk positions in a few chi-chi stores. Then there was always the very limited field of waiter or bartender in a gay establishments. Finally, there were the guys in the lowest level office jobs, and often not visible to the public, who got to enjoy being the company fag for life – not to mention being targeted as a homo or queer outside the relatively safe work environment.

The losers at the passing game, the folks who tried and were not successful at it, on the whole probably fared worse. They found themselves fired or dead-ended in their work lives, and the recipients of whatever other humiliations the straight world chose to deal out to those who had evaded its rules through deceit.

Then there were the people like John in the bar: Those who refused to try to pass, but who demanded a place in mainstream society anyway. This was rarely a promising route. John's one-way trip out a window seemed an object lesson in what came of it.

POLITICS AND PUBLISHING

Though there was no political activity in Syracuse at all in regard to "gay rights" - an unheard of term to me then -- there were two groups on the scene elsewhere, I learned. The Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis (women) - limited mostly to the West Coast and NYC as far as I knew - did have social and political objectives. The Mattachine Society had originally been founded by some gay ex-Communists who left the party when they realized that it was determinedly homophobic. These organizations had miniscule memberships and about an equal amount of overt influence - either amongst gay people or straights. But their courage for this era was incredible. Each one of these people at least figuratively had a bull’s eye for a head, unlike later gay activists who could count on safety in numbers in a turbulent era of social unrest and a far, far more liberal social climate..

And there were books: Giovanni's Room (1956), James Baldwin's first novel, which had an explicitly gay plot and protagonists, - my first gay read - and a handful of other mainstream gay literary efforts, e.g. The City and the Pillar. A previous, less successful novel was James Barr's Quatrefoil (1950), unknown to me until later, and then there was the famous lesbian-themed pioneering effort, The Well of Loneliness (1928), by Radcliffe Hall.

1959 paperback of Baldwin's novel

There was also a little magazine called One, which attempted to discuss gay issues in a serious way, it had a very small circulation. Most newsstands didn't carry it, and the postal authorities considered it pornographic......and then in those times, who would want his name on a subscription list in the event the police raided a gay publisher? I found it for sale in the back corner of a bookstore on campus (Manny's (?) not the college run bookstore!) next to Baldwin's and Vidal's books and bordering on some shelves of Beat stuff.

1954 issue
Gay beefcake magazines were small pocket-sized numbers like Bob Mizer's famous Physique Pictorial, and Vim, Tomorrow's Man, Adonis, et al, which showed muscular guys in posing straps, and in the case of the PP sometimes pairs of men in poses that would have given even Helen Keller the picture of what they were interested in. A couple of large format magazines of the same type, but with color photos, (Demi-Gods, etc.) flourished later on, attempting to present themselves as "artistic" offshoots of bodybuilding magazines. The Grecian Guild Pictorial, one of the pocket-size magazines, even had a formal "creed" invoking its connection with the Classical world that it included in its issues in an attempt to cover its legal ass. I used to buy my copies at a hole-in-the-wall magazine store downtown around the corner Dey's Department Store - and still approached the buying process as if I were purchasing heroin in church.

1959 paperback
Muscle Boy, published in 1959, is something of a cult classic. It was written by a modestly successful author of straight novels, Derek David Stacton, under the pseudonym Bud Clifton. It is ragingly homophobic, concerning the adventures of a teen age bodybuilder who is lured into posing for beefcake photos and then becomes involved - reluctantly of course - in a world of bodybuilding sleazebags and S&M psychos of every description. One of them, a painter, is considered to have been modeled after George Quaintance, famous for his erotic paintings. The tone of the novel is a shade of silly purple and in each scene Our Hero is just barely saved only to fall into more dire straits. It has a kind of Perils of Pauline quality that is unintentionally funny overall, and yet there is also such detail and accuracy about the milieu that you can't help wonder if Mr. Stacton wasn't as much fascinated as repelled, and perhaps had first hand knowledge. Sources on the Net have stated that he was married, and also that he died of a stroke in 1968, however one said that he had committed suicide.

"The Sustaining Stream," an article in a February 1963 issue of Time magazine, was a reading list of recommended authors whose first works had appeared within the last few years. This is the comment on Stacton (referring to his straight books):

"David Stacton, 37, is a Nevadan who wears cowboy boots, is fond of both Zen and bourbon, and is as nearly unknown as it is possible for a writer to be who has written, and received critical praise for, 13 novels (all have been published in England, five in the US.). His books, most of which have historical themes, are masses of epigrams marinated in a stinging mixture of metaphysics and blood. Mostly they resemble themselves, but something similar might have been the result if the Duc de la Rochefoucauld had written novels with plots suggested by Jack London."

If the atmosphere surrounding homosexuality seems almost unbelievably repressive and claustrophobic, consider that there was a virtual war still being waged against rock and roll music. For example, as he testified before a Senate subcommittee regarding the Smathers Bill of 1958, Vance Packard, popular author of Hidden Persuaders, said that rock and roll was "inspired by what has been called race music modified to stir the animal instinct in teenagers. Its chief characteristics now are a heavy, unrelenting beat and a raw, savage tone. The lyrics tend to be nonsensical or lewd, or both. Rock and roll might best be summed up as monotony tinged with hysteria.” And this is U.S. Senate testimony about pop music of all things!

NEW YORK, NEW YORK!

Bill Kenner and I hadn't picked up our sexual relationship after our sophomore year, however I did see him almost every day as we had the same major and were in many of the same classes. Shortly before our Easter break he asked me if I'd like to spend it at his home. Bill's father was an oil exec and they lived in Scarsdale, a wealthy suburb north of New York. God. New York! And with a gay guy. I jumped at the chance, and my parents with much complaining allowed it.

When I came to New York for the first time on that spring break in 1959 one of the bars I went to, not a very popular one, was Le Faisan d'Or. I was told that it was the single remnant from the old Bird Circuit era, the bars that I had read about long ago in that Esquire magazine article. (While it may possibly have dated from the same era, I don't think that it actually was part of the circuit, which I read much later was located on Lexington and Third avenues in the upper Forties/lower Fifties.) But as far as I knew then, I had seen the last gasp of 1940s/early 50s gay life. After that time, once in a very great while, I would meet someone who was old enough to have frequented the Bird Circuit in its heyday, and it would give me the same "tingle" of awe I used to get out of Civil War veterans when I was a little kid! A comparison I had sense enough not to make out loud.

50's NYC signature: the Midtown skyline

Our first night of that Easter break Bill and I went into town together to see my first Broadway show in New York (of which I, surprisingly, have zero recollection) and take in a bar or two. But in the next couple of days I took the train in by myself. (The real live New Yorker's commuter train! Just like in the movies.) That night I met a guy in the Old Colony on 8th Street, and since he was staying with a friend in his studio apartment we shacked up in the Hotel Earl, which was a shopworn place near Washington Square in those days. The next day we took in a matinee, and I got to see Geraldine Page, Paul Newman and Rip Torn in Sweet Bird of Youth. (The "Wows!" were really piling up.)

I did not visit Mary's, the bar that Donald Richie had taken Yukio Mishima to in 1952, which was only a few doors east of the Old Colony. I was warned not to as it had not improved over the dismal description that Richie gives it in his Japan Journals.

THE DARK SIDE OF THE BRIGHT LIGHTS

A night later I went into the city with Greg from the bar clique at college, and we connected with Clem and Sam, two young gay guys he'd met who worked in the city. We went to the Mais Oui, a dance bar in what was then New York's extremely seedy Upper West Side. When we left the other two stopped on the way out, and Clem and I sat in the back seat of the car waiting for them. Suddenly the door was ripped open, lights were flashed in our faces and we were dragged from car, and accused of having sex. The cops were raiding the dance bar we had just been in. We were ordered to empty out our pockets and give our names and addresses, then we were ordered to stretch over the hood with our hands up. I was numb. The cop in charge threatened to notify my parents when he saw I was a college student from out of town. He was suddenly distracted by some fleeing patrons and ran in their direction. Among the things I’d pulled out of my pockets was a small Irish souvenir rosary. The young officer picked it up, and said, “Are you Catholic?” I said, “Yes,” very timidly, afraid that this would bring on a storm of outrage. But he told us to pick up our stuff and get the hell out of there before his partner came back.

Luckily, Greg and Sam showed up right at this point. They had been hassled as they were leaving the bar, nothing else, but when Greg heard that the cops had taken the license number of his parent's car he was afraid they would be notified. (They weren't.) Nevertheless, we all headed back downtown to another bar, bantering back and forth and reworking what had happened into a campy adventure.

It had been frightening, but it was no more than all of the cautionary tales made real, and, after all, it hadn't been the worst it could have been. So, I was really seeing all of "gay" life.

(Back in Syracuse, however, this incident was to come back to me again and again. It became a defining - or perhaps better, redefining - moment in my life. The fact that we could be - and had been - treated so highhandedly and with such abusive contempt simply because it was assumed we were "homos,” eroded any campy interpretation of the event, along with self-serving notions I had of my own sang froid. I had been scared - almost literally - shitless, and nothing less. And it may well have only been a cop's quirk of religious sentimentality that saved Clem and I from being charged with public indecency, which most certainly would have meant that my parents would have become involved.)