Not So Good a Gay Man Read online

  About this time I asked my mother if she thought I was handsome (standard question from a teenage boy). She made two mistakes. The first was to take a minute to think about it. The second was to say “You’re very nice-looking.” It took me a few decades to appreciate the wisdom of this. A handsome movie star whose career depends on his looks had a lot more to lose as he grew older than I did.

  A few years before, I learned that kids are sexual at an early age even though they don’t yet know what to do with the sensations. In sixth grade I usually sat in the back of the room with a young girl and we’d tell each other dirty jokes. When one of us didn’t get it, the other would explain it.

  By the seventh grade all us boys sweated for fear we’d be called to the front of the class to diagram a sentence on the blackboard or do a simple problem in math. Our pants would rub against our legs and we would get an erection. We used to bite our lips as an antierection aid. And then there was the problem of taking a shower after gym class. Those boys who had matured early usually flaunted the evidence and the rest of us would stare at them with envy and admiration.

  My favorite comic strip at the time was Tarzan of the Apes. Artist Burne Hogarth, for reasons I suspected later, had Tarzan swinging through the trees in leopard-skin Speedos, which gave him the most attractive butt in comics. I mentioned this to friends, who looked puzzled and said “So what?”

  By thirteen I was introduced to more serious forms of sexuality by stepbrother Gene. We had a table tennis setup in the basement and we started playing games together. He was a much better player than I was and after a few volleys always managed to hit the ball directly into my crotch—with the expected results.

  Things became embarrassing one Thanksgiving when I excused myself from the table to go to the washroom to take a pee. I wriggled my penis once or twice, got an unwanted erection, and then very strange things happened. My family began to holler at me, asking if I’d died in there, and finally I emerged, sweaty and flushed.

  Everybody stared at me for a long moment and I realized that now they all knew about my coming of age. The Ping-Pong games became more serious now, and after a dozen volleys stepbrother Gene and I would end up in the coal pile.

  At the time, we boys slept two to a bed. One of my stepbrothers and I in one, Mark and Gene in another. One night I completely lost it and tried to climb into bed with Gene, even though Mark was already there—hopefully sound asleep. A week later Mark and stepbrother Gene got into a fight when my folks weren’t home and sprayed blood all over the upstairs hallway. That scared both of them and they spent all afternoon trying to wash it off.

  Neither ever admitted the reason for the fight, but I suspected it had been about me. I was Mark’s little brother, which automatically made him my protector. A few months later Gene was drafted and a year or so after that so was Mark.

  For a long time I hated my stepbrother for “turning me gay,” but a few decades later, in therapy, I discovered I hadn’t hated him at all. I’d loved him. Our Ping-Pong games had become sexual, but to me physical touch, a rarity in the family, had translated as affection, sexual or not.

  Mark and I became much closer the year he got his driver’s license and almost killed us both. We were driving along a country road paralleling a train track when we heard a train whistle in the distance. My daredevil brother decided to beat it to the next crossing. He floored the gas pedal and I started to sweat as the warning whistle of the train got louder. We just made it. On the other side of the crossing my pale-faced brother abruptly stopped the car. I flew forward and bumped the windshield with my head, raising a welt. Once home, my mother asked what had happened, how come the bump on my head.

  For once in my life, I kept my mouth shut.

  II

  SOME YEARS LATER I had lunch with director Tom O’Horgan (Hair, Lenny, Jesus Christ Superstar) and during the conversation discovered that for my first two years of high school, at the start of World War II, we’d both gone to Proviso Township in Maywood, Illinois. We’d taken the same classes, had the same instructors, and knew the same students.

  The big difference was he knew all the gay students. I knew some of them but had never known they were gay.

  I had started reading science fiction when I was eleven. I usually stayed up in my bedroom reading science fiction magazines while my brothers played baseball in the empty street (few people had cars in those days) or shin hockey in the alley (roller skates, cheap hockey sticks, and a tin can for a puck). I graduated from high school when I was sixteen—I was a smart kid and had skipped a grade—and by this time I was a dyed-in-the-wool science fiction fan. I carefully saved all the magazines and joined a magazine correspondence club (so had Hugh Hefner, who joined “The Weird Tales Club” in 1943) and was starting to make friends across the country.

  Locally my friends were Ronald Clyne and Charles Beaumont (originally McNutt, but he took a lot of kidding from classmates and while living in Beaumont, Texas, had changed his last name to that of the city). Ron was an artist and Chuck wanted to be a writer (so did I), and in our senior year the three of us decided to put out an amateur magazine titled Parsec. That never happened, but Clyne went on to design most of the jackets for Folkways Records, and Chuck ended up selling stories to Esquire and Playboy while I was still mucking around in the penny-a-word digest magazines.

  My mother had hired a private eye to find her own mother, and while none of the family had much in common with our bedridden Grandmother Proctor, we always liked her husband, Fred, who covered sports for the Chicago Herald-Examiner.

  Fred got me a job as a copyboy at INS (International News Service—both it and the Examiner were owned by Hearst) and took me to hockey games and down to the locker room, where he introduced me to “Mush” March and Johnny Gottselig of the Chicago Blackhawks as the “great white hope.” That got a laugh out of the players—at 140 pounds sopping wet I wasn’t the great white anything.

  Hockey wasn’t my favorite sport, but I went with Fred to the games, where he would dictate his story to me, I’d write it down and hand it to the telegrapher, who’d send it to the sports desk. (Fred had palsy and couldn’t hold a pencil.)

  After six months of picking up the morning reports from the Chicago livestock yards for INS and feeding rolls of paper to their teletype machines in the afternoon, I got a dream job working in the mail room of Ziff-Davis, then publishers of Amazing Stories, Fantastic Adventures, Mammoth Mystery, and Mammoth Detective. The fiction magazines did well, but the real moneymakers were Flying, Popular Photography, and Radio News.

  Between delivering mail to the various departments, I’d hang out with a diminutive hunchback, Ray Palmer, head of the fiction department, and Howard Browne, who handled the mystery magazines. Howard was a pretty good mystery writer himself and introduced me to novels by Raymond Chandler. Years later, in journalism school at Northwestern, I combined the mystery genre with the fantasy genre and wrote one of the first “thrillers” (The Power). I hit it big—magazine serialization, television, a George Pal movie, and more foreign editions than anything else I’ve ever written.

  I owed Howard a lot.

  (I also owed Palmer a lot, though I didn’t realize it until much later. If you write what you think is a great line, kill it—it will throw the rest of your piece off balance. The same advice was given by the writing teacher in the movie Kill Your Darlings.)

  As an avid magazine collector, I was also something of a thief. The mail room held the original two years of Amazing Stories, bound in thick, black volumes, six magazines to a volume. “Sydney Gernsback” was printed in gold at the bottom of the spine (Sydney was the brother of Hugo, the original editor and publisher of Amazing.) Nobody ever looked at the volumes; nobody had in years. But to a collector they were pure gold. It was winter and my overcoat was very big and floppy. I smuggled the volumes out, one at a time, beneath the coat. The only time I was almost caught was when the treasurer of the company rode down with me in the elevator, staring at me,
wondering how his office boy had gained so much weight.

  The most horrifying thing that ever happened in my life was when I was walking to work one spring morning. A stockbroker in the building next to 540 North Michigan—the home of Ziff-Davis—had leaned too far back in his swivel chair by an open window and toppled out of the fifth floor. If I had gotten there ten steps sooner I would have been beaned by him. I was one of the first to arrive at the scene—no police, no ambulance, no shocked pedestrians, just myself.

  My first thought was what science fiction writer Robert Heinlein had once said: a human being was just a bag of liquids. What would a grapefruit—which had a much thicker skin than a human being—look like if it had fallen from five stories up? It would have splattered on the cement, which is what our broker had done. Year, later I would wonder what a soldier would look like if he had been driving his Humvee in Iraq and hit an IED? I wouldn’t wonder long—I already knew.

  I could hear the police sirens and an ambulance in the distance and hurried through the gathering crowd to the offices of Ziff-Davis. I got there just in time to lose my breakfast when I hit the john.

  My sexual life was nonexistent. By now I was familiar with “faggot,” “queer,” and “dirty Commie faggot.” I didn’t want to be any of them, knew I had no choice, and started building a social closet so nobody would know. I was pretty sure I was unique—I knew of nobody else like me. Talk about it to a minister or a priest? You’ve got to be kidding. Living at home, my mother knew everything about me—after all, she did the laundry. I could have confided in her, but what young boy ever talks to his mother about his sex life (or lack of it)?

  The Trevor Project, the hotline for young, troubled gays, had yet to be created. Like many other young gays I thought of suicide but didn’t have the courage—or, when it really came down to it, the desire. It seems silly to say it now but the serials in the science fiction magazines were a big help. What was going to happen in the next installment of Second Stage Lensman or the new novel by Robert Heinlein? I’d stick around long enough to find out.

  I knew a few gays—along with some nongays—who lived in a small science fiction commune in Battle Creek, Michigan, called “Slan Shack.” (A “slan” was a superhuman mutant in a popular novel by A. E. Van Vogt.) One was an older man who had actually served time for being gay. Another one became one of my best friends: Walt Liebscher (the only one in science fiction “fandom” who knew I was gay at the time but never talked about it).

  Slan Shack used to throw its own small conventions, notable for their auctions, to which Ray Palmer contributed some of the artwork from Amazing Stories. (An original cover painting by J. Allen St. John, the doyen of cover painters at the time, might go for $25. Today it would go for more than twenty-five grand.) At one of these conventions I developed a crush on a fellow teenager from Buffalo, New York, who traveled all the way in for the convention. If I had made a pass, he probably would have agreed—much later I learned that many late teenagers are sexual experimenters. (Some members of Congress learned it before I did. It’s probably a toss-up whether the congressmen preyed on the page boys or some of the teenage page boys preyed on the congressmen.)

  When Slan Shack broke up and Walt moved to Los Angeles, he and a local gay man, Jimmy Kepner, were promptly “outed” by another fan when outing could frequently have tragic consequences. Walt became a recluse. Jimmy Kepner, on the other hand, became a leader in the gay rights movement, one of the founders of ONE and largely responsible for its archives.

  I had become a serious collector of old magazines, which by now led to my last contact with my father. I and two collecting friends discovered a large second-hand magazine store on Chicago’s South Side. We were flipping through handfuls of The Shadow and Adventure magazines when one of us spotted a locked glass cabinet at the rear of the store. Behind the glass doors we could see the spines of the old Amazing Stories, Wonder Stories, Weird Tales, and others—probably several hundred or more. We dropped the magazines we were holding and made a dash for the cabinet.

  “How much for all of them?”

  “I’m not going to sell anything to you guys,” the owner said with a snarl. “You dropped my magazines on the floor.”

  We romanced the old man, we listened to his tales of World War I, we bought hamburgers for his dog. Finally he relented. We could have the cabinet. For $150. Split three ways, that was $50 for me, a lot of money for a kid. I asked my mother for a loan—she now had a job in a defense plant and was making serious money for the first time in her life. I’ll never know why, but she lent me the $50.

  Once home, we spread the magazines out on the kitchen table and started divvying them up. My friends were in love with the garish Frank R. Paul covers on Amazing and Wonder. For reasons I didn’t understand, I picked out all the copies of Weird Tales—by comparison, a drab-looking magazine with stories by authors I’d never heard of.

  My mother came out to see how I’d wasted her money and turned pale. While my father painted portraits from photographs, she had read to him from his favorite magazine: Weird Tales. She was now looking at some of the identical covers. (It turned out my father was also a fan of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Tarzan. So was I.)

  I have no explanation, but I would like to think it was genetic. Recently I was offered close to a quarter of a million for a complete file of Weird Tales—I had kept upgrading over the years and by now it was probably the only mint-condition set in the country. My old man had bequeathed me something after all.

  I spent a year at Ziff-Davis in the early ’40s, then the draft caught up with me. I’d tried to enlist but was classified with “compound myopic astigmatism.” That settled that, I thought—I was safe. When I went for my draft physical my handicap was downgraded to simple myopia, and in 1943 I was cannon fodder.

  I had my choice of services and chose the navy—my best friend in science fiction had enlisted in it. And besides, I liked the uniforms, thirteen-button flies and all. Not the equal of leopard-skin Speedos, but they had their own appeal.

  Electronics school started at Great Lakes, but the last seven or eight months were spent at Navy Pier in Chicago. A great town for liberty—the best music town in the country. Pickups were easy, and those who wanted to get laid had no trouble finding companionship. One guy we felt sorry for—he was slender and had a walk that would’ve put any Hollywood starlet to shame. Most of us wondered when the navy would get around to discharging him. One liberty, a member of the division followed him and returned looking awestruck. It had been an act. The suspect sailor would make friends with a likely prospect, have a few drinks, tell her about his lonely gay life, shed a few tears, and the girl would promptly decide to save him from himself.

  He scored every time, our spy said.

  (When it came my turn to relate my own sexual adventures during the weekend, I lied.)

  The dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945 was the first indication that maybe we wouldn’t have to invade Japan after all. Another one followed on Nagasaki, and shortly afterward came the surrender. We had originally been scheduled for assignment to the “working navy”—troop ships, attack cargo ships, LSTs, etc. We’d be anchored off Japan, supply ships for the invasion. Considering the Japanese suicide planes, we probably wouldn’t be anchored there for long. One sadistic chief even told us that in the cold Pacific water, our life expectancy would be something like twenty-seven minutes or less.

  The surrender was a huge stroke of good fortune for us. And atomic power! The newspaper ads said that atomic power would be so cheap it wouldn’t be worth the cost of measuring it. I was the science fiction buff (“Frequency Modulation Robinson”) in the division, which meant I was an authority and knew about such things. I was swamped with questions. Most of my answers were courtesy of Dr. E. E. Smith, the author of the Lensman series. Apologies to the memory of Doc Smith, but I’m sure I was wrong every time.

  None of us thought about the civilian casualties in either Hiroshima or Nagasaki,
which numbered in the hundreds of thousands. All we knew was that the war was over and we had a new lease on life.

  The war might be over, but the navy decided to ship us overseas anyway. The railroad trip from Navy Pier to San Francisco took two days and nights. In the sleeper cars we slept head to toe, two to a bunk. They bed-checked us every hour, and I prayed that my bed partner was fat and ugly.

  The few days I spent in San Francisco settled all my doubts about the city being a mecca for gay sailors. My first night in, I drew shore patrol with a first-class officer and we checked out the waterfront bars—forbidden to navy personnel. In the first one we entered, all the drinkers at the bar swiveled their heads in unison to stare at us. Two bars later we gave up and concentrated on finding drunken sailors roaming the street.

  Late that night, when I went off duty, I stripped down to my skivvies and crawled into my cot, dead tired—the navy had filled the gym floor of the Embarcadero YMCA with cots right next to each other—two rows of cots, then an aisle, then another two rows of cots. About two in the morning I felt somebody’s hand reach under my covers. I froze. I knew the penalties for gay behavior. A dishonorable discharge and maybe time in the Portsmouth Naval Prison (or so I had been told). Then I relaxed, figuring I had the perfect alibi. I hadn’t felt a thing—I’d been sound asleep.

  The next morning I got up early to check out what I hoped was a friend in the next bunk. (He’d left early.)

  Later on that afternoon I went up to the weight room to work out. It was deserted except for one guy who had completely stripped, then hung a towel on the end of his erection.

  I wasn’t sure what I wanted to be in life, but one look and I knew for damned sure what I didn’t want to be.

  We were assigned to a troop transport bound for Japan the next day. It was jammed to the gunnels. Along with several friends I stood at the railing and watched San Francisco recede into the distance. I reassured my friends that seasickness was all in the mind. Then we hit the rollers outside the Golden Gate and I promptly vomited over the side.