Not So Good a Gay Man Read online

In May of 1950, a month before graduation, the June issue of Astounding came out with my story in it. I ran to downtown Beloit and bought all the copies I could find, then hurried back to campus and distributed them to people that I knew had never believed I’d sold a story and had been public about their doubts.

  Once out of college I asked my stepfather for a loan of $500 to support me during my apprenticeship as a writer. His answer was a polite “No.” If you weren’t working nine to five or punching a time clock, you really weren’t working.

  I lived at home and holed up in the kitchen typing away on my trusty typewriter, my most prized possession. The Christmas before I had worked a few weeks delivering gift baskets for Stop & Shop, an upscale Chicago grocery store—the precursor of Harry & David. The route covered Chicago’s wealthy North Side suburbs and included such notables as illustrator George Petty, the creator of the “Petty Girl” for Esquire. One thing I learned early: Poor people can’t afford to tip, the middle class is usually generous, but forget the upper classes. The maid who answers the door is not authorized to tip tradesmen.

  I earned $50 that winter—just enough to buy a secondhand Model 5 Underwood typewriter. (Every time my computer goes out—which is often—I really miss the old manual.)

  One of the many magazines I was submitting to included Bill Hamling’s Imagination, a local science fiction digest. I had first met Bill when he and a writer friend shared an office on Chicago’s North Side, where they ground out stories for Amazing Stories. I used to drop by and sell Bill my cigarette rations when I was in the navy. I don’t think he ever realized how envious I was of his being a writer. The office was small and cramped with a broken-down couch, and I imagined Sam Spade might walk in at any moment.

  One day Bill asked me to fill in as bartender for a party he was throwing in his rec room the next week. The party was a rousing success, but I noticed a man standing quietly in a corner who didn’t talk much to the people there. It turned out that he’d worked with Bill when they had both been employed by a publishing company in a North Side suburb. He was a would-be cartoonist, Bill said, and had self-published a book of his own cartoons titled Chicago, That Toddling Town. As a favor Bill had bought several of his cartoons for Imagination, though he never planned to publish them. I think I poured a beer for the man and promptly forgot him.

  That was the first time I met Hugh Hefner, though it wouldn’t be the last.

  I was also going to a number of local conventions those days (back then few women attended, and almost all of the men were young and skinny—a lot different nowadays on all counts), and at one of them I thought my double life was blown.

  Bob Bloch—author of Psycho and one of the most talented and nicest guys in the business—asked me how I was doing. I gave him the financial report: what stories I had written, who had published them, etc. He looked at me for a long moment, then asked quietly, “And how’s Frank?”

  He had guessed everything about me, I thought, and I felt sick. Later I realized he wouldn’t have given a damn but at that moment in time I was a sexual paranoid. You could be arrested if you were caught in a gay bar, and your name, home address, and the name of where you worked printed in the morning newspaper. (More than one gay man hanged himself in jail.) If you picked up the wrong man in a bar or on the street you could have the crap beat out of you and people would think you deserved it. If you were really unlucky when you took a trick home, you might be robbed and murdered—and your pickup would get off scot-free if caught. It was called the “homosexual panic defense”—your would-be sex partner had panicked when you touched him and momentarily lost control.

  Being a “faggot” or a “queer” put you beyond the pale. You weren’t human.

  My writing career came to an almost complete halt when Shasta Publishers, a local publisher with whom I was friendly, announced a contest for the “Best Science Fiction Novel.” Pocket Books would put up the prize money for the contest. Shasta would publish the hardback and Pocket Books the paperback.

  First prize would be $4,000, and there would be six second prizes of $2,000 each (a lot of money then). I would be one of six lucky second-prize winners. (I was good buddies with one of the owners of Shasta—all I had to do was write a novel.)

  I did. It took me a week of eighteen-hour days. I had to keep reminding myself that with two grand, I could get my own apartment and write stories and novels in my own kitchen. Suddenly there were problems. Shasta took Pocket’s prize money and invested it in publishing a book titled The Westmore Beauty Book—makeup tips from Perc Westmore and his brothers, popular Hollywood makeup artists of the period. With the expected proceeds from the book, Shasta would then go back to the science fiction book contest. They were so sure of the plan they even had a publicity photo taken of the president of Shasta handing the winner—Phil Farmer—a huge, oversize check for four grand.

  The Westmore Beauty Book actually came out, and I took one look and realized my kitchen and small apartment had suddenly vanished. The book was in black-and-white, and no way could a black-and-white book show the variations in shades of color for lipstick and face powder or the colorful three-dimensional beauty of a woman’s face.

  There were no second prizes—nor was there a first prize.

  I had my own problems at the time, but they had nothing to do with Shasta’s default. I came home one day and found my mother holding a letter and crying.

  The Korean War had just started in the early ’50s, and the government had panicked and called up the reserves. Upon my discharge from the navy at the end of World War II, I had been talked into joining the “Inactive Reserve.” Just a formality, I’d been assured, but in case of a war or police action I would keep my rank, etc., etc.

  I glanced at the papers and wondered why the hell my mother was crying. It should have been me who was bawling.

  The Inactive Reserve had just been activated, and what my mother was holding out to me were seventeen—count them—copies of orders to report.

  IV

  THERE WERE AT least twenty of us in the navy doctor’s waiting room. One was a young student with two months to go before he got an engineering degree, another was an older first-class radioman whose son was in the army, his daughter was in the WACs, and his wife was rolling bandages for the Red Cross.

  Others in their late twenties and early thirties sat in chairs around the wall, looking glum. I was probably the only one there who had no excuse to evade serving my country—the nation would never miss a struggling science fiction author.

  A few minutes later a doctor in a stained white smock stuck his head in the doorway and looked quickly around to see if anybody there could qualify as being lame, halt, or blind. He smiled. All of us had managed to make it under our own steam.

  “Anything wrong with you guys?”

  A dozen hands shot up.

  The doctor smiled again and said, “Welcome aboard.”

  Three days later I was on a rust bucket out of Norfolk. Civilian life with all of its problems and duties was now left behind. I wasn’t entirely unhappy about it. I liked the smell of fuel oil in the shipyard, the slow roll of waves against the bow and sides of the ship, the sounds from other ships, and the faint echoes of shouted commands.

  I felt right at home on the USS Alshain.

  They had asked me which theater of operations I would like, and since the war was in the Pacific, I had chosen the Atlantic. I would take Italy and France and the rest of Europe over Korea any day. At the very least, nobody would be shooting at me.

  A few days of loading supplies and then we got under way. I watched the land slowly slip over the horizon, and this time my seasickness really was a case of mind over matter.

  Our first Sunday out was a day off from holding various watches, drills, and inspections. Some of us slept in and the rest of us flaked out on the deck to enjoy the entertainment. Somebody had brought a record player on board and a few records.

  I made myself comfortable against a bulkhead, and af
ter a few records, members of the crew began dancing. With each other. I watched with more than passing interest. There was going to be competition for the cute-looking guys on board.

  (Every time we got new additions to the crew, we’d line the railing to check out the new arrivals. I put it down to just curiosity, though I may have been wrong.)

  The entertainment wasn’t limited to the Sunday dance. The most popular man on board was a first-class yeoman in the ship’s office who had a flair for writing pornography. He’d turn out stories three or four pages long, single-spaced, on yellow second sheets, staple them, and give them to friends to pass around. He had a commercial eye and quickly learned the trick of breaking a story in two—the first half the buildup, the last half the wildly explicit sex, where our hero would lay the women in the aisle—literally. Within a day, the stories would be dog-eared, some pages only half there. My guess was some members of the crew tore out the hottest scenes and saved them for future reference.

  One rumor was that actual sex might also be available. Younger crew members suspected of being gay would be approached and bet twenty bucks they wouldn’t go down on a shipmate. Ten minutes or less later the horny member of the crew would button his fly, hand the kid the money, shrug, and say, “Gee, I lost the bet.”

  I considered that rumor more wishful thinking—a certain amount of privacy would be required, and navy ships were notoriously short of private spaces.

  It wasn’t all fun and games. Shortly after I reported on board, the ship took on a contingent of marines for an operation off Vieques Island, Puerto Rico. The island was small, with about ten thousand inhabitants. The navy owned half the island and used it over the years for simulated landings, bombardments, etc. The natives who lived on the other half of the island, of course, hated the navy.

  We weren’t entirely without amusement—one of them was watching the marines muster on deck in the morning. Their company clerk responsible for the roll call was slightly built, somewhat girlish, all spit and polish, and with a high-pitched voice. At another time in another place he would have been known as a “screamer” (an obviously effeminate man). On liberty one day some sailors cornered him, a few marines noticed it, a fight followed, and the sailors went back to the ship nursing bruises and missing a few teeth.

  The company clerk may have been a screamer, but before he was anything else, he was a marine—and marines protected their own.

  The Alshain took part in training exercises at Onslow Beach, North Carolina, headed back to Norfolk, and then to the Mediterranean, where Naples became our home port. Most of the bars and whorehouses were along the waterfront. Sightseeing tours were available for members of the crew who had culture on their minds, but some of the crew never got beyond the whorehouses. When liberty was over they staggered back to the ship and reported to the “clap shack” for inspection and shots from the ship’s corpsmen.

  My first tour was of the ruins of Pompeii, a city near Naples and in the shadow of Vesuvius, which had erupted in A.D. 79 over a period of two days. Many of the people left the town the first day Vesuvius let go. Those who stayed behind were buried in eighteen feet of ash the next day. (If the wind had been blowing in a different direction, scientists might be excavating the ruins of Naples.)

  What was of immense interest to us sailors was the erotic nature of the city. Paving stones had phalluses chiseled in them like arrows, pointing the way to the nearest brothel so visitors wouldn’t be embarrassed by asking where it was. At the entrance to the “House of the Vetti” (the Vetti were merchants) there was a large statue of Priapus weighing his huge phallus against a bag of gold. Our guide said that since we were sailors and obviously more sexually sophisticated than the average tourist, he would open up a room usually closed to visitors. The Vetti had provided their guests with a private room for entertainment, with frescoes on the walls depicting naked Pompeians cavorting and having various forms of intercourse.

  We were fascinated to see that what they did two thousand years ago wasn’t that much different from what people did today. At least I didn’t see anybody taking notes.

  The next two stops were a little south of Pompeii, along one of the most beautiful coasts in the world. Sorrento and Amalfi—if I could have, I would also have included Capri, but that was an island close ashore, a favored resort area.

  Both towns still showed the effects of World War II, when the Nazis and the Americans fought over them. Shell holes in buildings, walls here and there still partially knocked down. But what you were really aware of was the sheer beauty of the place, our bus driving along the narrow highway with the Mediterranean a sparkling blue below us.

  A few weeks later came the tour most of us had been waiting for. Rome—which had been an open city during World War II—was disappointing. A relatively modern city, it was still spotted here and there with an ancient statue or an equally ancient building shouldered by a building of the twentieth century. The trick was to ignore anything modern and try and see the city as the Romans had.

  Part of the enormous Colosseum was falling down, and I was inclined to view it as a tumbledown ruin. There were dozens of them throughout the city, though none as large as this. Then I visualized the stone benches crowded with forty-five thousand spectators cheering on the gladiators, holding their thumbs up when they wished to save one of the vanquished, or gossiping with one another as they ignored the cries of the Christians being fed to the lions.

  Aside from the classical ruins, the two most striking buildings in the city were Mussolini’s railroad station—all modern, all huge—and the basilica of St. Peter, the largest church in the world.

  St. Peter’s was an architectural fantasy, the product of the talents of Michelangelo, Bernini, and dozens of other artists, sculptors, and architects. It took almost a thousand years before it finally assumed its present form. On the inside, the space under the huge dome was vast, the altar in the middle framed by four twisted columns and capped with a golden cupola. The number of tourists crowded inside had to be limited—as large as the space was, it couldn’t accommodate them all. Crowded or not, you could see figures in black robes and red hats scurrying through the corridors.

  The enormous building and its art treasures were overwhelming. If someone were to put a value on it, it would have run into the billions of dollars.

  I—and a thousand other sailors—had an audience with Pope Pius XII in his consistory. It was short, the pope waving his hand and blessing us and the rosaries we had brought along for friends.

  I’m not especially religious, but as I was leaving I stood in the entrance for a moment and tried to imagine Jesus, a Jewish man of thirty or so wearing sandals and dressed in a simple robe that swept down to his feet, looking around, puzzled, and feeling desperately out of place. Would he have felt at home in the basilica built in his honor with all its gilt and statuary and the imposing high altar flanked by its fantastic columns? I doubted it. The Jesus I had read about had thrown the moneylenders out of the Temple. What would he have thought of the pope and the gaudily dressed priests?

  And if the pope and priests could see me for the would-be sexual outlaw that I really was, would they have welcomed and accepted me? I thought Jesus might have, but I felt a lot less sure of his worshippers.

  There was more to see in the Mediterranean than Rome and Pompeii. I pulled liberty in Crete, and what impresed me the most was the utter poverty of the country. What symbolized the capital city of Heraklion for me was a little girl relieving herself in the gutter as people wandered by. (It gave me great pause years later when the stores along San Francisco’s Castro Street wouldn’t let an old bag lady in to use the john. Her only choice was to lift her skirts and squat over a nearby sewer grating.)

  Athens was to prove something of a relief from the poverty of Crete. Like Rome, Athens was a relatively modern city dotted with classical ruins, the most famous of which is the Parthenon, a slim, simple building with classical pillars holding up its roof. Built hundreds of years
before St. Peter’s, at various times it served as a temple, a treasury, and a storehouse for ammunition in the various wars that severely damaged the building.

  The appearance of the Parthenon was further marred when in the early 1800s some of the sculptures around the top of the building were removed by the British. (You can see the “Elgin Marbles” in the British Museum in London—they’re gorgeous.)

  We pulled more liberties at cities along the Mediterranean, but the last one I remember was Cannes, famed later for its film festivals. I was looking forward to flaking out on a beach and watching the boats in the harbor, but the beach wasn’t a beach at all, at least not like the sandy stretches I had ever walked on. It was covered with stones and what looked like dark gray shingles. You could, of course, buy a chaise lounge or a mattress, so you had something soft to lay on as you watched other beachgoers pick their way over the rocks.

  A tour of the different towns and cities that bordered the Mediterranean would have cost me thousands of dollars through a regular tourist agency. I’d had it, courtesy of the US Navy (with only minor inconveniences), free of charge. I had seen Italy’s beautiful coast along with Amalfi and Sorrento, Rome and Athens, Cannes, and far from least, Beirut, where I had paid my final respects to my friend on Beloit’s swimming team.

  And there was the Colosseum, the Basilica of St. Peter, the Parthenon, and, of course, the private room in the House of the Vetti in Pompeii that I doubted was on any tourist company’s list of things you shouldn’t miss.

  The first thing most of us did that first liberty back in Norfolk was to buy a pint of milk and chug-a-lug it. On board ship we ran out of fresh milk in two days; after that, it was all powdered. The second thing we did was buy a pint of real ice cream (same reason).

  After that the rest of the crew went looking for entertainment or momentary companionship. I searched out a store that specialized in magazines and paperbacks. I noted with envy that one entire table was covered with copies of Mickey Spillane’s I, the Jury.