Not So Good a Gay Man Page 9

  Our undercover (no pun intended) staffer flunked, but the rest of us were kind enough not to say anything about it.

  The magazine was doing very well by now. The staff numbered twenty-nine, counting the salesmen, the additions to the art staff (we had a very good one), etc. Some of us even got small raises.

  None of us realized how soon the gravy train would end.

  XII

  MY LIFE WORKING at Rogue was a lot of fun. My private life was anything but. I had to be constantly aware of what I said and what I did, what jokes I laughed at, my response to various comments regarding “faggots” and “queers”—used mostly in a descriptive sense more than a pejorative one. What would have been the response if I’d come out? I wasn’t willing to risk it. Maybe nobody would have given a damn.

  Maybe.

  When I finally couldn’t stand the strain of living a nonsexual life, I called Max. It was a little like ordering a pizza—in an hour or so the product would arrive.

  Usually there was no social intercourse at all, very little talking. Ten minutes later they left and the sexual pressure was off for another two weeks.

  I was envious of everybody else on staff who had girlfriends, boyfriends, husbands, or wives, and all of whom led a presumably normal sexual life.

  Sometimes the rent boy was surprisingly friendly. Business was business, but one time the hustler suggested we visit the yacht basin on Lake Michigan, where he worked. We went to the yacht basin more than once, and the last time I saw him he gave me a large envelope, saying it was for me.

  I opened it later, and inside was a photograph of a four-year-old boy smiling at the camera. Written on the side was his name, “Frank,” and his age. I hadn’t known his father long enough, but it was the thought that counted. His father was straight; sex on a Sunday was a hobby that paid well. And if you were lucky, you had a friendly and interesting john who treated you as something more than a male prostitute.

  Another time there was a hasty knock on the door, and a kid I had been with several times ran in, scared to death. The skin was broken between two fingers and he was bleeding. Apparently he had been in a bar when a fight had broken out, there were shots, and a bullet had—luckily for him—passed through his fingers and broken the skin but it was nothing serious.

  I cleaned it and stopped the bleeding and bandaged it. He was calmer now and automatically started to take off his pants, ready to thank me the only way he knew how.

  I waved him off. He’d had enough trauma for the evening and so had I.

  My other good deed involved a kid I’d met through Max but afterward would meet at a coffee shop near my apartment. He was a chess player and a good one. This time when we went to my apartment I asked him what he wanted to be in life. He said “an artist,” and I asked him what he was going to do about it. The Art Institute of Chicago had night classes, he said, but tuition was a hundred bucks.

  I wrote him a check for a hundred, and when he started to take off his clothes I held up my hand and said, “That’s a gift.” He looked embarrassed, said “Thanks,” and apparently quit the hustling business. I never saw him again but thought of him a lot, wondering if he ever got to art school.

  (He never forgot me, either. One time Dave Stevens, now a Playboy employee, was drinking in a near North Side bar, and my name came up when he was talking to the bartender. The bartender brightened and was suddenly all over him—did he know St. Frank? He wouldn’t tell David how he knew me, and I wasn’t about to tell David how I knew his bartender.)

  The star of Max’s show was easily the most handsome hustler in Chicago. He was also the secretary of his junior class at an eastern university. Why he was putting in time as a rent boy, I never knew. Jeff Hensley didn’t need the money, but I think, to him, it wasn’t money but power. Every john in town wanted him. He was smart, well educated, in his very early twenties, and I think was proud of his fame. He was good in bed and I could easily understand his popularity. Of all the rent boys in Chicago, he was the class act.

  As to be expected, there were also legends about him. The most popular was that he had spent a summer in the Bahamas and seduced a man working for Barclays Bank who embezzled money to prolong the relationship.

  Jeff came back to Chicago—so the story went—hired a Rolls-Royce and driver, and one by one took each of his johns (I wasn’t one of them) out to dinner. I never quite believed it, but it was a great story and only enhanced his reputation.

  All of us wondered what the vintner bought one half so precious as the stuff he sold, and one night we found out. Jeff’s boyfriend came up from the Caribbean for a visit. He was a light-skinned mulatto who made even Jeff look homely. A few years later I left the city to visit Haight-Ashbury and stayed longer than I had planned. When I returned I ran into Jeff again when I visited one of Herb’s longtime friends.

  Jeff was much different from the rent boy I’d once known. He had put on some weight and lost some of his looks along with most of his charm. In the years I had been away he’d gone to law school and picked up a degree.

  Sometime after that I bought a copy of a newsmagazine and read about Roy Cohn’s yacht being blown up on its way from Miami to New York. The reporter got most of his information from a young spokesman in Roy Cohn’s office.

  Jeff.

  It wasn’t six degrees of separation between myself and Roy Cohn—it was only one.

  Hanging out with Herb from time to time was an education all its own. He liked to go to the occasional concours d’élégance, and once I went along. I didn’t even know how to drive but I could appreciate the beauty of the old cars. One time Herb had another young friend along besides his usual driver. The young man’s name was René, a French Canadian. We became something of a number, and then one time I asked him why he hustled.

  “It’s my body,” he said defiantly. “I’ll do what I want with it.”

  Herb and I tried to get him a work permit so he could stay in the United States, but no luck, and eventually he went back to Canada. It was the wrong move. He stole something or got into a street fight—I never did get the full story—and was sent to jail. He was a cute kid and within a few weeks one of the regular convicts tried to rape him. René had apparently foreseen this possibility and fashioned himself a knife from a bedspring or some other metal. He knifed the would-be molester and killed him.

  The rest of the story I’m sure was embroidered. René, so the story went, was hanged for murder. I checked, and the death penalty had been outlawed in Canada a year or two before his return.

  The first part of the story I believed. The rest of the story I didn’t. But I doubt that René ever saw the light of day again.

  Another time Herb and his blond lover drove down to Mississippi. I went along as a travel companion. I knew that Herb was an expert on old southern mansions dating from the Civil War, and I was curious. Herb knew them all—he had been down there several times before. The aging houses looked like something out of Gone with the Wind. The winding dirt road leading through the backwoods to a mansion with the white front pillars peeling paint.

  The slave quarters were in back, crumbling and broken down, with blank eyes where the windows had once been—if there had ever been any windows.

  The next day we drove to New Orleans, where Herb met an old friend for dinner. “Old” was not the word. Our dinner companion was maybe eighteen, a handsome kid who looked a little older than he actually was and slightly worn around the edges. Dinner talk consisted primarily of him reminiscing when he was the belle of the ball in New Orleans at age sixteen. He was very proud that he had been the most popular rent boy in the city. It was the high point of his life and I had the feeling that when he was thirty or forty it would still be the high point of his life.

  Herb and his chauffeur drove on to Los Angeles, and I caught a plane back to Chicago. Shortly afterward the world shifted for gays. The Chicago Police Department had become increasingly corrupt, especially when it came to shaking down gays. The shakedowns w
ere an important part of their monthly income.

  It had gotten to the point where the mayor and the governor of the state were faced with disbanding the Chicago Police Department, calling in the state National Guard to police the city, and restaffing the police department all over again.

  There was, of course, a more practical way: change the criminal code of justice.

  Changing the code could be done, but to get it passed would require the cooperation of institutions that normally would not be cooperating. The newspapers volunteered to downplay the story. The archbishop of Chicago agreed not to allow mention of the code in Catholic churches.

  The complaints of the police department were effectively muffled. They still had their house organ, but the only people who saw it were the police themselves.

  When the revised code passed the state legislature the story was relegated to the back pages of the newspapers with an innocent headline. I was thumbing through the newspaper and almost missed it.

  It was now legal for consenting adults over the age of eighteen to sleep together.

  This was two years before 1969’s Stonewall, and Illinois was the first state to amend its legal code to allow consensual sex.

  Adlai Stevenson was the governor of Illinois at the time and was primarily responsible for pushing through the changes. (He was now known as “St. Adlai” to the gay community.)

  But there was a small catch that somehow Herb had missed. The age of consent was still eighteen. One time Herb picked up a runaway from the bus terminal who was underage. The police got suspicious about the kid, checked his phony ID, then sweated him for a list of the people he’d spent the night with.

  A few days later two neatly dressed plainclothesmen showed up at Herb’s front door and wanted to talk to him. They said they recognized that he was a pillar of the community and the incident with the young boy was really unfortunate. But there was a way to make it go away. For a small donation of $3,500. I heard later it was split among the arresting officers, the bailiff of the court, and the judge. (I don’t know whether this was true, but considering the police corruption at the time, it probably was.)

  For myself, the new code meant that my calls to Max were drastically diminished. I was now on my own.

  With freedom came a desire to experiment. We had a new hire in the office, Carla. She was trim, probably in her early thirties, and all the straight men in the office gave her the eye. So did I. There were two sexes in the world, and I only knew one. With Carla there was no real desire or affection—it would be another experiment. When it came to sex, Carla liked to take in stray cats, and I certainly qualified.

  She wasn’t interested in the theater or dinner beforehand, none of the preliminaries. I got undressed, but undressing her presented problems. I had never taken the clothes off a woman before, I didn’t know where the snaps were on her bra nor much of anything else. I wasn’t very good, but she helped. There was very little kissing, very little affection, a great deal of doubt and dislike on my part for the whole procedure.

  Much to my surprise, I could function. I felt a lot different getting out of bed. For all practical purposes, I now felt like a straight man and had the experience to prove it.

  It carried over to the next day, and I came back that night. It wasn’t any better, but my badge of straight manhood was now a bit brighter. The next afternoon I celebrated and got thoroughly drunk on gin—the worst kind of drunk in the world. I went back again the third night, but this time hid behind a tree to see if she were entertaining anybody else. My experience with heterosexuality had been brief, and now I had gone full circle. I was jealous.

  Her visitor was a kid nicknamed “Superman” for what I figured were all the right reasons. Then it hit me and I sobered up. My three-day course as a practicing heterosexual was over. What the hell was I doing? If nothing else, my experiment proved that while I might be many things in the world, a heterosexual wasn’t one of them. I wasn’t physically attracted to her, by my lights she wasn’t very good (more teeth than Jaws), my badge of manhood meant no more to me than it did to a hundred million other men who were capable of enjoying what I found, in the last analysis, to be difficult and traumatic.

  We got along all right at work, though both of us were very formal. When she left, we corresponded briefly. I found out later that she had left my letters lying around so her new husband would find them. They helped in the divorce she subsequently got.

  Years later a mutual friend told me she had kept a diary and let him read the page she’d written about me. Remembering “Superman,” I had a pretty good idea of what she wrote.

  Shortly afterward—this was at a time when sex between consenting adults was now legal—I realized once again that I was on my own. I had gone the distance, I had spent time on both sides of the sexual fence.

  This time it was much more logical, no experiment. I teamed up with Joseph, a young man who had been dumped by a visitor to Herb’s house who in turn had dumped me.

  We rejects had something in common. We shacked up for a month of nights in Joseph’s apartment on the North Side. The only furniture were two chairs, a table, and two sleeping bags. Plus a stereo along with a stack of records.

  There were no curtains—we just pulled down the shades.

  For a month we curled up with each other, had simple sex, and fell asleep in each other’s arms listening to Janis Joplin.

  It was as close to paradise as I ever got.

  XIII

  AFTER A YEAR or two at Rogue, my social life—as opposed to my sexual—began to pick up. Charlie Beaumont came to town to see friends and editors at Playboy and one night took me out to dinner at Palmer House, an old-time Chicago hotel with a classy dining room. Halfway through the salad, the waiter came over with a telephone, plugged it into an outlet near the table, and handed the phone to Charlie.

  “Hollywood, Mr. Beaumont.”

  I don’t remember what the deal was, but I do recall turning a vivid green on the inside. The call probably had something to do with The Twilight Zone, for which Charlie had written a number of scripts, or maybe The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm, being directed by George Pal at the time and for which Charlie had written the screenplay.

  Charlie had gotten to Hollywood, I thought, and here I was working on a second-rate skin book and buying articles for a nickel a word.

  Another time when he was in town, Charlie took me over to Hefner’s mansion on the near North Side. The vast living room was crowded with people I didn’t know scattered among the ferns. Charlie introduced me to all of them—some I knew by reputation—and then ordered hamburgers from Hefner’s “man.” Another time I turned green as grass.

  Some months later I was invited to the mansion once again and this time I threatened to punch somebody out for the first time in my life.

  At Rogue we wanted to run some photographs of The Gate of Horn, Chicago’s hippest nightclub, featuring pictures of folk singers such as the Clancy Brothers and Odetta, and comics such as Lenny Bruce. Along with the photographs we needed some super captioning as to who was who, plus a short history of the club.

  The question was who we could get to write it. I don’t remember who suggested that Shel Silverstein, one of the leading visual humorists at Playboy, would be great for the piece. We knew he was friends with the performers and could write a nice, nostalgic article.

  Great idea, obviously, but it would never work. Silverstein wasn’t about to write for us. “Besides,” I added, “we’d need him to sign a release.”

  Ann, a relatively new girl on the staff, pretty and red-haired, said quietly, “I can get us one.”

  “Sure, sure,” I said, “you do that” and forgot about it.

  A few days later she showed up with a signed release. We ran the article with Shel’s name as the byline on the piece and were very proud of ourselves. A few weeks later Beaumont was in town again and it was over to the mansion for a beer and hamburgers. I was halfway through mine when Shel came in and Ch
arlie, with a smile on his face, hastened to introduce me.

  “Shel, I’d like you to meet Frank Robinson—he’s the editor of Rogue.”

  In a split second Shel was in my face, screaming, “You son of a bitch, you almost cost me my job! I have an exclusive contract with Playboy, you prick!”

  I was all apologies. “I had no idea,” I said—I really hadn’t. “If I’d known, we never would have run it.”

  It was beginning to occur to me just how Ann had gotten the signed release.

  Shel continued to erupt, I continued to apologize, and finally I couldn’t stand it any longer. In my best steely tone of voice I said, “Would you like to step out into the hall, Shel?”

  I knew perfectly well that the other guests wouldn’t allow us to throw a punch, but if we had, all Shel had to do was exhale and I would probably have collapsed. As it was, Shel turned and stalked away and I glared at Charlie, who knew damned well what would happen.

  “Thanks a lot, Charlie.”

  Years later I met Shel in Haight-Ashbury—he had a houseboat anchored off Sausalito—and we became friends. One day we walked past a man standing before the Straight Theater and Shel said, “Would you like to meet him, Frank? That’s Herb Gardner.”

  Gardner had written A Thousand Clowns, my favorite film—I must have seen it half a dozen times.

  I shook my head, embarrassed.

  Shel was surprised. “Don’t you like it when somebody comes up to you and says they read your latest story and loved it?”

  So I dug my toes into the cement, walked over to Gardner, and mumbled, “Gee, Mr. Gardner, I saw A Thousand Clowns, and it’s one of my favorite movies.”

  He shook my hand, grinned, and said, “Hey, thanks!”

  Unsolicited praise from a total stranger who loved what you did is the best kind.