On Being Different Page 3

  I was four years old when I started school. My mother had told them I was five; I was somewhat precocious, and she may just have wanted to get me out of the house. But butch haircut or not, some boys in the third grade took one look at me and said, “Hey, look at the sissy,” and they started laughing. It seems to me now that I heard that word at least once five days a week for the next thirteen years, until I skipped town and went to the university. Sissy and all the other words—pansy, fairy, nance, fruit, fruitcake, and less printable epithets. I did not encounter the word faggot until I got to Manhattan. I’ll tell you this, though. It’s not true, that saying about sticks and stones; it’s words that break your bones.

  They used to call my friend Sam G. a kike, but that was behind his back. The black boy and black girl in my high school class were “jigs” or “coons,” but that, too, was behind their backs. Some Catholic boys were “mackerel snappers,” but to their faces only if they were much younger and weaker.

  I was the only one they looked right at when they said the damning words, and the only thing I can think of to my credit is the fact that I almost never ran away; I almost always stared them down; I almost never cried until later, when I was alone.

  I admit I must have been a splendid target, undersized always, the girlish voice, the steel-rimmed glasses, always bent, no doubt limp of wrist, and I habitually carried a music roll. I studied both piano and violin all through school, and that all by itself was enough to condemn one to permanent sissydom.

  When I was doing a television documentary of Harry Truman’s life, he said at one point, “I was never what you’d call popular when I went to school. The popular boys were the athletes with their big, tight fists, and I was never like that…. I always had a music roll and wore thick glasses; I was wall-eyed, you know…. I stopped playing the piano when I was fourteen years old. Where I come from, playing the piano wasn’t considered the proper thing for a boy to do.”

  I said, “Mr. President, did they ever call you ‘four-eyes’ when you were a little boy?”

  “Oh, yes,” he said, “‘four-eyes,’ ‘sissy,’ and a lot of other things. When that happens, what you have to do is, you have to work harder than they do and be smarter, and if you are, things usually turn out all right in the end.”

  As a child I wanted to be the girl my mother had had in mind—or else the All-American boy everybody else so admired. Since sex changes were unheard of in those days, I clearly couldn’t be a girl; so I tried the other. I ate carloads of Wheaties, hoping I’d turn into another Jack Armstrong, but I still could neither throw nor catch a baseball.10 I couldn’t even see the thing; I’d worn glasses as thick as plate-glass windows since I was three. (“You inherited your father’s eyes, among other weaknesses:”) I sold enough Liberty magazines11 to buy all the body-building equipment Charles Atlas had to offer, but it did no good.12 I remained an eighty-nine-pound weakling year after year. And when the voices of all the other boys in my class had changed into a very low baritone, I was still an uncertain soprano, and remained that until I got to the University of Iowa in Iowa City and, among other disguises, lowered my voice at least two octaves so that I could get a job as a radio announcer on the university station.

  I also became city editor of The Daily Iowan13 and modeled myself after a character out of The Front Page, wearing a hat indoors and out, talking out of the corner of my mouth, never without a cigarette, being folksy with the local cops, whom I detested, one and all. I chased girls, never with much enthusiasm I’m afraid, and denounced queers—I hadn’t yet come on the word fag—with some regularity in the column I wrote for the Iowan. Most of those odd people were in the university theater, or so I chose to pretend, and while I never came right out and said they were sexually peculiar, I hinted at it. They wore what was by the standards of the time long hair, and I denounced that as well. What a fink I was—anything to avoid being called a sissy again.

  I was afraid I would never get into the army, but after the psychiatrist tapped me on the knee with a little hammer and asked how I felt about girls, before I really had a chance to answer, he said, “Next,” and I was being sworn in. For the next four years as an editor of Yank, first in the Pacific and then in Europe, I continued to use my deepest city-editor’s–radio-announcer’s voice, ordered reporters and photographers around and kept my evenings to myself, especially in Paris.14

  After the war, I became as much a part of the Establishment as I had ever been, including servitude as an editor of Time. I remember in particular a long discussion about whether to use the picture of a British composer on the cover because a researcher had discovered that he was…I am sure if there was a vote, I voted against using the picture.

  A little later, after finishing my first successful novel, That Winter, which became a best seller, I decided there was no reason at all why I couldn’t be just as straight as the next man. I might not be able to play baseball, but I could get married.

  Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky had the same idea. Maybe marriage would cure him of what he called “The.” But, afterwards, in a letter to his friend Nadezhda von Meck, he wrote:

  …I saw right away that I could never love my wife and that the habit on which I had counted would never come. I fell into despair and longed for death…. My mind began to go…. 15

  Pyotr Ilyich’s marriage lasted only two weeks. My own lasted longer and was not quite so searing an experience, but it could not have succeeded.16

  Lucy Komisar says in Washington Monthly that this country is obsessed by what she calls “violence and the masculine mystique,” which is certainly true enough. “The enemies of national ‘virility’ are called ‘effete,’ a word that means ‘sterile, spent, worn-out,’ and conjures up the picture of an effeminate pantywaist.” Also true, but Americans are certainly not the first people to get uptight about “virility.”

  Philip of Macedon was forever fussing at Olympias because he claimed she was making their son Alexander effeminate. And, to be sure, Alexander turned out to be at least bisexual, maybe totally homosexual. How else could one explain his grief at the death of his lover, Hephaestion? According to Plutarch:

  Alexander was so beyond all reason transported that, to express his sorrow, he immediately ordered the manes and tails of all his horses and mules cut, and threw down the battlements of the neighboring cities. The poor physician he crucified, and forbade playing on the flute or any other musical instrument in the camp a great while….

  Gore Vidal has been quoted as saying, “The Italians are sexual opportunists. Anything that feels good, they’re for it.”17 Which may be true, but I cannot imagine an Italian father who would not be devastated if he found that his son was homosexual. Or, for that matter, a father in any country in Western society. In England, where the Sexual Offenses Act has been on the law books since 1967, ten years after the recommendations of the Wolfenden Committee, Anthony Gray, director of an organization that helps sexual minorities, says that even today “…the briefest experience is enough to convince one that discrimination against known homosexuals is still the rule rather than the exception.” Gray notes that homosexuals still cannot belong to the Civil Service and are still likely to lose their jobs if “found out.”

  Most members of the Gay Liberation Front appear to believe that Marxism is the answer, which is odd because in Communist China homosexuals are put in prisons for brainwashing that are called “hospitals for ideological reform.” Chairman Mao has said, “Our object in exposing errors and criticizing shortcomings is like that of a doctor in curing a disease.” In Cuba homosexuals have been placed in concentration camps.

  Still, as Huey P. Newton, Supreme Commander of the Black Panther Party, has said, there is no reason to think a homosexual cannot be a revolutionary. In late summer of 1970, shortly after the New York chapter of the Gay Liberation Front gave a $500 donation to the Panthers, Newton, in a rambling, rather tortured statement said, “What made them homosexuals? Some people say that it’s the decadence of capitalis
m. I don’t know whether this is the case; I rather doubt it…. But there’s nothing to say that a homosexual cannot also be a revolutionary…. Quite the contrary, maybe a homosexual could be the most revolutionary.”

  On the other hand, Eldridge Cleaver in Soul on Ice gives what I am sure is a more prevalent view among the Panthers: “Homosexuality is a sickness, just as are baby-rape or wanting to become head of General Motors.”18

  Of course, the Soviet Union claims not to have any homosexuals. I cannot comment on the validity of that claim, never having been there, but I do know that when one of the Russian ballet companies is in town, you can hear a great many Russian accents on West 42d Street and in various gay bars.

  Growing up in Marshalltown, I was allowed to take as many books as I wanted from the local library, and I always wanted as many as I could carry, eight or ten at a time. I read about sensitive boys, odd boys, boys who were lonely and misunderstood, boys who really didn’t care all that much for baseball, boys who were teased by their classmates, books about all of these, but for years nobody in any of the books I read was ever tortured by the strange fantasies that tore at me every time, for instance, my mother insisted I go to the “Y” to learn how to swim. They swam nude at the “Y,” and I never went. Lead me not into temptation. In gym—it was required in high school—I always tried to get in and out of the locker room before anybody else arrived.

  And in none of the books I read did anybody feel a compulsion, and compulsion it surely was, to spend so many hours, almost as many as I spent at the library, in or near the Minneapolis & St. Louis railroad station, where odd, frightening things were written on the walls of the men’s room. And where in those days, there were always boys in their teens and early twenties who were on their way to and from somewhere in freight cars. Boys who were hungry and jobless and who for a very small amount of money, and sometimes none at all, were available for sex; almost always they were. They needed the money, and they needed someone to recognize them, to actually see them.

  That was the way it happened the first time. The boy was from Chicago, and his name was Carl. He was seventeen, and I was twelve and the aggressor. I remember every detail of it; I suppose one always does. Carl hadn’t eaten, said he hadn’t eaten for two days. His father was a plumber, unemployed, and his mother was, he said rather vaguely, “away, hopefully forever.” I remember once I said, “But why don’t you go home anyway?” And he said, “Where would that be?”

  Years later a boy I met on West 42d Street said it best, about the boys in my childhood and the boys on all the streets of all the cities where they wait. He was the next-to-youngest child in a very poor family of nine, and once he ran away from home for two days and two nights, and when he got back, nobody knew that he had been gone. Then, at nineteen, he discovered The Street, and he said, “All of a sudden here were all these men, and they were looking at me.”

  The boys who stopped by at the M. and St. L. in Marshalltown all had stories, and they were all anxious to tell them. They were all lonely and afraid. None of them ever made fun of me. I was never beaten up. They recognized, I guess, that we were fellow aliens with no place to register.

  Like my three friends in town. They were aliens, too: Sam, whose father ran a grocery store my mother wouldn’t patronize. (“Always buy American, Merle, and don’t you forget it. We don’t know where the Jews send the money you spend in one of their stores.”) A girl in a wheelchair, a polio victim; we talked through every recess in school. And there was the woman with a clubfoot who sold tickets at the Casino, a movie house, and let me in for free—tickets couldn’t have been a dime then, but they were—until I was sixteen, and, as I say, skipped town.

  The black boy and the black girl in my high school class never spoke to me, and I never spoke to them. That was the way it was. It never occurred to me that that was not necessarily the way it was meant to be.

  There were often black boys on the freight trains, and we talked and had sex. Their stories were always sadder than anybody else’s. I never had any hangups about the color of somebody’s skin. If you were an outcast, that was good enough for me. I once belonged to twenty-two organizations devoted to improving the lot of the world’s outcasts. The only group of outcasts I never spoke up for publicly, never donated money to or signed an ad or petition for were the homosexuals. I always used my radio announcer’s voice when I said “No.”

  I was fourteen when I happened on a book called Winesburg, Ohio.19 I don’t know how. Maybe it was recommended by the librarian, a kind and knowing woman with the happy name of Alice Story. Anyway, there at last, in a story called “Hands,” were the words I had been looking for. I was not the only sissy in the world:20

  Adolf Myers was meant to be a teacher…In their feeling for the boys under their charge such men are not unlike the finer sort of women in their love of men.

  Sherwood Anderson’s story ended unhappily. Of course. How else could it end?

  And then the tragedy. A half-witted boy of the school becomes enamored of the young master. In his bed at night he imagined unthinkable things and in the morning went forth to tell his dreams as facts. Strange, hideous accusations fell from his loose-hung lips. Through the Pennsylvania town went a shiver. Hidden, shadowy doubts that had been in men’s minds concerning Adolf Myers were galvanized into beliefs.

  I must have read “Hands” more than any story before or since. I can still quote it from beginning to end:

  They had intended to hang the schoolmaster, but something in his figure, so small, white, and pitiful, touched their hearts and they let him escape.

  Naturally. If you were that way, what else could you expect? Either they ran you out of town or you left before they got around to it. I decided on the latter. I once wrote that I started packing to leave Marshalltown when I was two years old, which is a slight exaggeration.

  As he ran into the darkness, they repented of their weakness and ran after him, swearing and throwing sticks and great balls of soft mud at the figure that screamed and ran faster into the darkness.

  Winesburg was published in 1919, and one of the terrifying things is that the people in any town in the United States, quite likely any city, too, would react very much the same way today, wouldn’t they?

  Look what happened only fifteen years ago, in 1955, in Boise, Idaho, when a “homosexual underworld” was uncovered.21 The “upright” citizens panicked, and some people left town, some were run out of town, and others were sentenced to long prison terms.

  In a perceptive and thorough account of what happened, The Boys of Boise, John Gerassi reports that a lawyer told him that during the height of the hysteria the old American custom of a night on the town with the boys disappeared entirely:

  You never saw so many men going out to the bars at night with their wives and girl friends…we used to have a poker game once a week. Well, for a few weeks we canceled them. Then one of the guys got an idea: “We’ll invite a girl to play with us. You know, it’s not very pleasant to play poker with women, not when you’re in a serious game. But that’s what we had to do.”

  I have been back to Marshalltown only briefly in all the years since my escape, but a few years ago I did return to a reunion of my high school class. I made the principal speech at the banquet, and at the end there was enough applause to satisfy my ego temporarily, and various of my classmates, all of whom looked depressingly middle-aged, said various pleasant things, after which there was a dance.

  I have written about that before, but what I have not written about, since I was still not ready to come out of the closet, is that a little while after the dance began, a man whose face had been only vaguely familiar and whose name I would not have remembered if he had not earlier reminded me came up, an idiot grin on his face, his wrists limp, his voice falsetto, and said, “How about letting me have this dance, sweetie?” He said it loud enough for all to hear.

  I said, “I’m terribly sorry, but my dance card is all filled up.” By no means the wittiest
of remarks, but under the circumstances it was the best I could manage.

  Later, several people apologized for what he had said, but I wondered (who would not?) how many of them had been tempted to say the same thing. Or would say something of the kind after I had gone. Fag, faggot, sissy, queer. A fag is a homosexual gentleman who has just left the room.

  And the man who said it was a successful newspaper executive in Colorado, in his mid-forties, a father of five, I was told, a grandfather. After all those years, twenty-seven of them, was he still…what? Threatened by me? Offended? Unsettled? Challenged? No children or grandchildren around to be perverted. Was his own sexual identity so shaky that…? A closet queen at heart? No, that’s too easy. And it’s too easy to say that he’s the one who needs treatment, not me. George Weinberg says:

  The “homosexual problem,” as I have described it here, is the problem of condemning variety in human existence. If one cannot enjoy the fact of this variety, at the very least one must learn to become indifferent to it, since obviously it is here to stay.

  The fear of it simply will not go away, though. A man who was once a friend, maybe my best friend, the survivor of five marriages, the father of nine, not too long ago told me that his eldest son was coming to my house on Saturday: “Now, please try not to make a pass at him.”

  He laughed. I guess he meant it as a joke; I didn’t ask.

  And a man I’ve known, been acquainted with, let’s say, for twenty-five years, called from the city on a Friday afternoon before getting on the train to come up to my place for the weekend. He said, “I’ve always leveled with you, Merle, and I’m going to now. I’ve changed my mind about bringing———[his sixteen-year-old son]. I’m sure you understand.”