JEAN COCTEAU proclaimed friendship to be his only politics. “I would rather be celebrated for constancy of the heart than for any doctrine of the mind,” he remarked in his essay “On Friendship.” Cocteau considered friendship to be an art and equated it with the “fellow feeling” of Walt Whitman. “It continually corrects itself, sets itself aright, and avoids the wars of love. Friendship maintains its balance so that we can maintain ours in it.”
For gay men of a certain generation, the word “fellow” encompasses the true meaning and spirit of friendship as understood by Whitman and Cocteau. For six-plus decades I have nurtured masculine fellow feeling alongside and in the guise of fairy-tale romances, impossible hetero crushes, boyfriends, lovers, and fuck-buddies. But through them all, certain life-changing, evanescent friendships formed during the glory days of the 1960’s and its anti-war tumult still glimmer. One of those is my friendship with the extraordinary Laud Humphreys (1930–1988), about whom a scholarly biography has recently been published under the title Laud Humphreys: Prophet of Homosexuality and Sociology (University of Wisconsin Press), by John Galliher, Wayne Brekhus, and David Keys [reviewed in the “Books” section of this issue].
A labor of genuine affection and generous appreciation, the book necessarily focuses on the sociological and psychological accomplishments of the pioneering Humphreys, an Episcopalian minister who retooled himself into an innovative social researcher, Christian iconoclast, war-resisting activist, and tireless gay rights campaigner. The intent of this paper is to augment and expand their important work by going into hitherto undisclosed personal terrain. Certain details that might otherwise have been included in this biography, had Laud himself or his wife Nancy been available to fill in the gaps, were not accessible to the authors.
Seventeen years have elapsed since carcinogenic tobacco smoke brought about the last gasp of Laud Humphreys, and it’s been 35 years since his groundbreaking socio-psychological study The Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places (1970) was published.
I MET Laud Humphreys in St. Louis some time in the fall of 1967, probably following a coffeehouse poetry reading series that I hosted on Thursday nights. I was “underground,” hiding out with my paratrooper-medic-deserter boyfriend Brian in the government-funded Model Cities Project La Clede Town. I was an out gay man, politicized and vocal, and Laud immediately let me know that I was the first out-and-proud homo he had ever met. My dangerous status as such attracted him at once. He gave me his card, adding his home phone number on the back for good measure.
I had come out of the closet in 1966 as a consequence of my close encounter with the draft. I flaunted my 4-F Selective Service card with sassy bravado to all who cared to see. I always relished the effect it had on the cops. Laud would tell me later how impressed he had been with my candor and don’t-give-a-fuck attitude about being gay. My pre-Stonewall anarchy resonated powerfully with him.
During that first tête-à-tête, my gaydar informed me that Laud was a closeted gay man, and I sensed that he felt compromised by his heterosexual marriage. To be sure, virtually all gay people were deeply closeted at this time, and for good reason. Laud and my way-too-cute bunk buddy Brian hit it off right away, and I confess Laud’s touchy-feely attraction to Brian was a prickly irritant. The freewheeling Brian always insisted that there was plenty of his daunting beauty to go around. I was constantly having to run interference, since I had an entirely different take on that sensitive subject. Poaching gay men and starry-eyed hetero girls were my perennial nemeses.
Ultra-masculine, street-smart, sunshiny Brian was a textbook case study for Laud, the inquisitive psychologist and sociologist. Brian very soon became a valued informant in Laud’s inchoate undercover research project. Brian, a serial runaway, had survived continual physical abuse in his New Jersey foster home and experienced altar boy weenie worship administered by a lineup of diddling priests after choir practice at Saint Peter’s. By the time he was fourteen, my blond sidekick had learned how to market his beauty on street corners. In Greenwich Village he was introduced to heroin, and soon became a baby-faced boy toy in a stable of heroin-addicted pretty boys kept by an infamous British rock band manager whose grave I hope to piss on some day.
At sixteen-and-a-half Brian lied about his age and enlisted in the military to escape the sicko scene in the heroin boy brothel. He kicked heroin cold turkey during basic training in Texas. When I met him he was stationed at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, where he was practicing jumping out of planes. He was fed up with everything military and eager to hit the bricks. I have carefully preserved his plastic-laminated military ID for almost forty years. His Jean Genet-style shaved-head mug shot is classic. His blank, tough street-boy gaze says it all. “Don’t touch me there. You reek. Fuck off.”
These days my 60’s-70’s inamorato would undoubtedly be clinically diagnosed as someone coping with attention deficit disorder, functional dyslexia, and fetal alcohol syndrome. Brian and his older sister had been adopted as young children by a dysfunctional pair of right-wing disciplinarians. Brian’s lifelong romance with alcohol began at age eleven with a pilfered bottle of communal wine.
It was during late May in 1968 that our underground St. Louis love nest got its first wake-up jolt. A sleuthing pair of rookie FBI sniffer-dogs came knocking. I answered the door. Fortunately, Brian was at his cushy day job coordinating the constituency office of a political hack running for election to the Missouri state senate. Laud Humphreys had supplied Brian with a letter of recommendation (which I still have) under the assumed name of a deceased youth whose ID we had come by. I told the none-too-bright, squeaky-clean shorthairs that, yes, I did know a certain Brian who had passed through town during the previous fall on his way to California. No, I hadn’t heard anything since that time. Perhaps they ought to look for him in California? The federal rookies apparently believed my performance, and I never encountered another member of their church again, though they pursued me doggedly for another four years. Brian and I stored our movables in the cellar of a friend’s psychedelic head shop and headed off on a Greyhound to a Rocky Mountain tourist town in Colorado, where we spent the summer among a group of Hell’s Angels (which is another saga way too unbelievable to recount here).
Suffice it to say that the isolated outlaw biker refuge in the Rampart Mountains west of Pike’s Peak had been a former ecclesiastical posting of the Reverend Laud Humphreys in his previous incarnation. I had stayed there among the retired gold diggers and Harley connoisseurs while doing post-graduate research (or not doing such research) during the summer, fall, and winter of 1966-67, following my rejection by the military. Two years before I met Laud Humphreys in the flesh, I had already heard tales of his colorful tenure at Cripple Creek narrated by several of his former parishioners. Laud’s Oklahoma roots and earthy style had endeared him to his rowdy flock. He was a socializer, just as much at home in the local bars as in the church basement at Sunday potlucks.
It was thus an almost mind-boggling moment of fate or karma (as we would have called it then) when I actually ended up meeting Laud Humphreys in the flesh. Such was the nature of the psychedelic 60’s. But my fated or karmic (or whatever) connection with Laud Humphreys in this mysterious regard did not stop there: I later discovered that I’m related on my mother’s side to Laud’s late wife Nancy, whose father was a Wallace. My maternal grandmother was an Appalachian mountaineer named Wallace. My and Nancy’s Celtic highlander genes link both of us to the doomed Scottish freedom fighter William Wallace.
The summer of 1968 was pivotal for many of us peaceniks. The freewheeling Brian was quickly freaked out by the Hell’s Angels in Colorado—something to do with machine guns, as I recall—and so he hightailed it back east to St. Louis. Our pal Laud, now a professor at the Edwardsville campus of Southern Illinois University, arranged for Brian to hide out among some gay divines at a monastic retreat somewhere in the Illinois boondocks. When I decamped from the mountains at the end of the summer with a car and some cash—but without a driver’s license or insurance, and with a sixteen-year-old Colorado Springs runaway beside me in the shotgun seat—I found city-boy Brian ready for some new adventures. The sissy monks cramped Brian’s style, though he did appreciate their well-stocked wine cellar.
After several more months of lying low with me in backwater western Kentucky, the restless Brian returned to Edwardsville, and Laud began his undercover networking in Anglican Montreal, Halifax, and Toronto. He renewed contact with three Canadian cohorts he’d met at Episcopalian-Anglican conferences and networked his churchly connections to cobble together a safe corridor for draft evaders from the U.S. into Canada, along with strategies to implement his master plan. There were never any glitches or close calls in Laud’s transmission network once he got it rolling. Round-trip plane tickets were provided to clients (the unused return ticket refund was retained as seed money), every refugee was met at the terminal and taken in, immigration details and counseling were attended to, and housing and jobs were arranged by participating Anglican Canadians. I understood (though I never learned the particulars) that a wealthy, retired St. Louis aristocrat bankrolled the project anonymously.
Brian sold his beloved rosewood ten-string guitar and bought a plane ticket for Canada, becoming the first of many war refusers that Laud Humphreys and I spirited off to freedom in Canada. There were more than 65,000 refugees of the U.S. draft in Canada at that time. During the winter, in Montreal, Brian became a charter signatory at the founding of the American Deserter’s League. He dropped out of the League right away since it was riddled with provocateurs, loose cannons, and FBI infiltrators.
After eight months of anti-war activities and evasion of the federal cops in the Midwest, I hitchhiked across the U.S. and sneaked my culpable ass across the Canadian border at Sweetgrass, Montana, and reconnected with my boyfriend Brian in Calgary on his twentieth birthday in August 1969. We worked our way across British Columbia to Vancouver. In November, I returned south for a final hectic and violent year in the Lower Forty-eight, working in tandem with Laud Humphreys to shuttle draft dodgers, deserters, and war-haters up to Pierre Trudeau’s True North safe haven. In early 1971 I returned to Canada’s west coast, where I have resided peacefully these 34 years.
I don’t know the exact number of youths that Laud Humphreys helped. No records of any kind were preserved for obvious reasons. I do know that Laud was a tireless courier, that he identified personally with the warring ethical conflicts troubling an entire generation twenty years younger than his own, and that his contribution to their struggle was crucial and legitimate and had the highest moral purpose. Laud Humphreys knew that he was engaged in the sacred work of his best friend Jesus whose example he followed as best he could, who practiced what he preached, blessed the peacemakers, and was a friend to the persecuted.
Wes Hartley currently resides in Vancouver, BC.
