The Day After
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THE DAY AFTER I gave this talk to the Harvard gay and lesbian alumni/æ group, I was taken to lunch in Dunster House by some undergraduates. After filling our trays on the serving line, we all sat down together at what was evidently a “gay table.” As the older, visiting gay writer I felt strangely uncomfortable: I didn’t know if I was to talk with my hosts about gay subjects or converse generally—what was our bond, after all? Even worse, I kept thinking of that scene in the movie Animal House where the rejects at the fraternity party are told to sit on the same sofa, where they huddle together like so many convicted criminals—as a fly crawls across someone’s turban. Is this good, I wondered, this segregation, this gay table? Wasn’t it better when a student belongs to the common culture? Could identity politics be a mistake?

Other questions raised in the speech below seem to me ten years later just as perplexing—for instance, the matter of the six crises Erik Erikson taught were part of the human life cycle (“intimacy”—with a member of the opposite sex—being one I flunked, preventing me from moving on to “generativity,” i.e., parenthood). Many of us did not have children because we felt we could not be honest with a wife about our real sexual desires. Now gay couples have finessed this issue altogether. The right to marry, the adoption of children, seem like a determination to recreate heterosexual family life. Is this the answer to Erikson’s crisis of generativity? Or merely what Santayana, in his essay on the New Haven YMCA, claimed was a powerful urge in American culture: the desire to conform?

Which brings me to another point: the idea that gay people should be allowed to try, in the free marketplace of ideas, whatever means they choose to pursue happiness, so that we can see which ones work and which do not. I used to think the point of coming out, of creating a gay culture, was to humanize relations between gay people, which seemed and still seem awfully harsh at times. But even now, after AIDS and Matthew Shepard, the Texas sodomy ruling and Will & Grace, gay novels, gay films, and gay tables at universities, I wonder: Just what is there in the space between two gay people who meet today? The same old same old, or something new? Ten years after this speech, gay life seems to me at times adamantly unchanged (drugs, sex, the gym, and promiscuity), and at other times virtually unrecognizable—evaporated, almost, into assimilation and cyberspace.

So why—the question I asked ten years ago—did we make so much of our homosexuality? To make things better for all of us, I presume; even if it appears that some things between us cannot be changed. Does that gay table at Dunster House still exist? I do not know. Here, at least, is a picture of the way things were long before that.
— Washington, October 2003
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My Harvard

Freshman year I was dating a woman I’d gone to high school with who was at Wellesley. Each Saturday night we would return from the French film we’d double-dated at, and stand before her dorm, while the other couples around us puréed each other’s lips. Debbie and I talked about Truffaut, then lightly embraced and said good night. Disturbed, I went to Student Health. My question was: Why didn’t I want to kiss Debbie? (Debbie’s question probably was: What’s wrong with my hair and makeup?) At Student Health I had a pre-appointment interview designed to ascertain if there really was a problem; the woman who heard my doubts about my sexuality made a sympathetic clucking noise as she listened—small moans, and sighs; the sound my mother made when watching news of some awful plane crash on TV. I got an appointment the next day with a sun-tanned shrink whose desk held framed photographs of his sailboat and his family on a lawn in Maine. I told him I thought I was homosexual because I didn’t want to kiss Debbie. He listened to me wordlessly and then leaned forward and solved the problem by saying: “Next time, kiss her.”

Instead, I stopped dating altogether, and freshman year came to an end in utter isolation. After dinner in the Freshman Union—a meal I waited to eat three minutes before closing, because it seemed easier to sit by myself in that huge room populated by other loners, staring straight ahead as the stuffed moose heads on the wall looked over us at one another—I would go upstairs to an empty room on the top floor to study, and end up instead staring at a young man modeling a swimsuit for Parr of Arizona, Inc., in the back pages of Esquire. I remember going to Widener shortly after my visit to Student Health and looking up Plato in the card catalogue; and I remember being very careful that no one was behind me who could see over my shoulder just what I was looking up. I think I also found John Addington Symonds, whose title—A Problem in Modern Ethics—seemed an understatement at the time. None of this was decisive; to know that great minds had considered homosexuality not only acceptable but noble did not make much of a dent in a 20th-century middle-class American Catholic upbringing. Another place I went to read was Lamont. I was taking a course in geology at the time: Nat Sci 5. While sitting in the john one day, I noticed the partitions between the stalls were sheets of limestone in which the imprints of trilobites could be seen. I also noticed advertisements for nude wrestling scrawled on the doors in Magic Marker. As everyone knows who has gone to school, one can read certain things at a certain age and just not get it: Moby Dick. King Lear. Ads for nude wrestling on bathroom walls. Such was the force of my denial, I didn’t even associate such things with myself. And when a hand reached under the partition between the toilet stalls one day and stroked my left leg, I stood up, horrified, pulled my pants on, and left. The johns in those days sounded like Niagara Falls when flushed, and the sound, I was sure, let the slimeball who had touched my left calf know just what I thought about that sort of activity.

Enter Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.  Sophomore year I moved to Lowell House without a roommate. How could I? I still knew no one. The first days there I went to look at places I might live: rooms or suites with people who had no roommates either. One of them was very strange. He chain-smoked while we talked, wore glasses, talked in a low, sepulchral voice and wanted, I learned later, to be a nightclub singer more than anything else in life. Though I ended up in a suite with three sober history majors, I began noticing Richard around Lowell House with another person—always the same person, a very exotic, aristocratic-looking student who didn’t look like the rest of us. He had the sort of expression I’d only seen on the bust of Nefertiti: slanted eyes, wavy blond hair, and a serene but piercing gaze that seemed to regard the world from a mysterious distance I couldn’t quite analyze. He often wore a double-breasted blazer, beautiful striped shirts; I decided he must be European, the son of a French count, perhaps. In reality he was the son of a civil servant from the Bronx, and had transferred to Harvard from CCNY. Richard told me about him one day when I found Richard alone at lunch. He said I should get to know Joel, because Joel was in charge of inviting Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton to Lowell House for a Ford dinner in the small dining room, part of a series in which undergraduates could invite artists to dinner there. If I got to know him, he might put me on the guest list. The introduction took place. Joel, Richard, and I began eating together and meeting every night in Joel’s room at eleven o’clock. From there we went to Elsie’s, ate, came back to Lowell House, and talked till two. They had a remarkable sense of humor, one I liked a lot, but which I knew was not quite right somehow. When I left Joel’s room I thought this was how Macbeth felt after visiting the witches. Harvard, after all, was all about language, the careful and precise use of words. Glib, gabby freshmen like myself soon had ice water thrown on them: my first tutor told me I was “feckless” and I had to rush home to look the word up. Harvard was all about a rational, ironic, critical reserve. Not so with Joel and Dick. I spoke a different language in the room with them. There was a book out at that time about a Princeton student and his relationship with a black prostitute, called The Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding, and it had a line of dialogue that Joel and Dick used to toss back and forth between themselves that was not very politically correct: “She think hers don’t stink, but it do.” I couldn’t quite fit this in with Henry James, Henry Adams, and Cotton Mather, but after a long day in class learning tropes in Puritan sermons, and the oblivion of Lamont Library, I knew I had to go to Joel’s at 11 o’clock and hear someone say that line.

As it turned out, Elizabeth Taylor never came to Lowell House; she was trapped in her hotel room in downtown Boston—where Burton was appearing in Hamlet, shortly after the beginning of their romance. Trapped by fans and paparazzi, if there are paparazzi in Boston, she could not get out to come over to Cambridge. Or so we were told. But by this time, even without Elizabeth Taylor, Joel and Dick and I had become a unit. Or rather I was an appendage; Joel and Dick were the unit, so closely bonded they still seemed to me separate from the rest of the house. They always ate together, for example, at a small table in the corner of the dining hall. Some evenings I would enter that room, see the two of them in one corner and my roommates at another table, and realize I had to make a terrible choice, a choice Joel watched me make with his penetrating eyes as I walked to the serving line to get my tray—since he knew exactly what I was going through, torn between the conventional and unconventional, respectable and outré. Joel seemed to know more about me than I did about myself, in fact. At Joel’s I learned a lot of odd things—that perfume is smelled on the wrist, not from the bottle, that Venice is best in September, that I should rinse my face twenty times after cleaning it before bed—but they all seemed mere symptoms of a deeper knowledge he had about what people, including myself, wanted out of life. Really wanted. I, of course, was too polite to ask, and many nights I simply glanced at Joel and Richard in the corner of the dining room and sat down instead with my roommates to talk about the closing of the frontier in America.

The frontier may have closed, but finally, in Lowell House, I myself was opening up. I began noticing people besides Joel and Dick; making other friends. One was an assistant professor of English who gave me a part in An Evening with Oscar Wilde in the common room, and who led a seminar I took on Tennessee Williams, and whose own book on Emily Dickinson had just come out. Road signs, it would seem, at this distance. But sexuality is not so easily perceived when young. Once, after a lecture on Walt Whitman, we went to lunch in the dining hall, and when we asked if we could sit at his table with him, he looked up, sighed, and said: “If you promise not to ask if Whitman was homosexual.” I hadn’t been about to, but this confirmed my impression that homosexuality was a neurotic bore, a tiresome insecurity of anxious undergraduates and nothing more. Yet I was also aware of this professor’s close friendship with another tutor in the house, and the fact that he was 35 and unmarried—a fact that must have allowed me to feel closer to him than to other instructors. I was aware, too, of other friendships; another tutor in particular, and a sophomore, who were both very handsome and went out together in the evening so well dressed they looked like Edwardian fops. And two students, a sleepy-eyed blond and a dark-haired fellow with a faint case of acne, who would walk around our courtyard in spring in black leather pants, actually cracking a big black whip. There was a student playwright whom I saw one morning, just after dawn, walk into the foggy courtyard, while I—having stayed up all night studying for some exam—watched him cross to another entry with his arm wrapped around another man. Cross the courtyard, I sensed (without even making the thought conscious), in a way that was possible only at dawn, in a fog, while everyone else was asleep. There was even a tutor in Slavic studies who looked like the pederast small children are told not to accept candy from—with enormous, liquid eyes, and a pipe at his red lips—a man who contributed drawings to The New Yorker and who, rumor had it, flunked his doctoral exams on purpose so he could stay in Lowell House, running both the weight-lifting club and a life drawing class. Both of which seem appealing to me now, but at the time were sub-rosa, off limits, vaguely dangerous. The general atmosphere of the culture, and Lowell House, was macho-competitive. One friend lived with a pack of preppies who would sit in the dining hall Friday nights betting which women coming in as dates were virgins. One of my own roommates was having an affair with a student at Convent of the Sacred Heart, and described his distaste at having to make love in rented hotel rooms with another couple on the adjacent bed. Another roommate was dating a Wellesley student he did more than kiss; he would hang a red tie on his doorknob to mean they were having sex and were not to be disturbed.

Afterwards, I would see them walk into the dining hall with what looked like a radiant glow on their flushed faces. Like the heroine of a Henry James novel I was reading, I suspected everyone was having sex but me. I suppressed the whole issue by spending even longer hours in libraries, searching for the perfect chair, the perfect desk, the perfect lamp that would enable me to imbibe these books I could hardly remember a word of the minute I finished them. By sophomore year you realize, of course, that reading is, in a sense, all you’ve been sent here to do. And teaching is all about telling a person to read the right book, the one he or she needs.

My friend the English instructor suggested I read one called The Last Puritan by George Santayana in fall of my junior year. The Last Puritan happens to be about a Harvard student, a student who transfers to Williams, actually, and his romantic / idealistic / platonic friendship with an English sailor his father hires to sail his yacht. It’s about a love between two men that can never come to sexual expression; it depressed me deeply. I seemed to recognize in the book an emotion that was my fate, a fate that seemed to close off so much of life that should be hopeful and outgoing in a sort of melancholy resignation. I was also given that year a novel by Henry James called The Ambassadors. In a famous scene in The Ambassadors a middle-aged man from New England, standing in a garden in Paris, suddenly realizes his life has passed him by, and says to the young man he’s with: “Live, live all you can, it’s a mistake not to!” The words made perfect sense to me. They do to most of us. The question was: How? In the novel, everyone’s upset because a young American has lingered in Paris while having an affair with an older woman. This was hard to translate into the opportunities available to a middle-class college student walking with Joel to Elsie’s every night for a piece of mocha cake, hearing him say in his sonorous, nasal voice, “Now, there’s a face.” Faces were all we had, though what the significance of their beauty was, I wasn’t sure. We did not always agree on the face, but that we both felt them important, and magical, was one of the bases of our friendship, and the glory of this place. Odd. There was no course at Harvard in Faces, the Beauty Of. There was no seminar that dealt with the powerful hold mere physical beauty had on me—at least, no seminars listed as such. Everything was being transmitted obliquely, politely, it seemed—as seeds that would flower, like so much education, later.

Senior year I took a course on the Life Cycle taught by Erik Erikson that made an impression on a lot of people. The Life Cycle consists, in his conception, of six life crises between birth and death. The idea is to pass each one to get on to the next. It always involved a choice. The one that applied to me at the time I took the course seemed to be the Crisis of Intimacy, or Intimacy versus Isolation. The Crisis of Intimacy involved a member of the opposite sex. Since I now believed I would never pass that one, I concluded that my life was permanently stalled—what people used to, and may still, call arrested development; homosexuality as a sort of eternal and terminal adolescence. Well, thought I, since I can’t pass the Crisis of Intimacy, I can never move on to Generativity (parenthood), Acceptance, and Death. Or rather, I’d go straight from Crisis Three to Crisis Six without ever experiencing the other two.

There was another concept of Erikson’s that I think of now, because it seems to have perhaps more to do with homosexuality in our culture, and that is Negative Identity. Negative Identity is just that—identifying with the reverse of virtues we are supposed to emulate. That homosexuality was a negative identity was a message I’d received all my life. It was, quite clearly, the complete opposite of the pattern urged on us by family, community, custom, church, school, and law: Marriage and Family.
Marriage and Family: the ultimate Goal. The Crisis of Intimacy successfully passed. When my favorite professor announced his impending marriage my senior year, I was thunderstruck, appalled; felt deserted, abandoned, as if an adored older brother had just told me the news—so deserted, I blurted out without thinking, “Why?” “To enlarge the circumference of my experience,” he said, using a phrase from his book on that famous celibate, Emily Dickinson. To enlarge the circumference of his experience? That sounded like an odd reason to get married—like going to Greece. But then the summer I’d gone to Greece, my travelling companion, from Adams House, kept saying—each time we found ourselves on some matchless promontory above the Aegean—“I’m going to bring my wife here when I marry.” Chilling words: I knew I’d be returning solo. When I was talking with one of my other friends, a math major from Oregon who lived across the entryway from Joel, one night, I remember telling him the difference between us was that he liked math and I liked English. In other words, I thought, you’re straight and I’m gay. “Gay” was not the word then, of course. And Harvard, still sexually segregated, all male, let me finesse the whole issue—the dawning sense of isolation, the failure to pass Life Crisis #3—by ignoring everything. No wonder the novel I wrote in a state of depression after graduation was so awful. No wonder it really seemed my life had ended. If homosexuality was a topic the few adults I asked implied was not worth talking about, I might as well ignore it too. In reality I could not. Even ignoring it, I was to waste an awful lot of time afterwards, those years when I sometimes wished I’d never gone to Harvard, [but instead]had moved to a city like New York, say, right after high school.

Years later, the dear friends I couldn’t bear to part with in June of 1965 were all leading separate lives. The math major from Oregon got married, took over the family farm, and had two daughters. The friend who wanted to visit Cape Sounion with his bride, did. Joel moved to Paris, met someone, he wrote in a letter, “who sees the world the way I do,” and began trying to earn a living. Richard moved to Washington, D.C., to avoid the draft, and taught high school. I took the foreign service exam, thinking I would work for the State Department; but each time I scheduled a personal interview, I cancelled—thinking the FBI or whoever interviewed me would know I wasn’t straight. (As Gore Vidal said: “I could’ve been President except for the fag thing!”) Instead, I went to a writer’s workshop—who cared, in the arts, if you were gay?—and, after a stint in the Army, moved to New York and became a clone. The few times Joel and I got together on one of his trips back home, our relationship seemed a bit awkward; it was obvious we couldn’t reproduce Harvard on the streets of Greenwich Village. He hated New York, for one thing. I loved it. He wasn’t “gay.” I was. The period of hilarious innocence was over, and Harvard was behind us, and everything had to be, in a sense, renegotiated.

One summer evening we were walking through Greenwich Village while he was in New York on business, eating ice cream cones the way we had in Cambridge, and we passed a newsstand. Writers in the newsmagazines at that time—1975—were fond of saying that the love that dared not speak its name now would not shut up. In the ten years since Joel and I had graduated, not only had I come out of the closet, so had thousands of other people. I even knew the man with whom Joel had gone to Europe the summer after I’d met Joel and Dick—a French teacher who now lived three blocks from me in the East Village, where, though he never visited the bars and discos that I did, he lived with one lover after another, always Puerto Rican or black, like some man in a story by Joseph Conrad, one Conrad never wrote. Joel, of course, had been with the same companion for ten years now; without ever once having gone to a bar, baths, or a place like Fire Island—the three staples of my existence at that time, places one went ostensibly to find a companion, again and again and again. Which was the reason I felt a little embarrassed taking him down Christopher Street that evening: Part of me was wondering if he hadn’t done it in a better way, and didn’t consider this pathetic. In fact, by 1975, Christopher Street had turned fairly trashy, the excesses of the 70’s already beginning to transform it into something seedy, and as we walked it all seemed suddenly sordid in a way it might not have, had I not been trying to sense, as we walked, his reaction. I was already anticipating his disapproval, perhaps, the failure of the scene to match his own standards in life, whether this was Harvard snobbery or Harvard intelligence, when we passed a newspaper stand covered with porn magazines like Honcho, Mandate, and Drummer. Joel stopped for a moment to look at them, and then said, as we walked on, in a musing voice: “Why do they make so much of it over here?”

Why do we make so much of it over here, indeed? The question struck me then, and still does: I’d made a lot of it, certainly, in my own life. It had become in a sense everything. So I had to ask my own self what he had, what only a visitor, perhaps, could. The easy answer to his question was to say that in Europe, homosexuality was not the basis for a separate category, community, interest group as it was here; that people there lived out their sexual preference while remaining in the context of the larger society and culture. And that you could call this either staying in the closet, or refusing to be ghettoized. What was this mob scene I was involved in, anyway, this stampede of promiscuity, this gay life that seemed all too often toward the end of the 70’s as predictable and conformist as any in the suburbs, with its rituals, habits, stereotypes, expectations, and burn-out? Perhaps homosexuality was in fact an essentially private and personal fact, something that had to do with the person in one’s bed, and nothing more. I could have told Joel that it was a Frenchman, Renaud Camus, who’d written a book that described gay life as well as any I’d read, a book aptly named Tricks. But that was not the answer. So I was back to his simple question as we strolled onto the pier: Why did we make so much of it over here?

Andrew Holleran is the author of the novels Dancer from the Dance, Nights in Aruba, and The Beauty of Men. Since his appearance in the first issue of the G&LR, he has contributed numerous essays, book and movie reviews, and memoirs to this journal.