Editor’s Note: This is the second part of an essay titled “My Harvard, by Andrew Holleran” that ran in the very first issue of The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review (Winter 1994). The first part was republished in our tenth anniversary issue (Jan.-Feb. 2004). In it, Holleran discussed his years as an undergraduate at Harvard in the 1960’s, focusing especially on two classmates: Richard (Dick), a shy, eccentric English major; and Joel, a confident, ambitious artist from New York. He also discussed two books that had made an impression: Erik Erikson’s Childhood and Society (1963), which argues that there are certain crises in life that we all must meet, one of which is “the Crisis of Intimacy”; and Henry James’ novel The Ambassadors, in particular a scene in which an older man whom life has passed by tells a younger man: “Live all you can—it’s a mistake not to.”
Andrew Holleran has been a regular writer for this magazine since this piece in the first issue, and his contribution to its survival and success are immeasurable. His novels include Dancer from the Dance, The Beauty of Men, and Grief.
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 canceled—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 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 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, bath, or 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 seventies 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, self-interest group that 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 French man, 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?
Nothing is so diminishing as to realize that one was, after all, part of a trend—an era, a historical moment. American life—the sort journalists sum up in decades, or nicknames—is something Harvard people think, I suspect, they are too smart for, too individual, too different, to be a part of. But I was part of something, I guess, that Joel was not. The Age of Clones, 1971 to 1979 A.D. All movements are merely accumulations of many individuals desiring the same thing, of course. When you are coming out, you do not spend much time thinking about what you are doing—you want simply to live, to have a personal life—an approximation at first of the dreams one was brought up with: domestic happiness, fidelity, affection, trust. You want to solve [what Erik Erikson called]“the Crisis of Intimacy.” These concepts translate oddly into homosexual life, I learned. There was no education for the sort of life I ended up leading. We are not brought up to be gay. There was a sense of learning new codes, living in New York as a gay man; of going to school all over again in a society which did not recognize the diploma you’d earned. It recognized other things, mostly unrelated to your education—exactly the problem of all education, Henry Adams had pointed out. I, who wondered what James meant in The Ambassadors, was now wondering how to combine brewers’ yeast with my morning milkshake because I needed extra protein for the body-building I was doing at the gym. The thing that had not seemed important at Harvard—the body—was now crucial. My roommate would not travel unless he could continue his workouts wherever he was going, as if he were afraid he would deflate. It often struck me in New York in the 70’s that while my friend the math major was writing in letters that Harvard had little to do with farming wheat, I was thinking it had nothing to do with entering the Sandpiper on Fire Island in the right T-shirt and haircut. As the T-shirt said: “So many men, so little time.”
Life in the 70’s was an extraordinary burst of energy and invention. But questions of history and literature were replaced by three: Did you go out last night? Who was there? How was the music? (I did. It was jammed. The music was okay.) In 1977 a Harvard graduate named Toby Marotta came out in his 10th Anniversary Class Report; he got so many letters, he wrote a book called Sons of Harvard—a collection of interviews with gay classmates. One weekend I went down to Washington to visit Richard—Richard who, with classic New England reserve, had never said a word about his private life. Neither Joel nor I had any idea about his sexuality or amorous life. All we knew was that he had been in therapy and was living with nineteen cats. One summer evening he and I stood on a terrace of the Capitol, and I asked him what he wanted out of life, and he said: “I want to be successful and have a family.” The words stunned me; not only because he seemed far from this goal. When I said goodbye as he dropped me off at Union Station, I did not tell him I felt like the Little Mermaid returning to the sea—the sea of men. I was addicted to cruising. Ten years after graduation from Harvard, where I saw nothing in terms of sex, I now saw everything that way. Re-reading The Ambassadors, it struck me that the book was really about Chad Newsome’s penis—everyone wanted it. And instead of going to Paris to live, live all I could, I headed straight for the Everard Baths the moment the train returned me to New York.
One night the Everard burned down. People died, it was said, because the owners had not hooked sprinklers up. One of the dead was the lover of a man from my neighborhood that I used to run into every now and then, infrequently, because he spent six months of the year teaching English in Saudi Arabia and six months back in New York since, he said, he needed half a year in a strict, puritanical, drugless society to alternate with New York. It was true that, having no limits, thanks to penicillin, there seemed no way the escalation of drugs, muscles, ways to have sex, would stop. The Everard was rebuilt, and now there was also the St. Marks, Man’s Country, and The Club. I was reading Henry James now in the waiting room of the Enteric Disease clinic on 9th Avenue, where I kept running into friends, while waiting for our shit to be analyzed for amoebas. Once I overheard the nurse ask one of the patients the usual question, “Have you been traveling?” and I thought: Yes, in the wrong circles.
Yet the moment one was cured, one celebrated by going back into the fray. As a friend said when I asked him what he was going to do with his clean bill of health: “Go to the Mine-shaft.” In the meantime, a new generation arrived in the City that wanted nothing to do with discos, plaid shirts, or Fire Island theme parties. One day I looked down and saw stenciled on the sidewalk of my block by a group called Fags Against Facial Hair the words clones go home. I obeyed. Burned out by it all, I went home and ended up writing a book about an experience that seemed to have nothing to do with what I’d been educated or prepared for: Gay life. An experience that constituted an odd, mostly invisible, and very foreign country all by itself.
Oddly, all three of us had ended up living apart—Dick in the inner city of Washington, Joel in Paris, me in gay America, all equally foreign somehow. What was wonderful was our friendships surviving everything. The awkward reunions spaced over a decade eventually worked themselves out. Joel even introduced me to a man in New York—a friend of his—who became my closest friend in New York. They were pleased about my getting published. We walked around New York together, the three of us, soon after this. Then AIDS hit in 1983, and took the friend Joel had introduced me to, and the next thing I heard were long distance calls from Paris and Washington asking how I was.
LAST NIGHT, I took a walk around campus. I went down to Elsie’s [Lunch, a long-time Harvard landmark, now defunct]—closed and dark and all changed inside, but still there. Then I went, with some wariness, to Lowell House, wondering if I could even go in. I could, and did, and it was quite spooky. The door to Joel’s entry was locked, and two women were in the window beside it facing the courtyard; but I could still feel the spell of those evenings in L-14—how happy and romantic I’d been there—and what a dream world we’d lived in, I now realize. At one point I crossed the grass and stood outside the window of my own first room there, looking out onto the courtyard through the fog. I stood there and peered into the window where I’d sat that night, resting my eyes after a night of studying, separated from that moment by 25 years of Time, that densest of all mediums through which many things cannot pass. And all I could think, watching the students talking to each other on the walks, saying good-night before the entry-ways, rehearsing music in the common room, was how fresh they seemed, how utterly hopeful.
Homosexual desire isn’t easy. It takes, for all its romanticism, an unending ability to face facts over and over again. Sometimes painful facts. What to tell parents, if anything. What to tell friends, people you work for, where to work, how to integrate sex with the other parts of your life and personality. How to settle the issue of generativity. Of intimacy. How to deal with the temptation to shame. How to find what one wanted to begin with—fidelity, intimacy, affection. Henry James wrote a story called The Beast in the Jungle in which a man realized his fate was that nothing whatsoever would happen to him all his life. Well, once you act on homosexual, or heterosexual, desire, a lot of things happen. Many writers have painted a not exactly alluring picture of where all this leads. In A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche DuBois gets taken away to the insane asylum for kissing the paperboy. In Death in Venice, Gustav ends up sobbing on a beach as mascara runs down his cheeks. (For Thomas Mann, a homosexual life was chaos.) In Proust, the greatest of them all, Charlus is devastated when Morel leaves him for a woman. Homosexuality ends up at some point requiring your best thinking and effort: One’s education does in fact have to be used, at crucial times.
The past 25 years have in a sense illustrated Thomas Jefferson’s belief that the best way to find out what is true is to let everything compete with everything else in the free marketplace of ideas. We did make much of it over here. It was an attempt to be happy. Now, surrounded by the litter of a certain amount of human wreckage, we can ask ourselves what should be saved, what should be discarded, in the experiment. A point somewhere between gay cheerleading—the recourse of every minority—and despair should probably be found. One has, after all, to go on, whatever the cards dealt.
There is a wonderful story by Colette in which a woman who has spent her life going to lunch with friends on the Riviera decides one day that she is too old to continue this existence. So she tells her friends goodbye, takes off her make-up, and stays home. And stays home. And stays home. Till she can’t stand it any longer. So she puts on the make-up, and schedules lunch. Exactly. There’s a joke I heard Milton Berle tell on TV this winter which describes the same instinct. A Catskills joke, set in one of the hotels where widows used to go to meet new husbands. A handsome man walks into the lobby one day. A woman goes over to him and says, “I don’t think I’ve seen you here before.” He says, “That’s because I’ve never been here.” “Oh,” she says, “a good-looking man like you?” “I was away at school,” he says. “Away at school?” she says. “A man your age?” “I was up the river,” he says, “in the slammer. The penitentiary. We call it school. I killed my wife. I hacked her into 27 pieces with an axe.” “Oh,” she says, “so you’re single?”
