Gays, Lesbians, and Straights through the Decades - Salon

It will be a cold day in hell when the anti-homosexual minority adds even a soupon of value to our lives and to our nation in comparison with many homosexuals.

Strange as it seems today, my story of discovering that homosexuality exists began in high school when I read the autobiographical Our Hearts Were Young and Gay by Cornelia Otis Skinner. Gay did not mean what it means today; it meant happy. My mother had enjoyed the book and recommended it to me. Reading Skinner's reference to "fairies in the garden" of the brownstone where she lived in Greenwich Village, I realized she was not talking about wee winged folk. I went to Mother and read the puzzling passage to her.

"What does she mean by fairies?"

"Homosexuals."

"What's that?"

"Men who are attracted to men instead of women."

Envisioning male and female sexual equipment, which in my mind included only the vagina and penis, I asked, "What do they do together?"

"I don't know"

Of course she knew. She had always been candid about sex, so homosexuals must be exotic if she wouldn't tell me about them. But I didn't learn until later the details of conventional homosexual sex, and more time would pass before I knew heterosexual men and women did the same things, and women can buy a strap-on penis to satisfy their men. I was a slow but avid learner. Today we can watch videos of Kama Sutra positions online, making research easier to pursue, but before the Internet, education in some subjects was slow.

I knew Lesbians at Wellesley, but no one came out to me until much later. And even then, when I was visiting a classmate in her house in San Francisco's Castro district and having dinner with her and her partner, she told me she went to professional conventions alone, when colleagues brought their spouses, because being out professionally would have a negative impact on her career. So unfair.

After Wellesley and long before I reconnected with my classmate in San Francisco, I attended the Actors Repertory Theater (ART) in New York. Classes were at night so people like me who had jobs during the day could attend. One evening when getting up late and staying up late had got to me, between classes I lay on a cot behind a folding screen in the empty rehearsal room. Two of the guys came in and sat on the window seat talking. They didn't know I was there. It was clear that they were dating. And they were my friends. I had gay friends. It was a start at being more at home in a larger and more varied world than the one in which I grew up.

My mother's cousin Tony was, as far as we know, the only genius our family has produced. When he was a baby in blankets, his parents were driving over a bridge in Pittsburgh, and Tony raised his little head, looked at the river below, and asked, "Is that the Susquehanna or Monongahela?"

Tony went to college at fifteen and became involved with a male professor. As Mother told the story, with tears in her eyes, Tony confided to his parents that he was devastated to be attracted to a man. His parents hadn't known men could be attracted to each other: this was a long time ago. Absorbing the news quickly, they offered to pay for psychiatric help, an advanced suggestion at the time, if Tony thought it would ease his pain. They were not trying to change him. They loved him the way he was, but he was suffering. Yet he did not want professional help.

I don't know what went through Tony's mind when he decided to kill himself, but I know his death devastated the family. Understanding that Tony did not want his secret exposed, his parents told people he killed himself because another scholar had published the central theory of the master's thesis in math that Tony was working on. Mother said the family thought he killed himself because he couldn't accept that he was homosexual.

But Tony was a genius. He was young to be in graduate school, but I wonder if he did research and learned how many gay men there have been throughout history. The professor might have educated him. Perhaps being gay did not drive Tony to suicide. Perhaps the professor, fearing that if exposed the affair would end his career, told Tony they couldn't see each other in private any more. Tony wouldn't be the first or last person, straight and homosexual, to commit suicide over a rejection.

Decades later, my husband, our son, and I were visiting Mother's brother, Fred. Fred's two daughters were there, too. We got to talking about Tony, and Fred disappeared for a few minutes and returned with scrapbooks full of letters, notes, and clippings by and about Tony.

Fred sat back in his chair and watched while the rest of us spread out on the sunny carpet and poured over the scrapbooks. We took turns reading aloud to each other as we delighted in Tony's brilliant, witty mind. Today my cousin Christine is keeper of the Tony scrapbooks.

Mother's favorite living cousin was Janet. When she visited us, I loved hearing her and Mother talking and laughing. Janet had married briefly when very young, had had a son, and had divorced. She raised her son alone and never remarried. But she had a woman friend who stayed with her right through the end and took care of her when she could no longer care for herself. Mother, who by then realized Janet was a Lesbian, was grateful to the friend.

During my years in New York before AIDS, sexual freedom and experimentation were beyond anything our parents had known.

Orgies were popular with straights and gays but did not attract me, particularly after a friend mentioned casually that he'd been to an orgy the night before. The lights were turned out, and people did not necessarily see or identify their partners. My friend said, "I flicked on my cigarette lighter and looked at the girl underneath me. She was a pig. I'll never go to another orgy."

Yuk. That poor girl having a man like that inside her. Yet despite his flaws, I liked the man who liked orgies, although I doubt he stopped going to them. Considering that he's had what might seem an excess of wives, I suppose he might be a sexaholic. To me, he seemed like a nice guy with a bad habit, a nasty side.

Another man, whom I was dating exclusively, wanted me to attend an orgy with him. I said no thanks. He broke up with me. I plummeted into depression. What was wrong with me? Why was I so inadequate? Only decades later did I discover, through a doctor I dated after my second divorce, that I am bipolar. The meds have been life-saving. Literally. But that's another story. At the time, unmedicated, I was undone by a rejection based on refusing to participate in orgies. It was awhile before I dated again.

In pre-AIDS years, straights threw not only orgies, but also key parties where couples gathered in one of their homes and the men dropped their car keys into a bowl. Each woman took a key and had sex with the man whose key it was. This appealed to me exactly as much as orgies did.

While orgies and key parties were considered liberated indulgences, it would be decades before a new generation would invent "friends with benefits," a common-sense way to detach sex from romance and excess. Happily, my generation can benefit from the concept if we choose.

Eventually there was Plato's Retreat, a club in Manhattan where couples engaged in sex in public. Gays were kept out, but Lesbians were welcome. I never went there, but friends did and described it in titillating detail.

Not far from Plato's Retreat (which was not far from our apartment near Lincoln Center) was Bruce's Pleasure Chest. It catered primarily to gays, but I was not the only straight woman who browsed in the small shop displaying S&M paraphernalia. One December my husband came home from shopping in the neighborhood and said, "You'll never guess who's in Bruce's. It's full of West Side ladies shopping for Christmas and Hanukkah."

Before AIDS, while an adventurous minority of straights threw themselves into orgies, key parties, and goddess knows what else, my gay friends entertained me with tales of gay bathhouses. The baths offered saunas, a swimming pool, massage rooms, and private rooms; men could have one-on-one sex or orgies. The bathhouses were licensed and safe before AIDS. The idea of having sex in a room alone with a complete stranger freaked me out just as it did some of my gay friends. But a lot of men enjoyed the baths, finding company even on Christmas and Thanksgiving, when some baths stayed open to serve men whose families didn't invite them for the holidays.

Then AIDS struck and became a given of life. The party was over.

While some of the best and most talented men of their generation died, an older gay writer told me he and his gay friends were lucky because they'd stopped being promiscuous as they aged. None of them got AIDS. But for both gays and straights, our lives would never be as carefree again.

I had moved to Northern California by the time Ed, a close friend from New York, was dying of AIDS in Los Angeles. As I heard the story from a mutual friend, he was faithful to his partner, but his partner was promiscuous, and Ed got AIDS from him. The partner never did deserve Ed. For example, Ed once rented for an hour the huge lit sign on the New York Times building in Times Square. He timed it so he and his lover saw a Broadway show, and afterward, Ed steered them to Times Square and point to the sign, which said, "I love you Lloyd!"

Lloyd was embarrassed and angry. Ed was hurt and crestfallen.

When Ed had AIDS, I called him in the hospital. He asked, "If I come to San Francisco, will you see me?"

"I'll pick you up at the airport with bells on. We'll drive to my house and you can sleep in my son's room. He's at college."

Ed died shortly after our conversation. I realized then that he'd known he could never visit me. What he really was asking was whether I'd see him. I suppose other "friends" had dropped him.

At the end of the month I received a phone bill with a large charge for a three-hour call to Los Angeles. At first I thought it was a mistake. Then I realized it was for my call to Ed. I felt a disconnect from reality. I can't explain this illogical perception, but I could not quite grasp that Ed had been alive so recently, yet was gone by the time I wrote a check for our conversation.

I contributed to a square on an AIDS quilt for Ed. Later I learned he had so many friends that he had a square on more than one AIDS quilt.

Ed was not my only personal connection to AIDS. And all victims were not gay. A friend's heterosexual daughter had a one-night stand with a jazz musician who mainlined heroin. The young woman died of AIDS, and her mother raised the granddaughter.

A new generation grew up with no memories of pre-AIDS, comparatively carefree days. Times had changed so much since my youth that a friend's son (I'll call him Tom) confided in me that he had learned a woman he had been sleeping with had slept with a heroin addict. When I asked Tom if he'd had an AIDS test, he said no. He was too scared.

I said, "You have to have it. If you don't, I'll tell your parents."

"Will you go with me?"

"Of course."

I drove us to the AIDS clinic and waited in the reception room while Tom attended an obligatory educational session. Then he had the test. As he and I left the clinic, we passed the reception desk. While a dentist's office often has a bowl of sugar-free candy on the reception desk, the AIDS clinic provided free condoms. Tom scooped up a handful and put them in my pocket.

"You have to be safe, too," he said.

And I thought, "We've come a long way, baby."

Tom did not have AIDS. Today we're friends on Facebook.

The time has come belatedly for federal and state governments to make same-sex marriage legal and to end "Dont ask, don't tell" in favor of equal opportunities for all. If politicians won't make these corrections to policy, then the only just alternative is to make marriage illegal for all and to permit only the celibate to serve in the military.