Our People     

Looking back on the lives of friends, I would have to say that marriage has usually provided the fullest sexual satisfaction, simply because it makes sex easiest. Children, shared property, tax and insurance benefits, and full acceptance by society—all help to provide the strongest motivation for a couple's remaining together. A heterosexual couple has to work hard at marriage; the divorce rate demonstrates how difficult this is. Lacking the legal perquisites of heterosexual couples, homosexuals have to work doubly hard to maintain their relationships. The fact that a great proportion of men seem to be polygamous for at least part of their lives heightens the problem for gays. Many settle for what is in effect a marital life, even if some permit themselves to have sex on the side. In my time, in contrast, gays couldn't even live together in most places.

I have referred frequently in other chapters to my being gay, and now I wish to deal with the subject directly. I was a late developer, and throughout my life, because of my profession and fears, I was sexually active only between frustrating periods of celibacy. As a teacher and professor, my eros usually had to be sublimated, because of the near-paranoia concerning homosexuality in men’s colleges and universities, where I taught for 13 years. Other institutions in my time were scarcely less guarded. In compensation, my sexual energy had to find expression through teaching, and my hungry senses devoured the musical, visual, and literary arts. These arts have sustained me throughout a lifetime. Although I usually enjoyed being in love, my sexual desires were frequently unrequited, because, coming from a puritanical environment, I remained shy and unaggressive. After my scandal at Smith College, my socially-induced anxiety about gay sex was greatly heightened. My sexual life also declined markedly when I developed more severe spinal trouble when I retired in 1984. Nevertheless, I of course retained strong desires, and suffered from great sexual yearning. My life was thus very different from that of my grandfathers, both Mormon polygamists.

I’m sure that I have always been gay, and I’ve guessed that my orientation derived from my father. Until the late Forties, homosexuals did not have a positive and widely shared term for themselves; and the later use of the term “gay” (long used in other contexts) seemed inappropriate to many with unhappy lives, but it was at least less offensive than its alternatives.

I was probably precocious sexually. I had a period of aborted heterosexuality when I was about five. I invited Patty, a neighbor girl, to our basement, where we wordlessly sat on the cold cement floor and explored each other for several moments. Unfortunately, my mother, always watchful, burst in upon us during our third session and scolded me harshly, thus ending my brief period of normality. My earliest expressions of sexuality were inevitably narcissistic. I first became fascinated with my budding sexual powers during the summers of my sixth and seventh years, when I was put to bed for a long nap every afternoon in my mother’s room. I had already discovered that I carried around with me my own magical plaything, almost a playmate, far more interesting than any teddy bear, since it seemed to have a life of its own, rising and falling unpredictably. I would put on my mother’s heavy bathrobe and parade half-naked back and forth in front of her three-way mirror, a position that enabled me to be both performer and audience. As though by accident, my gown continually fell open to display glimpses of my treasure. My penis was naturally always erect, and despite its small size, it riveted my attention. We made a twosome, and together we performed for an imaginary public.

Clearly, I already had a vivid sense of drama. I would pretend that I was a prince with a naughty streak, strutting in front of my court, which was presumably watching from the mirrors. My courtiers must have been eunuchs or castrati, for they were insatiably curious about my unique member, and I was delighted by their admiration. Proudly, I showed off my prized possession, although little of the rest of my body, which I felt was skin and bone. I would pretend to be embarrassed, but to general acclaim, I let my viewers see more, until all was revealed. The penis’ prolonged defiance of gravity astounded me. After this early exhibitionism, my boyhood drama was rarely re-enacted, certainly not with my childhood sense of wonder nor freedom from shame. It’s surprising that I didn’t become an exhibitionist or flasher. I could not have realized that I would later become famous for merely possessing photos of male genitalia. I am today reminded of the astonishment with which Adam, in a brilliant 19th Century cartoon, stares at the “first cock stand” in history. Until my mid-teens, I had no idea that the penis could perform a final trick, as a fountain of life. Thus I willy-nilly missed the main point of having erections. My sister, at about 10, caught me one day conversing amiably with my cock, which was responding beautifully. This was a great shock for her and embarrassment to me. Of course, we never referred to it.

Long before I had heard anyone speak of the penis as shameful or wicked, therefore, I felt the spontaneous, innocent joy in displaying this organ that many boys must experience before they too are “crippled by morality,” as a therapist once put it. As an orthodox Mormon boy, I was inhibited from touching it unnecessarily. The penis was always mysterious and wonderful, and spontaneous erections were enough for me. But most of the time it served me merely as plumbing. Ironically, I seemed to be at the height of my erectile powers before puberty, because I gloriously had no guilt! But Mormon prohibitions soon became more powerful than nature’s drives. Even after I was seduced by my piano teacher at 16, I thought in my unawakened state that this miraculous organ was more an instrument for giving pleasure to others than to me.

Luckily, I soon shifted my attention from my own body to those of other boys. During my years from 8 to 10, my happiest moments were spent at the gymnasium. Although I rarely exercised there, for over two years my heart and soul were at the gym—ironically far more than my gawky body. In utmost innocence, mother, signed me up for weekly swimming lessons at the Deseret Gym, the Church’s “temple for the body,” only two blocks from my grammar school. She couldn’t have known what fears and pleasures she was unwittingly introducing me to. In our all-boy class, our swimming instructor, Mr. Welch, liked to pick out the most timid or underdeveloped boys and challenge them to show what they could do. He became for two years my principal villain. To my astonishment, even under the Church’s auspices, males of all ages swam nude, and boys in their later teens and early 20s had the period after ours. When inside the locker room, I was always too self-conscious to be caught looking at other boys. But after I had dressed, I would run up to the balcony overlooking the pool and stare at these splendid examples of slightly older Mormon manhood to my heart’s content. I was always alone. The gym’s official (and wonderfully benighted) assumption seemed to be that no Mormon boy—“normal” by definition—would ever be interested in others of his own sex. If the door to the balcony was locked, I would climb up the fire escape to peer through the tops of windows to catch a glimpse of at least a chest or back. At other times, I would find an awkward low grill in a janitor’s closet that enabled me to catch glimpses into the men’s locker room. Like a straight boy trying to peek into the girls’ room, I would have moved heaven and earth to appease my insatiable desires.

With far more developed bodies than mine, these older boys were young gods to me. I had never before seen teenage men nude, but I knew at once that I would never again see anything so breathtakingly beautiful. Leaning over the balcony railing, I was fascinated by their larger penises, musculature, pubic and body hair, and their wonderful heads and faces. As apparent products of the Saints’ clean living and pious thinking, these Apollos were phenomenal embodiments of the genus male. At times, I would nearly faint when an exceptionally handsome boy entered the pool room and went to the diving board. There he often would jump up and down for some time, preening like a bird of paradise, until he began to get an erection, of which he pretended to be utterly unaware. Then, to my disappointment, he would plunge into the blue-green waters and swim gracefully back and forth several times. Staring fixedly, I would follow this young prince until he hauled himself out onto the tile floor and started rubbing himself down nonchalantly with his towel. If he was unusually good-looking, I noted that other boys were also watching him. I learned early that, with furtive glances, most boys pay a silent tribute to male beauty. And as I have observed, most men—being competitive in every way—check one another out in showers. It also seemed to me that many boys expressed homosexual feelings before they adopted socially acceptable heterosexual identities. There was no nudity in my family, and my father was usually absent. Thus, these young males represented to me an unknown half of the world, a part of humanity that I’d only dreamed about. Or they were creatures of another species. Indeed, they seemed infinitely more beautiful nude than dressed. I no longer had to be my own phallic hero; more gifted heroes were exercising before me, and my eyes were now their adoring mirror.

The bodies of these glorious young men seemed utterly unlike my own prepubescent skeleton. Because of the cold water, my small, late-developing penis always shriveled to nothing in the pool. Although it was my necessary badge of admission to the all-male hall, I was ashamed of my small equipment and tried to hide it. I was grateful and surprised, however, that an ambivalent boy like me was allowed into this enormous room full of naked men. I was like a spy in foreign territory. Of course I kept my exciting voyeurism as private as I had my displays before my mother’s mirror.

I divided my life into seemingly unrelated experiences. I never connected these secret moments at the gym, for instance, with the overtures of my piano teacher, or any other forbidden experiences. I would end sessions at the gym exhausted but satisfied. Applying my religious language to my desires, I came to feel that the human form is sacred, if anything is. Later, I understood why the Greeks portrayed their gods as beautiful human beings. Fixedly watching these naked young men at the gym initiated a lifelong preoccupation, one that never lessened, but very soon I had no way to satisfy it. It was never again as innocent, pure and selfless. I think that enormous numbers of boys who professedly become straight have enjoyed similar experiences, but they probably call their stolen glances “admiration” or “hero-worship.” They usually deny that this admiration could be tinged with physical desire. Older men may repress their urge to stare, or else they become ever more furtive.

Throughout my life, I have experienced many sporadic occasions of similar voyeurism. Over time, my voracious eyes were somehow disconnected from my penis, doubtless because of my moralistic upbringing and body-hating family. Thus my sexual performances themselves later became unreliable. Because it was secret and safe, my desire to see replaced my desire to act. Looking, thank God, was never forbidden. When my family moved for a year to Thermopolis, Wyoming, for my mother’s health, I repressed my joyful spying as if I had never experienced it. Because of my skinny torso, gyms afterward became anathema to me. And never again did I find boys swimming nude. Except for public showers, I rarely again saw males wholly naked until I visited the baths in New York over 20 years later. Unfortunately, my sexual precocity was followed by years of painful abstinence.

Although I never saw him nude, I was repelled by my father and his body. Until puberty, as I’ve said, I wanted to be like mother in every way. Mother herself, however, always seemed embarrassed by all physical signs of sexuality. Because she always kept her body carefully hidden, I was shocked one day at about five when I came upon her sitting on the toilet. I caught a glimpse of a dark area between her legs, without a penis. What was in there? This sense of my mother’s differentness greatly disturbed me, but I as usual repressed it. But not everything could be repressed. I remember how appalled my sister was when she started menstruating. I saw my mother withdrawing with her to explain a few facts of life—never, I’m sure, mentioned before. By contrast, nothing was made of the mysterious fluid from my wet dreams, although the dreams themselves were intensely vivid and pleasurable.

Curiously, my father was a J. M. Barrie, apparently wanting me to remain an eternal boy like Peter Pan. Indeed, when father came home from his trips, he seemed to resent his children’s growing up more than mother did. Who were these taller, more vocal, more independent, young people? Why couldn’t they simply remain lovable children? All references to sexuality were of course forbidden. Ray and Claire seemingly didn’t wish us to develop adult desires, and we never looked forward to maturity or adult sexuality. Later in puberty, our physical and emotional changes seemed to Julia and me a possibly dangerous phase of life. I felt that our parents had somehow put a ceiling on our growth. Although mother said nothing, I strangely felt that she did not like signs of my growing genitals and body hair. I would hide all evidence of both when undressing or bathing at home, carefully cleaning out after each bath the loose hairs from the wash basin and tub. As an adolescent, I also concealed all early signs of shaving, although I knew that many boys were proud of entering this burgeoning phase of life. For a while, I did have a hirsute adornment of which I was proud. Until my early 20s, I had a very full head of dark brown hair. Within ten years, it had mainly fallen out, but, oddly, I had so little physical vanity that this didn’t seem to bother me. Even as a popular teacher at Harvard, I was strangely indifferent to my personal appearance. I finally accepted nature’s pattern for older men: some hair on my body, but little on my head.

Without realizing it, I was trying to deny my sexuality to please my parents. When mother would complain that my brother and I were peeing on the floor near the toilet, I would respond absurdly and angrily, “No, you and Julia are peeing on the floor.” I did not want her to refer even indirectly to my penis, to my differentness from her. Children often identify, as I did, with the dominant parent, but I carried this physical and psychological identification to the point of the absurd. Indeed, I collaborated with her in de-sexualizing me. Disliking the unpredictable physical vitality of boys, both of my parents thus unknowingly reinforced the feminine side of my nature. As old photos show, my father possessed as a young man a gentle, feminine quality.

After Lafayette Grammar School, West Junior High was so far away that I could not return to the gym of my earlier ecstasies. Although Utah summers were very hot, Mormon boys rarely walked around shirtless or in shorts on Capitol Hill. Thus in junior and senior high school, which had no pools or showers, I loved the only area of boys’ body hair that I could see every day—that between the short socks and the pants. Since I longed for all signs of maleness (which, I felt I didn’t possess), I made a fetish of those few inches of hairy flesh. The occasional boy, dressed in a T-shirt and shorts, was a revelation.

In Salt Lake City, male genitals were non-existent in two places—at home and in chapel. Church was, of course, the dreary place in which males had nothing between their legs. Piety was castrating, and like most Saints, I felt I should be sexless in church. But there were temptations even in the House of the Lord, as we called our nondescript ward house. An older, randy Mormon boy would shamelessly squeeze in next to me in church, grab my crotch, and try to unbutton my fly during services. I was very embarrassed that others might see, and I always rebuffed him, but he kept after me for months. I had a sweet revenge, however. Once, when I was about 13, during an intermission of a rehearsal of a church play, he chased me down a dark staircase. Before he could attack, I reached up his pant leg, as he was stretched out on the stairs. He pretended to be angry, but I persisted until my hand finally reached his bone-hard erection. While he squealed softly, I held on for dear life. To my amazement, I finally had what I had long dreamed about, although I was too naive to know what to do with my prize. We were shortly called back to the stage, but I could not forget my triumph—my capturing his lovely rod for a few precious seconds. I had stared at hundreds of penises in the gym, but I had thus far only touched my own. Later at school, I heard this boy say of me to a buddy of his, “He’s got a big one.” Although I was only normal, I was far prouder than if he had said, “He’s the brightest boy in class.” Boys and men are primitive beings.

Because I could not share these isolated and forbidden experiences with anyone, I again soon suppressed or compartmentalized them. My family and friends never touched one another. Everything affectionate or sexual seemed forbidden for everyone I knew except couples. Once, when I was moving my hand in my pocket, my father cried, “Don’t play with your bellicose!” When I looked this word up in the dictionary, I was surprised at my father's strange association. Had he confused genitals with instruments of war? Most Mormon boys in my time must have struggled valiantly against their most inevitable temptation. “Self-abuse” or “self-pollution” was strongly condemned even by the Boy Scout Handbook. The Mormons, as we’ve recently learned, have co-opted the Scout movement, outrageously blocking gays from joining. My Mormon scoutmaster suggested that boys wear jock straps and keep their hands out of their pockets, as though the penis were a stick of dynamite, somehow attached to the body. I felt later that it indeed was, although not in the sense he intended. But why had nature placed the hand so near the ever-ready, protruding joystick? And why did it cry out to be touched? Despite my guilt, by my later teens I found the impulse to masturbate irresistible; delaying satisfaction rendered me very irritable. Many boys kept track of their jerking off in secret diaries; Catholics had their confessionals. “My reservoir needs a spillway,” as one friend later said. And Woody Allen added, “Don’t knock my hobby. It’s sex with someone I love.”

As a boy in Salt Lake City, when I saw words like “dick,” “prick,” and “cunt” —with crude, oversized drawings—on men’s rooms walls, I was often unable to figure out what either the words or the drawings meant, even when the moment before intercourse was graphically, if crudely, depicted before me. The penis was usually drawn like a rectangular blob, or tailless fish, with an eye facing a slit or an oval. Thus was feebly depicted life’s great drama, viewed purely as sex. Yet I remained puzzled. I was not familiar with pornographic visual or verbal exaggeration or slang, certainly not with the female body. I did not realize that these scribbled caricatures were universal shorthand for male wish-fulfillment, boasting and fantasy, perhaps related to the illusion of power men experience during the sex act. I remember the words crudely scribbled on the wall of a railroad station men’s room, “I am hunq like a hors.” In graffiti, many of these terms and drawings revealed demeaning male attitudes toward women, gays, and sex itself. I guessed much later, however, that the universal use of words like “cocksucker” (and in England “sod”), as everyday put-downs, probably indicated unacknowledged interest and curiosity as well as fear or revulsion. Until my high school biology class, I did not even understand how male and female parts fit together like lock and key. My long-lasting ignorance of the obvious seems unimaginable to me now. Today, because of the terrible tragedy of AIDS, formerly forbidden words, like “condom” and “penis” have finally and blessedly been forced into everyday consciousness.

As an adolescent, I thus knew nothing about the mechanics of sex. I oddly couldn’t imagine penetration or the penis as penetrator. The idea of my parents engaging in sex, however infrequently, was repellent, and this distaste blocked my thinking about all intercourse. I later realized that in Zion my roaming the streets at night in my teens constituted timid rehearsals for an unknown play. And this early hunting – seeking trouble, as I feared – gave my adult cruising a sinister resonance. When looking for partners when I was still in my 20s, frightened of strangers, I was often in a state of sensual dread. Fear was unfortunately my first erotic emotion. It was therefore especially difficult for me to make the transition from imagination to action.

After 1941, I began my 12-year stay in residential quarters in all-male universities, surrounded by students in their prime. This was an ideal situation for a gay man in all ways except that it was totally forbidden. For most of the time, only my eyes were satisfied. I had to dissociate my visual excitement from my sexual response, and this further prolonged my childhood fear of sex. All of this stimulation with no outlet! Universities always seemed to fear that their large communities of males at their sexual apogee, living close together, might go wild if the barriers were let down. It’s a wonder that students rarely did. There were gays at every level living at these institutions—from members of the administration and full professors to first-term freshmen. But in strenuously homophobic societies, their numbers did not make the slightest difference, and most of them remained as repressed as monks. These men would have been astounded to learn that within a few decades, gays would openly declare themselves, establish gay organizations, newspapers, magazines, and demand progressive legislation. But for us, the almost omnipresent fear of homosexuality was far stronger than our desires. Some found companions or small groups with whom they could share their secrets or occasionally find love. But many managed to control themselves, except in occasional drunken binges, until their senior years, and they only experienced fuller freedom after college, in New York and elsewhere. In the 1940s and 1950s, universities were as homophobic as society at large—more so, because they had to keep the lids on thousands of pressure cookers. From their biographies, we know that great men like Santayana had to be content watching athletes from the bleachers. And Thornton Wilder had to satisfy himself by attending men’s swimming competitions.

I regarded the huffing and puffing of exercise as pointless self-obsession, partly because I never overcame my hatred of my father’s displays. I later even came to dislike mirrors, and I now live almost entirely without them, except for shaving. It never occurred to me or my friends, as many gays feel today, that we could or should build up our muscles, or that a well-developed body was more beautiful, would make us more attractive and give us more confidence with other men. We academic or professional types haughtily claimed that we were proud of our minds, not our bodies. This was really self-defeating, since we all suffered from a sense of physical inferiority. When Laurence Olivier, already a distinguished star of the English stage, first arrived in muscle-bound Hollywood, he admitted that he was so ashamed of his thin arms and legs that he usually wore long sleeves and pants. Body-building was and remains an American obsession.

Over the years, I have been amazed to learn about many of my close friends’ lives. A younger and more liberated friend said that he had decided at Yale that he would be happiest living near the nude beaches around San Francisco, of which he had heard. He planned his professional life carefully, so that he now lives and works in the center of them. He balances his life each day between work and play. It never occurred to me that it was possible to include my sexual life within so rational a framework, or that I could or should save time for "leisure," so defined. I have furtively tried to steal moments from my professional for my sexual life, which, I tried to convince myself, was secondary. Another friend in an “open marriage” recently told me that in his long-term relationship, he and his partner of three decades have always been confident and secure, even though they cruise separately, because each feels that the other could never find anyone “better.” Oh, for a little of such confidence! Later, to my surprise, an otherwise gentle and self-effacing friend said of his younger years, “I was a predator and young men were my prey. It felt like a victory whenever I could bring down my quarry. I never associated sex with love, nor did I want to. I was mainly seeking my own pleasure.”

The heroic number of physical encounters of men like Gore Vidal would have been unimaginable to me. A high level of sexual energy, good looks, aggressiveness, or fame must be enormous advantages. But I didn’t want to separate the physical from the emotional, as many men do. I often settled for what I could get. The sexual daring of great writers and philosophers like Jean Genêt and Michel Foucault (not to speak of the Marquis de Sade), made me feel like Little Lord Fauntleroy. In food, love, and sex, the French seem to be masters. Clearly there are no rules concerning sex except those that govern physicians: “Do no harm.” Some S & M addicts might question even this proviso.

W.H. Auden speaks poignantly of the delicate balance between joy and danger in gay love: “Every farthing of the cost, / All the dreaded cards foretell, / Shall be paid, but from this night / Not a whisper, not a thought, / Not a kiss nor look be lost.” Some of the most ecstatic encounters between men can occur when they are forced to meet only for a few moments, like dragonflies mating in the air. This was doubtless true for sexual encounters throughout the ages. Before public lighting, Boswell and other 18th century diarists chronicled many quick sexual meetings of all kinds in the unlighted parks and alleys of central London. Great creative works have been inspired by such brief meetings. One thinks of the wonders which writers as different as Proust, Gide, Mann, Cavafy, and Genêt have made of the exchange of glances and quick encounters. I have witnessed several occasions of almost primitive male god-worship in the baths: tall, superbly-built Apollos, with wonderful heads of hair, well-proportioned bodies and accouterments, standing with legs apart like the colossus of Rhodes, in the midst of their worshippers, while thoroughly penetrated and penetrating, their velvet skin stroked by a dozen pair of hands. There was something reverential about the hushed atmosphere in these group tributes to masculine beauty.

Among other poets in our time, Yeats has expressed the unity of the divine with the “lowliest” parts of the body, and the necessity of breaking in order to make whole. When the Bishop tells Crazy Jane, one of Yeats’ alter-egos, to “Live in a heavenly mansion, / Not in some foul sty,” she cries defiantly:

                    ‘Fair and foul are near of kin,
                    And fair needs foul,’ I cried…
                    ‘Love has pitched his mansion in
                    The place of excrement;
                    For nothing can be sole or whole
                    That has not been rent.’

The sexual organs are referred to as a “mansion” by Jane, the home of both our highest desires and most basic functions.

As I discovered in both East and West, through the omnipresent “glory holes” in the partitions of the stalls in men’s rooms, sexual partners, including “straight” men, can remain unknown to one another. Some come to prefer the quick release and anonymity offered by these facilities. Gays living in sparse populations often feel that they have few alternatives to these makeshift meeting places—roadside cafes or men’s rooms on highway rest stops. In cities, the perpetual interchange was, “Do you have a place?” “No, do you?” “No.” It was easy to lose a sense of proportion on the sex treadmill. Of course, pleasures that are illegal can also be exciting. Chasing after sex can easily become, like other obsessions, all-consuming, the most powerful of drugs. No joint was ever as addictive as the penis. I myself have sometimes been a risk-taker. Because many gays have had harrowing experiences while cruising, it’s inevitable that danger, arrest, prison, and even death are unfortunately allied in their imaginations, an association reinforced in my time by the severe anti-gay laws and violent homophobia prevailing throughout most of the country. I would at times ask myself, “Is sex worth all of this anxiety?”

I visited New York many times before I heard that the baths even existed, and many more times before I dared to try them. A poor specimen of manhood, I was uncomfortable there. Men without good physiques, confidence, and drive can be almost invisible in these competitive arenas. I never made a long-term friend in either bars or baths, and I was usually just an observer. Although I often envied those who could enjoy recreational drugs in the Sixties and Seventies, I could never surrender myself to sheer sensation. I was afraid of any drug stronger than alcohol. The one time I tried hash, it felt as though my head were being split open with an axe. Sensationalists in baths sought moments in which they were totally focused upon penis, orifices, skin or the entire body of another male. One friend said that he would rather feel tactilely than to see or hear. Most men in baths were so intent on sex that conversation was impossible, except in the small, closet-like rooms. Before AIDS shut most of them down, I remember the baths chiefly as places in which I circled about endlessly, with decreasing hope. On my rounds, a fellow teacher said one day, “Isn’t this absurd? The handsome and the bold pair off, and the rest of us might as well be on a chain gang. At least it’s a refuge on a cold night from a heterosexual world.”

Michael Angelo's Sistine roof,
His "Morning" and his "Night" disclose
How sinew that has been pulled tight,
Or it may be loosened in repose,
Can rule by supernatural right
Yet be but sinew.