The Martin Duberman Reader (33 page)

“It is a piece of crystal. Why does it bother you?”

“It's so corny! I thought you were . . . the ‘real thing.' ” I was pleased at the bravado in my voice.

“The crystal can be a useful tool. But not a necessary one. I can remove it if it bothers you.”

I felt foolish again. “Why should it bother me?” I managed to mumble.

“Good. Then we can begin. I want you to write down”—seemingly from nowhere she produced a pad and pencil—“the one question that most preys on your mind. Do you understand?”

“I thought you already knew the question.”

Gemma smiled enigmatically. “I feel I need to provide you with proof.”

“One question?”

“Keep it brief. As short as possible. After writing down the question, fold the paper once, and then place it under the piece of crystal. Be sure to fold the paper over, so that the writing is not visible. After you have done that, I want you to sit back, close your eyes, and concentrate as deeply as possible on the question you have written down. I, too, shall close my eyes. I will empty my mind to receive your message. But you must concentrate very hard or you will not succeed in transmitting the message to me. Is that clear?”

“Wouldn't it be simpler if I just asked you the question?”

Again the enigmatic smile. “But then you would not believe that I have the power to read what is inside you without being told.”

I wrote on the piece of paper, “Will I always be a homosexual?” Then, following her instructions, I folded the paper and put it under the crystal. But my skeptical side simply refused to sit back and concentrate. Not for the last time in encounters with my saviors, my rebellious streak abruptly took over. I peeked. I saw Gemma take the piece of paper out through some opening in the bottom of the table, read it, then put it back.

“Open your eyes now,” she said. “You are indeed a very troubled young man. Just as I had thought. But there is hope. Your particular trouble can be cured. But you must want to be cured”—a phrase I would hear often in the years ahead.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, you must give yourself up wholly to the cure. You must leave your old life, at once, and join our gypsy family so that I can be constantly by your side.”

“Join your gypsy family?” The full absurdity of what Gemma was suggesting was clear. And yet, I
was
tempted—though I'd seen her trick with the paper, though my skepticism was entirely to the fore. I can still feel the powerful impulse within me to do exactly as she suggested.
Anything
to relieve the burden.

At least I was able to delay the decision. Fumbling toward the tent opening, I told Gemma I would have to think about it overnight, that in all likelihood I would do as she said, but that I first had to make “certain arrangements.” As I walked out of her tent back on to the midway, she whispered gently, “It is your one chance for happiness”—another prediction I would hear often in the years ahead.

In the upshot I did not appear at Gemma's tent at dawn carrying my worldly goods. I went to Yale instead.

—from
Cures: A Gay Man's Odyssey
(1991)

T
he year I entered Yale as a freshman, 1948, also saw the publication of Alfred Kinsey's
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male.
The book proved a bombshell on many counts, but particularly for what it said about homosexuality. According to Kinsey, 37 percent of adult American men had had at least one orgasm with another man, the experiences co-existing in many lives with heterosexuality. The incidence might be higher still, Kinsey suggested, were it not for social constraints.

Others before Kinsey—notably Edward Carpenter, Havelock Ellis, and Magnus Hirschfeld—had argued that homosexuality was a normal variant of human sexuality. But their views had long since been eclipsed by the consensus within the American psychiatric establishment that, contrary to Freud, homosexual behavior
always
connoted pathology (a consensus reinforced by popular culture and exemplified by the negative images of gays in films). It was in the nature of heresy for Kinsey to suggest in 1948 that erotic feelings for people of the same gender might be a garden-variety human impulse—rather than, as psychiatry insisted, the pathological response of a small group of clinically disturbed Others.

Kinsey went still further. He argued that heterosexuality did not represent a biological imperative and that in insisting it did,
psychotherapists were functioning as cultural police rather than as physicians or scientists. The psychiatrists, predictably, responded with a mix of scorn and fury. Lawrence S. Kubie, a prominent therapist and author, commended Kinsey and his associates for the diligence of their research, but then loftily declared that only those experienced in clinical psychopathology (namely psychiatrists) could provide a reliable interpretation of “normality.” And their judgment, Kubie made clear, had long since been rendered: homosexuality did not qualify.

Adding his voice, Dr. Robert P. Knight—of Yale, my new home—declared that although the cold was also common in the American population, no one would be foolish enough to describe
it
as “normal.” Another Yale professor, the zoologist George A. Bait-sell, wrote plainly in the
Yale Daily News,
“I don't like Kinsey! I don't like his report; I don't like anything about it.” Welcome to college.

I in fact arrived at Mother Yale's portals oblivious of the Kinsey controversy—though like most middle-class, white Americans, I'd ingested psychiatric assumptions with my baby food and was reflexively on Gemma's side of the argument, not Kinsey's. I was also very nearly innocent of sex. At age eighteen I was still a virgin, though with women, not for want of trying. I had gone the whorehouse route while still in high school. It happened in Florida over one spring vacation. Three of us, with standard teenage bluster, had managed to badger each other into a local brothel. The madam, with the trace of a smile and a manner just a bit too gracious, ushered us into a small sitting room, where four or five scantily dressed women were rocking slowly in their chairs; apparently they were enjoying their own kind of game. We sat down, covered with embarrassment, in the empty chairs. No one spoke. The women kept rocking, rocking. Finally, just as I felt I would bolt for the door, one of them broke into a laugh and said, “Okay, boys, time to choose. We can't spend all day.”

I jumped up first (let's get this
over
with!), awkwardly grabbed the woman nearest me, and headed with her into a back room. She dropped her robe as soon as we got there and asked me what I had in
mind. Everything, it seemed, had a different price tag, with “around the world” costing the most, a whopping twenty dollars. I told her I only had seven dollars, and showed her my wallet as proof; nobody was taking me around the world! She said for seven dollars she could only screw me (“Only!” I thought).

She called me over to the bed, where I dutifully got on top of her and, as instructed, rubbed up and down against her body. My cock stayed resolutely limp. Sensing my rising panic, she put aside the rules of the price scale—though I wasn't to tell the madam or she'd catch hell—and blew me a little. To no avail. She said not to worry, that married men often came into the house and they couldn't get it up either. She promised not to tell my friends and, to aid in the deception, kindly put some ointment in the urethral opening of my cock, wrapped it in gauze, and snapped on a rubber band (could this really have been standard preventive treatment in the forties for VD?). With this outward proof of heterosexual grace, I later bragged to my friends about how great the fuck had been. One of the two, off guard at seeing the gauze and rubber band concoction that I triumphantly displayed, confessed that he had no bandage on
his
cock; suspicion promptly deflected onto him as the “chicken.”

The night of the senior prom in high school, I realized that sex with women wasn't my thing. Seventeen, I'd been dating a “wild” girl, Rachel, for some time. We were known as an “item” and had promised ourselves—and announced to our friends—that we would “consummate our love” on the night of the prom. When the school dance was over, our crowd continued the revelries at Al's apartment (his parents were away). It was a fancy one, fit setting for the Big Event. Everyone sprawled out on the living room floor drinking and making out—and waiting for the moment when Rachel and I would go into the back bedroom; the whole group was vicariously losing its virginity through us.

Once in the bedroom, Rachel and I got undressed and lay together on the huge bed. Again, I was impotent—but this time more desperate, a little crazed:

“The doctor warned me,” I told her, “that this might happen—
I've been making out too much lately. He warned me to cut down on the sex or I'd get impotent.” Pure invention, of course, and obviously a little nuts, but Rachel took it in stride, neither questioning nor accusing me.

Again, I lied to my friends. This time the excuse (agreed to by Rachel—I was lucky in my choice of women) was that we hadn't been able to do it because she was having a period.

As far back as I could remember, I'd been attracted erotically only to men, and my masturbation fantasies had always focused exclusively on them. Even as a preteen in summer camp I'd had a “special friend.” In the camp yearbook for 1940, my write-up described me as “one of Bunk 6B's twins. Many a night his counselor came in to find Dubie [my nickname] sleeping beside his pal, Katz.” And the last line of Katz's write-up poignantly posed the question, “What will you do if they ever separate you from Duberman?”

Two years later, the beloved Katz no longer sharing my pillow and, at the onset of my twelfth year, advancing rapidly on puberty, I organized my current bunkmates into a ritual we called “fussing.” We would put a mattress at the bottom of the closet in our bunk and, through trial and error, developed a code question: “You feel like fussing?” If yes, we'd go into the closet, two at a time, and body-rub ourselves into pleasure. There was a definite hierarchy as to who got to go into the closet with whom (my first lesson in the tyranny of beauty, which the gay bars of later years would greatly reinforce). Teddy and I, pretty blonds both, were much in demand, and on the occasions when we would haughtily disappear into the closet
together,
the bunk would be ablaze with sexual tension.

Psychiatry in those days dismissed such boyish antics as altogether natural, an expected, even necessary, prelude to achieving “adult” (heterosexual) identity. But in my own case, the psychiatric prediction had not come true: my attraction to men hadn't disappeared over time. I nonetheless refused, tenaciously, to put the obvious label on myself. That would have been tantamount, given the current definitions of the day, to thinking of myself as a stunted human being, one whose libidinal impulses had been “arrested” at
the stage of early adolescence. I still remember the overwhelming shame I felt when I came across a
LIFE
magazine picture gallery of “criminal types” and saw that the one labeled “the homosexual”—a sweet, pretty blond—looked exactly like me.

All through my undergraduate years at Yale I steeled myself against looking for sex, sensing that the only kind of experiences I would be drawn to would force on me a self-definition I wasn't ready to accept. I was protected by the notion, standard for isolated, young homosexuals in those years, that there were so few of us and we were so desperate to guard our secret that no places existed where we could meet. But then one day an undergraduate friend offhandedly warned me to stay away at night from the Green (the large park abutting the Yale campus): “It's a hangout for fairies.” I was shocked—and thrilled.

That very same night, having gotten myself so drunk I felt conveniently muddled, I headed toward the Green. It was dark and looked empty, but as my eyeballs focused, I saw a very fat, middle-aged black man sitting quietly on a bench. I sat down on the empty bench opposite him. After a minute or two, he started whistling softly, tantalizingly, in my direction. Fueled by liquor, I got up, reeled my way over, and stood boldly in front of him. He started playing with my cock, then took it out of my pants. Wildly excited, I started to fondle him.

“Do you have any place we can go?” I whispered importunately.

“Nope. No place.”

Suddenly I heard laughter and noise coming in our direction. I was sure it was some undergraduates—and equally sure we'd been seen. Zipping up my fly, I ran out of the park, ran without stopping, panicked, hysterical, ran for my life back to my dorm room. I stayed in the shower for hours, cleaning, cleaning. I actually washed my mouth out with soap, though I hadn't used my mouth—other than to make a prayerful pact with God that if He let me off this time, I'd never, never go near the Green again.

The panic lasted for days. By the end of the week I was back on the Green, drunk again. This time I let myself get picked up by
one of the cars cruising the area—and let the driver give me a blow job in the backseat. He was expert and it felt delicious. But perhaps because I let myself actually touch his penis, I went back to the Green only two or three times after that, when the urge for contact overwhelmed my controls; and only once after that did I let myself get another blow job. Then, in my junior year, drunk and desperate, I groped another equally drunk twenty-year-old outside a fraternity house—and barely escaped a nasty fight. Except for a single clouded experience in New York City—where I met someone in Grand Central Station, but then, in the hotel where we went, felt too uneasy to go through with it—that was about the sum of my sex life until age twenty-one. Two blow jobs, two panic attacks.