Afterward we said good night to the girls, who thanked us with actual kisses on the mouth. Bernice's lips tasted of salt and Coke, and I was relieved when we parted after a short time. I don't think I was her idea of a perfect Valentine's Day date, which was just as well. I had no intention of taking my performance any further, and was not looking forward to days or weeks of having to feign excitement at her presence.
Mary appeared more content with her experience, kissing Jack several times before being led away by Bernice. He and I then walked home through the cold, our hands stuffed deep into the pockets of our coats. When we reached his house, he stopped.
"That was one bad movie," he said.
"It sure was," I agreed.
"The girls had a good time, though."
"Sure," I said.
Jack stepped forward, and his lips met mine. It was only for a second, and then he moved away, his eyes on the ground. "I'll see you tomorrow," he said. He ran up the steps to his house, the door shutting loudly behind him in the still night. I ran my tongue over my lips, trying to taste him, but all that remained was the lingering syrupy sweetness of Coca-Cola. I couldn't tell if it was from Bernice's kiss or Jack's, but I savored it until it grew faint. Then I walked up my own steps and into the house.
Many years later, I would discover that the real singing nun, Jeanine Deckers, left the convent after the success of her song "Dominique" and in 1985 committed suicide along with the woman believed to have been her lover for over a decade. But that night in 1966 all I knew was that, like her, my heart was singing.
CHAPTER 8
There are few things more defiant in the face of almost certain failure than a romance between young people. Despite the fact that a relationship begun when one is 14, 15, or 16 is highly unlikely to last the length of a school year, much less forever, millions of boys and girls blissfully ignore the statistical probability and pair up. When the inevitable breakup comes, they act surprised, as if the possibility had never occurred to them. And perhaps it didn't. The future, after all, is not something the young often consider, believing as they do that time is an endless commodity. They live in the moment, oblivious to the danger of heartache, even when it is all around them.
There are, of course, exceptions to the rule. We have all at one time or another met the couple who came together in high school, only to marry and thrive. Secretly, we hate these couples because they have managed to escape what most of us go through at least half a dozen times on the road to emotional maturity. We tell ourselves that avoiding this maturation is how they've managed to do it, and pity them their simplemindedness, much as we pity the former cheerleaders and quarterbacks who remember high school as the best times of their lives.
For the rest of us, high school dating was practice for later life. By dating, we were allowed to act out the dramas and comedies that are part of being creatures who love. We tried and failed, won and lost, and hopefully learned a thing or two before the stakes were raised. As the only real consequence at the time was pregnancy, we had free rein to do as we liked, or at least as far as we dared. At least as long as we were heterosexual. Those among us who leaned in another direction were, with almost no exceptions, left to figure it out on our own. I maintain that this is why so many of us had—and continue to have—trouble when we finally did begin dating. We hadn't had the years of practice that our straight brothers and sisters had. We weren't given the opportunity to find out what we liked, and what we had to offer. As a result, we had to do it on the fly, all the while feeling that we really ought to know what we were doing.
I envy a bit the young queers of today, with their gay-straight alliances, their centers, and their freedoms. I'm sure it's every bit as difficult being outside the norm as it was when Jack and I were 15, but at least they have access to information. At least they, most of them, know that they are not alone in the world. For myself and Jack, it was like waking up and finding everyone else gone. We had no idea who or what we were, and had to find our way on our own.
We didn't call ourselves gay. We didn't call ourselves anything. We were just two boys who loved one another. We didn't have Elton John, Harvey Fierstein, or Rupert Everett to show us what we could be. We didn't haveWill & Grace or Queer as Folk to reflect our lives (however one-sided those portrayals may be). We didn't have Falcon Video or Honcho to show us what men did with one another in bed. We had only one another.
The sex part we muddled through as best we could. Boys are nothing if not resourceful beasts, and we figured out quickly what felt good and did it often. Stroking turned to licking, and then to sucking. Hesitant at first, we quickly overcame our inhibitions about taking one another in our mouths. Because our lovemaking was done mostly late at night, with our parents asleep a room or two away, we were restrained in displaying our excitement, muffling our groans in pillows and coming with silent exaltation. We turned 16 in August, spent our second summer on Treasure Island (where Jack was inducted into the Order of the Arrow and we celebrated by jacking off on top of the observation tower at Yoder's Lookout), and a month later returned to school as sophomores. Understanding that camouflaging ourselves was a necessary course of action, we continued to date girls. This was more important for Jack than it was for me, as his popularity had grown exponentially and he was now, among other things, captain of the football team and vice-president of the student body. While I was far from being on the lowest rung of high school society, my positions as newspaper editor and first trumpet in the band were not in the same league as Jack's.
Jack was better than I at mimicking enthusiasm for the fairer sex. Where my dates rarely went beyond kissing, with perhaps a hint of tongue or a hand on a breast, Jack felt that both keeping our cover and his reputation required more of him. Accordingly, he occasionally allowed a girl to go down on him, and several times went all the way when a girl was particularly insistent and he needed a good story to tell the guys in the locker room.
Rather than envy these girls, I was thankful to them. Not only did they help Jack and me keep our relationship a secret, they provided us with ideas for our own times together. We owed a particular debt to one Margaret Alice O'Leary, fourth daughter of our town's chief of police. Jack's time with Margaret Alice culminated at the school's annual Halloween Dance, to which Jack went dressed as Tarzan. Margaret Alice, showing little imagination, came attired as a nun in an actual habit that had once belonged to her aunt, Sister Patrick Theresa, a resident of the Convent of Divine Love in Philadelphia, where she spent day and night in prayer and adoration of the Holy Spirit, Christ, and the Virgin Mary. All of the O'Leary girls were good Catholics, and Margaret Alice, being the second-to-youngest, had learned much from her older sisters. After the dance, while making out in the front seat of the car Jack had borrowed from his parents for the evening, she lifted her habit and suggested that Jack do something that had hitherto never occurred to him.
"She said if we did it that way, she would still be a virgin and it wouldn't be a sin," he explained to me later that night, after dropping Margaret Alice off and joining me in my bedroom.
"Did you do it?" I asked him, still doubtful about the feasibility of Margaret Alice's suggestion. Jack shook his head. "I told her I had too much respect for her and wanted to wait." "And she believed you?"
"I'm invited to her house for dinner on Sunday," said Jack. "After they go to mass. She says her mother will love me, even if I'm not Catholic. So, do you want to try it?" "Try what?" I said.
"You know," Jack replied. "What Margaret Alice wanted to do."
"Do you think we can?" I asked. "I mean, can you actually put something up there?" "Margaret Alice is a lot smaller than we are, and she was ready to do it."
"Yeah, but girls are built different," I countered. "Maybe they're, I don't know, bigger back there or something."
"Come on," Jack said, already taking his pants off. "We won't know until we try it." Reluctantly, I got undressed. My parents were out for the evening and not expected home until l
ate, so with the fear of discovery gone we could be less cautious. Soon we were both naked. "How do we do it?" I asked Jack.
"Get on your stomach," Jack suggested.
"Me?" I said. "Why not you?"
"It was my idea," Jack answered. "You can go next. I promise."
Knowing it was useless to argue, I lay on the bed while Jack got on top of me. I felt him push his dick between the cheeks of my ass. "I guess I just put it in," he said, thrusting forward.
Nothing happened.
"What's wrong?" I asked.
"It's really tight," said Jack. "I can't get it in. Maybe if I push harder."
He tried. My resulting cry caused him to make a hasty retreat.
"Did it hurt?" he inquired.
"I don't know about Catholic girls," I said, "but you're not getting that thing in me."
"Okay, okay," Jack said, trying to calm me down. "Let's try again. This time I'll do it really slowly. I know with girls sometimes you can't stick it in right away. You have to kind of loosen them up first."
"I'm not a girl," I shot back, using the line he'd once used on me.
"I know," said Jack. "But let's just try it again."
I turned over again and once more Jack positioned himself between my legs. Again I felt him prodding me. I held my breath as he entered me, a little at a time. It still hurt, but it wasn't the searing pain it had been the first time. Still, it burned.
"It's really dry," Jack said, pulling out. "We need something to make it wet."
He spit into his palm, and I heard him rub it into his skin. But when he tried to re-enter me, it hurt too much and I told him to stop.
"What about butter?" Jack suggested. "That's oily." "We use Parkay," I said. "Besides, my mom would notice if that much was gone." I thought for a minute. "I know. What about Vaseline? There's some in the medicine chest in the bathroom. We hardly ever use it, so it won't matter if some is gone."
Jack hopped off the bed and ran down the hallway to the bathroom. He returned a moment later with the jar of Vaseline in his hand. Taking the lid off, he scooped some out and applied it to his dick.
"Man, this stuff is slippery," he said appreciatively. "If this doesn't work, nothing will." It did work. Not perfectly, but it worked. After much pushing and pausing, advancing a little bit at a time as I told him it was okay, he managed to get himself all the way inside me. "Are you okay?" he asked, lying on my back with his mouth beside my ear.
"Yeah," I said. "It feels weird, but it's okay, I guess."
"Weird how?" Jack asked as he tried pumping his hips. "Weird like it hurts?"
"No," I answered. "More like I'm going to…" I hesitated, not wanting to say what it felt like. "Going to what?" Jack asked, his breath ragged.
"Going to go," I said.
"Go where?"
"You know. Go ," I said, emphasizing the word.
Jack pulled out quickly and backed away.
"I didn't say I was going to," I said, turning to look at him. "I just said it kind of felt like it." "You're sure?" he asked, looking doubtfully at my ass.
"Pretty sure," I said. "Just try it some more."
I guess the thrill of this new activity outweighed Jack's fears of an imminent explosion, because he mounted me again, and this time he kept pumping until he came. When he pulled out, he rolled onto his back and I turned over. Noticing my hardly-erect penis and the unstained state of the sheet, Jack asked,
"Didn't it feel good?" "It felt good," I said. "Just different. I think we need to do it some more." Truthfully, I really didn't see what the big deal was. It had felt good, but not as great as Jack seemed to think it did. Besides, my ass was gummy with Vaseline, which I knew from other experiences was almost impossible to get off.
"Why don't you try it now," Jack suggested, rolling over. Having had the advantage of going first, I was slightly better prepared than Jack had been. I was not, however, prepared for how good it felt when I finally sank into Jack's behind. I know I gasped, and I know I didn't last long. I think Jack's experience with girls, limited as it was, had taught him at least a little about holding off climax. I, being new to intercourse, had no such advantage, and it wasn't long before I lay, shaking and sweaty, on Jack's back.
"Is it like that with girls?" I asked him.
"No," said Jack. "Not even close. This is a lot better."
"So we can do it again?" I said.
"Yep," Jack replied. "And guess what, you're not a virgin anymore."
"But I thought Margaret Alice said this didn't count," I objected.
"That's because Margaret Alice has two places to put it in," explained Jack. "We only have one. So now you're not a virgin." Having lost my virginity to Jack, I felt I'd become a grown-up. And now that Jack and I had expanded our sexual repertoire, we went at it as often as possible. We became reckless, doing it in our bedrooms during the day, sometimes while our mothers were downstairs making us snacks of chocolate chip cookies and glasses of milk. We experimented with alternatives to the vile Vaseline, trying salad oil, shampoo, and even the stuff Jack used to condition his baseball glove before discovering that plain old Corn Huskers Lotion worked perfectly well and wasn't quite as difficult to wash off. We never worried about who was the "man" and who was the "woman." It would be another five or six years before someone asked me if I was a top or a bottom (at which time I still wouldn't know what the question meant). Our roles, at least in bed, were interchangeable. One of the advantages to being almost completely ignorant about what it meant to be gay was that we were equally ignorant about many of the misconceptions others had about homosexuals. We knew that men who slept with men weren't well-liked, at least enough to keep what we did together between us, but the sometimes violent hostility that would later be directed at the gay community had not yet shown its face to us. The year before, three people had been arrested for staging a sit-in at Dewey's restaurant in Philadelphia after diners assumed to be homosexuals were denied service. But apart from a brief mention in the newspaper, the event resulted in little public notice.
In talking about this fairly remarkable absence of either pro or anti-gay activity with an historian friend years later, he remarked, "They still had the blacks to beat up. They just hadn't gotten around to us yet."
True, the African-American community was taking more than a little abuse at the time. But history was about to change again, and it would take me and Jack with it.
CHAPTER 9
There used to be, at Knoebels Amusement Park in Elysburg, Pennsylvania, a ride called the Scrambler. It consisted of three arms extending out from a central hub. From each arm hung four individual cars. As the Scrambler turned, the cars spun independently in the opposite direction of the arms' rotation, so that the feeling of speed was intensified and riders were quickly disoriented. Disembarking from the car at the end of four or five minutes, walking was difficult, and the area around the Scrambler often appeared to be populated by drunkards as people struggled to regain their balance. Our family made at least one trip to Knoebels every summer when my father had a week off from work, and Jack and I were sure to take several turns on the Scrambler, reveling in the intoxicating effects. In the waning years of the 1960s, living in America was like riding the Scrambler on a daily basis. Just as we would regain our footing from one startling event, another would come and send us reeling in the other direction. On the same day in 1967, January 10, Edward Brooke, a Republican from Massachusetts, became the first black man elected to the United States Senate by popular vote, while in Atlanta, vocal segregationist Lester Maddox, who in 1965 chose to close his popular Pickrick chicken restaurant rather than serve black customers after the signing of the Civil Rights Act, was inaugurated as the new Democratic Governor of Georgia. This peculiar dichotomy was emblematic of the social upheaval rocking the nation. As if the entire country had slipped down Alice's rabbit hole into Wonderland (appropriately, Jefferson Airplane's psychedelic "White Rabbit" was a staple on radio in 1967), we peered, bewildered, into the funhou
se mirror of American culture. In San Francisco, the Summer of Love was about to unleash its message of peace, love, and LSD. But in suburban Philadelphia, interest and concern was focused on the arrival of the first Marine combat troops in Vietnam and President Lyndon Johnson's announcement of plans to enact a draft lottery. Until then, the armed forces had operated under the old system of registering all men aged 19 to 26 and calling them as needed, from the oldest down. Although nearly one million men had already been drafted to fight in the conflict against the National Liberation Front, those of us approaching the age of eligibility more or less considered ourselves safe, assuming that it would take a very long time to work through all the men currently in their twenties. Under the newly-proposed system, we could be called much earlier, a proposition that thrilled no one.
Still, we believed the threat to be a distant one. We also believed that the ugliness in Southeast Asia would soon be over. Demonstrations, the burning of draft cards, and defections (or, as my father called them, "desertions") to Canada and Europe were increasing. The conflict in Vietnam had sharply divided America, and it seemed we would either have to end our involvement in what appeared to many to be a losing battle or risk humiliation both home and abroad.
Given the current debate over gay marriage, it's interesting to remember that it was only in June of 1967 that the Supreme Court struck down state laws banning interracial marriage. Little did I think, when that news made the front pages of every newspaper, that 35 years later Thayer and I would ourselves enter into civil union, first in neighboring Vermont and, more recently, in Canada. The idea of two men marrying seemed as remote then as that of a white woman marrying a black man must have in 1942. Yet the world had changed considerably since World War II, and now, in the midst of another war, it was changing again, moving forward one step at a time. (Is it coincidence that changes in social policy occur historically in the midst of war? And will we finally see gay marriage instituted nationwide only after the sacrifice of another million lives?)