What was he averring socially?
What was he averring sexually?
And certainly it does not take much to see the two as diverging dramatically.
But it was precisely my lack of concern with these questions, plus a general sympathy for the eccentric (and he was good looking), that let me move with him through the labyrinths of mutual desire without questioning such contradictions.
The first time I taught for a full term at an American university, I had my thirty-second birthday while there as a Visiting Professor. As sometimes happens when a writer comes to a new school, a handful of the brighter students attached themselves to me, and soon I felt that some of those students had even become my friends. Among them was a brilliant young Hispanic woman, who, for the sake of the telling, I’ll call Carla, and who, while I knew her, had her nineteenth birthday.
Full-figured, with black hair and astonishing gray-green eyes, Carla turned a questioning energy on everything about her. She was an attractive personality for anyone who enjoyed the pleasures of thinking for its own sake.
That term I came out to my students as soon as it flowed from the material we were dealing with. If it did not put them at ease, it made me feel more comfortable. But I was clear about announcing the fact that I was gay within the first two weeks of classes.
The isolation of a visiting professor moving onto a new campus—and, in my case, it was also my return to the U.S. after two years in England—can be extreme. The few people, including Carla, who helped alleviate it, I was grateful to. One day, however, when she was walking with me across the campus, she confessed, somewhat jokingly, that she was sexually interested in me and would have pursued it with some passion had I been straight. “I’m just a slave to my body,” was her comment; it has remained with me for years from that afternoon. I know the feeling. But I reiterated that I wasn’t straight; still I hoped we could stay friends. A notable current of my adult social education—and I feel it’s very near the core of what I sometimes characterize as what it means to be a “responsible gay male”—is not to be irrationally terrified either by female anger or by female desire. I enjoyed Carla’s friendship and hoped she could still enjoy mine, even if she had to suppress an overt sexual component—a relationship I have had, and have enjoyed, with many men. I decided to make no effort to distance myself from her, but give her the opportunity to reconceive the friendship in non-sexual terms—an opportunity a good number of men, both straight and gay, have given me.
Classes ended, and, about a week before I was to return to New York, Carla, an older male student (a carpenter we’ll call Fred, an aspiring poet in his late twenties, whom, I confess, I was attracted to; but Fred had made it as clear to me as I had made it clear to Carla that he did not want to pursue a sexual relationship, even though, in his own words, the possibility flattered him), and another woman student who was Carla’s close friend, invited me out with them for an evening. The specific suggestion came from Carla. She explained I was to be their guest for the night, and that dinner and dancing afterward were their way of showing their gratitude for my term’s teaching.
A very pleasant night it started off. Somehow, however, I ended up with several more drinks than I wanted—twice when I came back to the table from a trip to the john, my half-finished drink had been replaced by a full one; and at least three other times a round I didn’t really want at all was bought over my protests.
But we were dancing, having a good time—and there was much talk of “drinking up.”
In Fred’s van, we returned from that very loud Buffalo dance bar which, in 1975, claimed to be the original home of the Buffalo chicken wing; and when we reached the double tier of motel rooms in which the university had housed me that term, Carla announced she would give me some help upstairs to my room—I only realized, perhaps, I needed some when I was halfway there.
In my room, she pushed me backward onto the bed, grabbed my arm to keep me from falling onto the floor, and proceeded to pull off first my clothes, then hers.
She climbed on top of me.
Then, at her insistence, we made love. I had the presence to ask if she was using any birth control. She answered: “What do you think I am? Crazy?” The only other interruption was, once, when I pulled away to race into the bathroom to be messily ill in the toilet. Solicitously, she brought me back to bed. The next morning, it was a while before anyone felt like moving. And, in the haze of my hangover, I recall her rising to dress and leave.
Some time later that day, she returned. I answered the door. She entered, and immediately began to undress.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Let’s talk.”
And so, for a while, we did.
It seems, she confessed, her plan from the beginning had been to take me out for the evening, get me drunk, bring me home and, in her words, “Fuck your brains out.”
“Yeah,” said Fred on the phone a little later. “But I told her she probably wouldn’t succeed. I don’t think you can really do that kind of thing to a guy, can you . . .?”
I pointed out to Carla that, one, this just was not what I wanted our relationship to be. Two, if I had done the same thing to her—or to any of her undergraduate friends—she would have been justifiably furious. “Didn’t you just tell me, about a week ago, about some male professor here who tried something rather like this on a young woman that you knew? As I recall, you were pretty pissed off at him.”
“Yes,” she said. “But it worked when he did it, too.”
“Carla,” I said. “If we’re going to be any sort of friends, you’re going to stop this—we’re going to stop this.”
“Yes,” she said. “I guess we are.”
And she left.
And left me wondering if, indeed, we could be friends anymore.
I hope you find this story, so far—for it is not over—troubling in all its resonances. I certainly did.
My term was up at the university. Three years later, when I was living in New York with my then-lover, I received a call from Carla. She was now in her second year of law school, there in the city. I said, quite sincerely, that it would be nice to see her again.
I mentioned that I had been living with a lover for more than a year.
She sounded very pleased. And about a week later, she came by. Her dark hair was cut very short and she wore very tight white jeans. “I want you to know,” she told me, as we sat and talked in my study, “that I took your advice.”
“Advice?” I asked. “What advice?”
“I’m a lesbian now.”
“This,” I asked, “was advice I gave you? I can’t imagine my advising anyone to ‘become’ a lesbian—or a gay man. Although I hear it happens, I wasn’t particularly aware that it was any more common than becoming straight.”
“Well,” she said, “what I meant is that I followed your example.”
“What example?” I asked, totally lost.
“You were married for thirteen years or so, weren’t you, before you became gay?”
“Ah!” I said. “No, I’ve been pretty aware that I was gay since I was eleven or twelve—though, yes, I did get married. But now, at least, I have some idea what you’re talking about. But ‘advising’ someone to become gay—that’s like advising someone they’d be better off black than white. Sure, in anger, you could suggest someone might learn something if they experienced some oppression. But no one who’s part of an oppressed group, who’s really thought about the nature of that oppression, is going to advise someone else to join in.”
Now it was her turn to say, “Ah.” She went on: “Well, it’s true; you never said it in so many words. But I thought that’s what you were doing. Anyway, whether you gave it to me or not, it’s been the best advice I’ve ever taken!”
“I’m very glad it was,” I said. “But, next time you think I’m giving you advice, do ask me to tell you directly what it is. I’ll feel better about it, even if you don’t.”
Two years later, Carla passed her
bar exams. And, on another visit in which she came by to tell me both of her new job working as a civil rights lawyer and of her new and most satisfying relationship with another young woman, she said: “You must have been very angry at me, back at school. I have a very different take on all that now—we handle sexual harassment cases. That must have been quite dreadful for you.”
“For whatever it’s worth,” I told her, “I wasn’t angry. I don’t know whether it has anything to do with it or not: but at least once in my life I’ve been held down by two men and raped. It was a lot less pleasant than what you did.”
“Well,” she said, “I’m glad you still let us be friends. I’ve gotten a lot from it.”
“I’m glad too,” I said. “So have I.”
I have no way to be sure, of course, what that experience meant to Carla—or, indeed, how often it returned to her. Here we are speaking, and I feel it’s important for me to say it clearly, of a situation where laws were violated, where the kinds of moral and ethical concerns Carla herself was now working with in her job were, on both sides, mine and hers, called sharply into question.
Were I asked what tales were characteristic of my young manhood as a gay male, what comes to mind are those nights circumstance put me beside some other man, peacefully asleep, whom I knew I could not touch—and so lay sleepless the night in a paroxysm of desire. But all the tales I have told and shall be telling tonight I’ve chosen precisely because they are uncharacteristic.
So, another tale—in this case of a muscular Puerto Rican, with curly black hair, whose workshirt bore a name we’ll say was “Mike” in yellow stitching across the gray pocket. He wore a green jacket with a green and yellow knitted collar—to the same theater where I met the first young man I spoke of. Across the back, yellow letters spelled out “Aviation Trades High School,” from which, I presume, he must have graduated sometime over the three-and-a-half years I knew him.
Mike was as regular a visitor to the theater as I was. He was handsome, in a bear-like way. From a couple of quiet approaches, however, I’d gathered he was not interested in me. From time to time, I would see him sitting in various seats in the balcony or orchestra. Nearly as frequently, as I walked up or down between the lobby and the balcony, I would pass him, sitting on the stairs toward the top, sometimes leaning forward, forearms across his knees, sometimes leaning back, elbows on the step two above and behind.
Once, after I’d stopped paying much attention to Mike, I was sitting a few seats away from another black man, in green work clothes and dilapidated basketball sneakers. Knees wide against the back of the seat in front of him, he was slouched low in his chair, watching the film.
Mike, I noticed, was slouched equally low in the row ahead, one seat to the right.
Then something moved near the floor.
I glanced down—to see a hand. Under the seat and behind the metal foot of the ancient theater chair, it looked rather disembodied. But the fingertips now and again brushed the rubber rims and black cloth uppers of the man’s right sneaker. Glancing at the top of Mike’s head, then down at the man’s foot—the man seemed oblivious to what was happening—I realized Mike had reached down between the seats and was playing with the man’s shoe.
“Ah . . . !” I thought, in all the self-presumed sophistication of my own sexual experience. “So that explains it!” And, four or five times over the next few months, I noticed Mike, now in the balcony, now in the orchestra, at the same practice with different men.
This was back in the years when today’s ubiquitous running shoe was just emerging as the casual fashion choice. As is more usual than not, I was at least a year behind most other people; and it was only that week that I broke down and got my first pair—in which, I confess, I never ran in my life.
They were a conservative gray.
One day I stopped at the Cameo and, on my way to the balcony, passed Mike sitting on the steps. Several people stood near the top, watching the movie; I stopped behind them, largely to watch them.
Minutes later, I happened to glance down. Mike’s hand was on the step, the edge of his palm against my shoe sole. I was surprised, because till then I had considered myself outside his interests. My first and most innocent thought was that his hand’s straying to that position had been an accident, even while more worldly experience said no. Precisely because of what I knew of him already, while it might have been an accident with someone else, his hand’s resting there could only have been on purpose—though his attention all seemed to be down the stairs.
I tried to appear as though I was not paying any attention to him. He continued to appear as though he was not paying any attention to me. I moved my foot—accidentally—a quarter of an inch from his hand. His hand, a half minute later, was again against my shoe. Again—accidentally—I moved my foot a quarter of an inch closer, to press against his fingers—and two of his fingers, then three—accidentally—slid to the top of my foot.
In ten minutes, Mike had turned to hold my foot with both his hands, pressing it to his face, his mouth, leaning his cheek down to rub against it.
To make the point I’m coming to in all this, I must be clear that I found his attention sexually gratifying enough so that I continued to rub his hand, his face, his chest, his groin with my shoe until, at last, genitals loose from his gray work pants, he came—and, over the next three weeks, when we had some four more of these encounters, I came as well during one of them.
We do not even have a term for the perversion complementary to fetishism. The myth of the sexual fetish is precisely that it is solitary. Its assumed pathology is the fact it is thought to be non-reciprocal. A major symptom of the general insensitivity of our extant sexual vocabulary is that as soon as fetishism is presumed to move into the realm of reciprocity, the vocabulary and analytical schema of sadomasochism takes it over; and to me this seems wholly to contravene common sense and my own experience.
Mike and I became rather friendlier now—when we were not directly engaged in sexually encountering one another. If we met outside the theater on the street, we said hello and nodded. If we passed in the theater stairwell, we might exchange brief small talk. There were no words at all, however, about what we were doing. It was clear to me that Mike did not want to flaunt his practices before the other patrons, with some of whom he was rather more friendly than he was with me. Among the theater’s younger clientele were a number of hustling drag queens and pre-ops: their teasing and joking could be intense. And these were the people who, in the theater, were Mike’s conversational friends.
Running shoes, at least the brand I’d bought at that time, do not last as long as they should. Soon it was time to replace them.
I thought of Mike.
By now, though, I’d glimpsed him several times get as involved with other men’s running shoes or sneakers as he could from time to time with mine. I felt nothing but empathy and goodwill toward him. But clearly some excited him more than others. The specifics of his preference, however, I hadn’t been able to piece together. How, I wondered, do I ask about such a thing? How do I put such a question into language?
Not much later, when I was getting up from my seat in a legitimate 42nd Street movie house where I’d gone to see some genre horror film, I saw Mike—also leaving. We smiled across the crowd and nodded to each other. I decided the best thing to do was to be as open and aboveboard about my curiosity as possible.
“You know,” I said, as we joined each other, walking toward the lobby, “I’ve got to get a new pair of sneakers, one of these days soon. What kind do you think I should get?”
He seemed not to have heard me. So I persisted: “Is there any kind you like particularly—some kind you think are the best?”
Mike stopped, just inside the lobby door. He turned to me, a look blooming on his face that, in memory, seemed a combination of an astonishment and gratitude near terror. He leaned forward, took my arm, and whispered with an intensity that made me step back: “Blue . . . ! Please . . . Bl
ue!” Then he rushed away into the street.
I’d expected an answer at the same level of fervor I’d offered my question. But, I confess, that afternoon, with an anxiety that, somehow, did not seem all my own but borrowed, at Modell’s Sporting Goods I purchased a pair of blue Adidas.
Two days later, when I wore them to the theater, however, Mike was not there.
Nor did I see him on any of my next dozen visits.
After a few months, I realized he had dropped the place from among his regular cruising sites. Three times over the next year I glimpsed Mike in his green jacket with the yellow letters, now on a far corner under the marquis at the Port Authority bus terminal, now by the subway kiosk at 72nd Street, now with his hands in his pockets, hurrying down 45th Street toward Ninth Avenue. But I never saw him in the theater again. I’ve wondered if our encounter in the second movie had something to do with his abandonment of the first: I can only hope that, among his friends, he might be telling his version of this tale—possibly somewhere this evening—for whatever didactic purposes of his own.
A few years ago, however, when I first wrote about Mike to a straight male friend of mine—a Pennsylvania academic—he wrote me back: “If you can explain the fascination with licking sneakers so that I can understand it, you can probably explain anything to anybody!”
My first thought was to take up his challenge; but, as I considered it, I realized all I could explain, of course, was my side of the relationship. I’d found Mike desirable—well before I had known of his predilections. Using some formulation by Lacan—“One desires the desire of the other”—it seems easy enough to understand that, if Mike’s desire detoured through a particular focus on my sneakers, it was still his desire, and therefore exciting—perhaps not quite as much, for me, as it would have been if it had focused on my hands, my mouth, over all my body, on some aspect of my mind, or on my genitals; but it was exciting nevertheless.