My Husband and My Wives: A Gay Man's Odyssey (11 page)

As the year went by I grew more and more disenchanted with my experience of the gay bar. It is a prejudice that has stayed with me for life. Consider for instance the musical
Falsettos
, in which a man leaves his wife for another man. Consciously or unconsciously the relationships between the bereft wife and her second husband and that of the two lesbian neighbors are so much deeper than that of the two gay males, who cannot finally give each other much of anything. It struck me as significant that the scene supposedly depicting the gay couple’s relationship was on a squash court, a scene of high and aggressive competition—the truth of male-male relationships I was to learn very well later on in my life. Gore Vidal’s first novel,
The City and the Pillar,
describes a young gay male in love with his teenage straight friend. In adulthood they meet again and the gay makes a pass, only to be spurned, which causes him to kill the unfortunate straight. Vidal later rewrote this novel when gayness became more acceptable, changing the ending from killing to anal rape. One understands male prisoners using anal intercourse as an instrument of control or revenge, but it is distressing to find a gay novelist treating what should be for him, and indeed for his gay character, a principal vehicle of the expression of love in a similar fashion. These examples describe the absolute separation of sex from love that is the dreadful psychic fallout from being told from pubescence on that homoeroticism is evil, self-destructive, or socially corrupt. One can love, or one can have sex. One cannot find it in the same person. It is like those men who have been so denatured by the teachings of the Catholic Church that they can only have good sex—that is, fun, recreational sex, by definition sinful—with prostitutes and not with their wives. But the climate that produced that mind-set does indeed seem to have undergone radical change. I noted in the last years of my teaching career that young gay males were dating, often restraining themselves from having sex on the first few evenings out together. Nowadays the gay world is clothed in increasing respectability, if one can use such a word anymore. It is an idea that numbers of gays deplore; still, it ought to make testing relationships a lot easier for young males.

Simultaneous with my bar life I kept on studying ancient Greek literature, which was helping me forge an aesthetic, ethical, and moral system to take the place of the Christianity I had discarded. The Judeo-Christian religions offer a god who takes a personal interest in humans, rewarding those who please him by their good works, punishing those who disobey him. There are rules to be kept or broken, and when broken, the active contravention of the law of this god is called sin and is punished. The Bible stories narrate that mankind sinned by disobeying God and eating the apple, and successive generations are born with sin. God so loved the world that He gave His only son Jesus, who came into this world to free man from this original sin. After death there is heaven for those who have led a good life, hell for those who have disobeyed the laws of their god. Roman Catholicism has a system of priests who stand for the god figure who can offer the truly repentant absolution from the sins they have committed. I had cast off this system of belief because I refused to accept the idea that homosexual lovemaking was in contravention of the laws of God and was a sin. That was the start and I proceeded to dismantle the rest as so much superstition, retaining only the Christian ethic based on love with which I had been raised. In fact I think it is not a bad idea to repeat to myself: “May the spirit of love and truth and peace make its home in your heart now and forever more.”

Studying the culture of the ancient Greeks brought to me the vital information that in most of their societies it was socially desirable for a male of twenty to forty to take a mid- to late-teenage boy as his lover. Homosexual physical love is a topic of their literature, their art, their laws, and in the fabricated conversations that survive in the writing of Plato and Xenophon. A man was not a real man unless he had a young boyfriend. Nothing could have given me more support than knowing that the culture that is held to be the very basis of Western civilization valorized male-male erotic relationships as essential for the good society.

In their religious thinking the ancient Greeks had no such personal god as the ancient Hebrew texts describe. Nor did they have a system of belief, a dogma that establishes what is right and what is wrong. The literature is the best expression of their beliefs. In the
Iliad
when Achilles says to Priam, “There are two jars before the door of the house of Zeus, one filled with good, one with evil, and Zeus takes from the jar of evil and sprinkles it upon mankind, and sometimes adds from the jar of good,” the narrator is providing a picture of a god who is indifferent to humankind and afflicts them or rewards them in an arbitrary way that has nothing to do with them. The story of Oedipus is of a man who at birth is prophesied to marry his mother and kill his father. His parents send him to be exposed on the hills, a shepherd finds the infant, and out of kindness gives him to someone who takes him to a faraway city. The boy grows up to manhood and sets out to travel, then meets an old man at a crossroads whose carriage bars his passage and in a fit of temper kills him. Journeying on to the city, he meets the widowed queen and marries her, only to discover years later, after she has borne him three children, that he is the long-lost son of his wife and the man he had killed on the road. This story is about deep and impossible evil that a man was born to commit, and nothing can prevent it from happening, no matter how hard the participants try. Through no fault of his own and despite strenuous efforts, Oedipus grows up to do what he was born to do. Instead of trying to justify evil with a system of sin and punishment, the ancient Greeks accepted misfortune as the luck of the draw. It made complete sense to me—how could it not?—having fallen from a balcony at four, having lost my father at six, watching my mother’s way of life disappear while at the same time discovering my community turning on me as an object of scorn and derision, living in an age when the newsreels projected death and destruction and the industrial annihilation of an entire people. Somehow the Christian notion that one gets what one deserves was too odious.

The
Iliad
is many things, but one central strand is the story of a young man who discovers as we all must that he is doomed to die, and that fact cancels out any eternal value in living, so that whatever we do in life is all we have and our only definition. In this sense life is tragic; aware, intelligent people live with the knowledge that they are doomed, but act as positively as they can because they want to make each act of life have meaning. This can go in strange ways, of course. One thinks of Aeschylus’s conception of Clytemnestra, who kills her husband Agamemnon because he as a general ordered the death of their daughter to propitiate the gods for his military expedition, and she as a mother of that daughter makes killing her husband a way to redeem and valorize motherhood and womanhood. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle were stressing a common cultural belief when they asserted that man aims at the good, man is a heroic and noble creation. Ancient Greek statuary also attests to that belief; it was amplified and reshaped in the Italian Renaissance of the fifteenth century. Nothing would have been more repellent to the ancient Greeks than the notion of some Christian sects that man is depraved. That belief is as far different from the tragic sense of life as one can go. It is important to remember that Clytemnestra, Oedipus, and all the others did the best they could, just as much as we latter-day human beings need to remember that important truth about ourselves.

THREE

“LET’S GET MARRIED”

Mary Powers, the new Mrs. Charles R. Beye, standing in St. John’s Episcopal Church, Ames, Iowa, with her husband after the ceremony, July 1, 1951
(Courtesy of the author)

One early morning—Wednesday, March 28, 1951, to be exact, nine days after my twenty-first birthday—I was returning books to the university library, when my friend Betsy Fontana came into my line of vision. After one of her exaggerated and giggly smooching kisses, she introduced me to the woman with her.

“This, Mary, my dear, is Charlie Beye, the biggest fag in Iowa City.”

I protested, although Mary seemed to take it as no more than Betsy’s normal flamboyance. We stood chatting, compulsive talkers all, until we remembered we were in a library. I was off on a walk around town with a wad of cash in my pocket, paying bills for my mother; it is hard to remember now a time when shopkeepers appreciated cash in the till and there were no credit cards. Mary offered to accompany me, claiming, as I was to learn was typical of her, that she had “nothing to do.” Betsy trotted off to class, and we began our ascent from the library near the river up the hill to the town itself on the far side of the campus where the shops were located. We never stopped talking even to get our breath as we moved along placidly on our walk, but raced from topic to topic, oh, Lord, there was no stopping us. First it was Homer and Greek tragedy. Mary had read the
Iliad
and
Odyssey
closely, although, as she claimed, she was much too immersed in English literature to find time to learn Greek. Still she knew the poems well; I was impressed. I, on the other hand, had nothing to say about English literature, having shunted it aside in my intense pursuit of the ancient stuff. Ah, well, we turned to Tolstoy, a favorite of both of us, whom I had read in high school before I got caught up in classics, so we could argue over the philosophical bits in
War and Peace
and whether they were all that necessary and proclaim our love of Anna Karenina. And, oh, joy, we both had read lots and lots of Proust in high school as well; it took me all of my senior year. I was intoxicated by the endless stream of words pouring from both our mouths, spurred on to more and more outrageous word choices in response to Mary’s vocabulary. At last, an hour later, all bills had been paid, and I had something left over to allow me to invite Mary for toast and tea at Whetstone Drugstore where back in the day one could get refreshments. It was now nine o’clock. I had known her for one hour; I was enchanted. We stopped talking to tend to the tea, and I looked across the booth at her and recollected what I had noticed on our walk. She was short, fleshy, there were pleasing curves to her hips—pear-shaped, they used to call it—in symmetry with her round full breasts that her sweater revealed. Her skin tones had a definite copper cast, which went with her thick strawberry blond hair, worn shoulder-length. She wore lipstick, and eye shadow, and penciled her eyebrows. She was definitely not an Iowa City High School girl.

“This has been great,” I said. “I think we should get married.”

Mary did not hesitate at the suggestion but had a question in reply. “Have you ever slept with a woman?”

“Well, no. I haven’t.”

Still unperturbed, Mary contemplated the toast on her plate before saying, “Well, that would be basic in any marriage.”

“Then we shall have to do so, and the sooner the better,” I solemnly decreed. “In fact, perhaps a week from this coming Friday.”

The last part of this lunatic conversation was predicated on the coincidence that I was going to be sleeping alone in our house on that Friday night. My mother was about to move us into a small apartment, for which she had discarded a great quantity of household furnishings. This stuff was stacked in the garage, about to be sold in an auction on the lawn in front of our house. Friday night I would be a guard; the double bed on which I was to sleep in the empty house would be moved out to the auction on Saturday morning. My reader cannot possibly find this course of action any stranger or more inexplicable than its author does!

The walk that ended in Whetstone Drugstore cannot be explained. Most of the time Mary and I talked about emotional depression, as I remember. I told her of my experiences growing up gay, an abbreviated version of what is contained in the previous pages. She herself had known hostility, had her own tales of classmates’ negative reaction to her sexual freedom in another small-town Iowa high school. Things hadn’t improved any, she told me, when she arrived at the university, where she made the mistake of thinking she could combine sex and friendship. If I was the town’s notorious cocksucker, she had to contend with her reputation as an easy lay. We both knew a lot about the same things, hurt, for instance, and social confusion, and sexual curiosity. We were also both able to put our experiences into a humorous perspective. We were so much alike; the thought of it threw me into a state of intense excitement.

Marriage? How did the idea pop into my head? The small-town mores of my day dictated that no two people could live together unless they were married. I must have proposed marriage as the obvious status of intimacy. It is a commentary upon the sexless home of my childhood that I never stopped to consider the sexual component, until Mary laughingly asked whether I had slept with a woman. It is a commentary upon Mary that she did not immediately reject the idea of marriage to a gay male. She was spontaneous, reckless, devoid of calculation. The very moment was telling. Mary was a juvenile diabetic who needed daily injections of insulin to maintain her metabolic functions. There she was sitting in the drugstore with me smoking a cigarette, drinking coffee, and eating sugared cinnamon buttered toast. These were so many no-no’s, as I was to discover later, to which she was quite indifferent. Mary was up for experience; she exuded the perfume of transgression and it intoxicated me. I think that she was equally attracted to me, that she was willing to give the idea of marriage, ludicrous, crazy as it was, a try, so long as I passed a test in the basics. While sex was not at all central to her idea of friendship, Mary was not about to let go of it.