Stonewall (10 page)

Bromley held periodic dances with Poly Prep, the boys' academy in Brooklyn, but few of the girls dated more than occasionally. Rhoda expressed some mild concern at Karla's apparent lack of interest in boys, but retreated when Karla pronounced them “boring”; that was still about the limit of her vocabulary. But by junior year at Bromley, Karla had discovered the locked case at the local library, and had discovered, too, that the librarian
would
allow her to read the books in it—though insistent on rattling her keys loudly to alert everyone in the room that another dirty-minded young girl had revealed herself.

About the first book Karla fell upon—it was a prototypical lesbian discovery—was Radclyffe Hall's
The Well of Loneliness
. But unlike so many other lesbians in these pre-liberation years, Karla did not feel a shock of recognition, nor was she filled with relief at the realization that other women like herself existed. She hadn't felt tortured enough for that, hadn't been guiltily hiding the desperate secret of her sexuality from herself and others. In this regard, the all-girl environment of Bromley had served her much as the all-boy environment of Chicago Junior School had served Craig Rodwell: Same-gender intimacy came to seem utterly natural to them. About all that Karla got from
The Well of Loneliness
was a newly depressing awareness that a lesbian lifestyle could be centrally characterized by confined options and negative consequences.

Again unlike so many lesbians in these years, Karla never read the lesbian pulp novels that began to appear in abundance in the fifties. Many of the books portrayed loneliness, alcoholism and suicide as the common lesbian lot. Some women found such desperation to be no more than an accurate reflection of their own unhappy lives, and took some solace in knowing that their misery was shared. But many other women have cited the pulps as having given them what limited empowerment they were able to find back then. For not all the novels were filled with wretched, self-hating “inverts.” In Claire Morgan's
1952 novel,
The Price of Salt
, for example, the women are presented as complex, admirable figures insisting, against great odds, on their own worth and on making dignified lives for themselves.
⁴

Karla seemed to have arrived at comparable self-esteem without benefit of the pulps. Her double distinction in the classroom and on the playing fields gave her, by the time of her graduation from Bromley, a settled self-confidence that she had previously lacked. She had a wall of trophies in athletics (in college she would become a semi-professional bowler), and in her senior year she won a coveted Regents Scholarship and graduated second in her class. It was quite a road for “Number 36” to have traveled.

The Regents Scholarship came in the nick of time. Up until the early sixties, Karla's father had been part-owner of the dunnage company he worked at, and he had made a fairly good living on the docks. His job status might have been blue-collar, but his income was middle-class. Karla never felt that she lacked for anything while growing up, though throughout high school she contributed what she could through baby-sitting and dog-walking jobs. But then, with the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway, an alternate shipping route, Abraham's fortunes started to decline. He told Karla he would be unable to finance a college education for her.

He was ambivalent anyway about a girl getting too much book learning—he
did
manage to find the money to send his son, Paul, to college. But Karla was determined on more education. The Regents Scholarship, which paid well in those years, made that plausible. The money wasn't enough for her to go to her first choice, Vassar, where charges were too expensive for her means, but it proved just enough for Barnard. Besides, a cousin had gone there and had raved about it. So Barnard it was. Abraham pledged ten dollars a week, and the scholarship covered tuition. Not enough money was left over for a dormitory room, however. And it was not at all clear how Karla would eat.

FOSTER

S
hortly before the end of World War II, U.S. Steel was casting about to find new uses for the metal in the coming postwar period. Foster Gunnison, Sr., a superb salesman, managed to convince the company
that it could substitute steel for wood in his prefabricated houses, turn out models in the $2,800-to-$5,000 range, and thereby open up a huge new market, comparable to that for automobiles. Persuaded, U.S. Steel bought out Gunnison Homes for two million dollars, kept Foster Sr. on as its president, and also put him on the parent company's board of directors.
⁵

By the early fifties, Foster Sr. had become convinced that U.S. Steel was making a botch of things; it might have been a giant company but its managers had no experience in the highly specialized housing field, and they seemed unwilling to rely on his. U.S. Steel, for its part, gradually became convinced that it had bought a white elephant; the company never built a single house with any steel in it, and soon discontinued Gunnison Homes, turning the plant into a warehouse. In 1950, before that final debacle, Foster Sr. decided to step down as president of Gunnison Homes (while remaining on the board of U.S. Steel) and to set up a prefab-house dealership in St. Petersburg, Florida, run by his son.

Foster Jr., now in his mid-twenties, had been floundering since his graduation from Columbia in 1949. Struggling to get a handle on a possible career, he decided to undergo a series of psychological, aptitude, and intelligence tests at the New York University and Columbia University counseling centers. The results were revealing, though somewhat disquieting. Foster's scores for general intelligence surpassed those of over 99 percent of twenty-six-year-olds, and on the verbal sections his performance was rated “truly outstanding.” That alone had to be a comfort to someone who had barely survived his freshman year at Haverford.

But the rest of the news seemed to confirm what his father viewed as Junior's “maladjustment.” The test results portrayed a somewhat formal, meticulous man, obsessive about detail work yet generally lacking in confidence. The report described him as “extremely sensitive, moody, unstable and rather immature,” and ominously concluded, as well, that “he is not at present making a favorable sexual adjustment.” The experts recommended a prolonged course of psychotherapy. Foster opted for Florida instead.

His father had bought up several blocks of land in north St. Petersburg, had had his prefabricated homes shipped down there from the plant in Indiana, had put them up, and had then sold houses and lots together, at 2 percent financing, for little more than six thousand dollars. Though Foster Sr. didn't himself move to Florida until 1953, about a year after his son, he handled most of the sales himself, leaving
Foster Jr. to take care of the dealership's internal business affairs. In all, some three dozen houses got built in a two-year period, with handsome profits for the father-son team. Foster Jr. accumulated enough capital, further parlayed through investments, to become financially independent.

But the work itself never captured his interest—though, as always, he did enjoy being behind the scenes in a structured situation that emphasized detail work. By the time Foster Sr. moved to Florida in 1953, following his marriage to his secretary (after a long-standing affair), Foster Jr. had decided he wanted to leave the firm to pursue an academic career. That hardly seemed a logical choice, given his mediocre undergraduate record, but, with the psychological testing results to bolster him, Foster felt that his previous under-par performance had been due to boredom with the subject matter of his courses. Of recent years he had begun to develop an interest in psychology, and as he did so, apathy toward academic study had given way to enthusiasm. Foster decided to enroll at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, for a master's degree. His intention was to continue on to an eventual doctorate and to a life in academia.

But his reentry into the academic world was not easy. He found himself unable to concentrate for very long. His mind wandered when he read, and his interest wavered from subject to subject. No sooner had he enrolled at Trinity than he began to increase his involvement with barbershop quartets. No sooner had he started out in psychology than he began to take elective courses in philosophy.

By the mid-fifties he was spending more time with barbershoppers than with academics, and he began to doubt whether he was really cut out to be a student and scholar after all. But he did get confirmation and encouragement from various quarters. His professors gave him uniformly high grades, and as one of the college officials wrote Gunnison Sr., “Foster's record here speaks for itself. I think I need not tell you that few people achieve such excellence.”

Moreover, one of the most touted young professors in the school went out of his way to praise Foster's abilities. Paul W. Kurtz, an assistant professor of philosophy at Trinity, had only gotten his own doctorate at Columbia in 1952, yet was already regarded as one of the guiding lights behind the emerging movement of humanism—and as an inspiring teacher as well. His sympathy for metaphysical speculation, at a time when logical positivism had taken over philosophy, appealed both to Foster's penchant for the “big questions” and to his pronounced psychological identification with the underdog. Though
Kurtz was very nearly the same age as Foster, he played a major role in arousing Foster's dormant academic abilities and interests. He might even be said to have become something of a surrogate father—except that this time, the father's interest seemed genuine. When Kurtz went to Venice in the summer of 1958 to attend the International Philosophical Congress, he took Foster with him and the two did some traveling together en route to the congress. Foster seemed at last to have found a congenial mentor and an academic home, and by 1958 he had formally enrolled as a student in both psychology and philosophy.

But the college dean had begun to suggest that he was being dilatory in completing his master's degree in psychology. Foster had chosen to make his thesis an evaluation of Adorno's study of the authoritarian personality, drawn to it, perhaps, as a way of better understanding the context of his own upbringing. But it was not until 1960, his sixth year in graduate school, that he was finally able to complete the thesis and earn his degree. The psychology faculty awarded him a grade of 97—the thesis apparently contained a genuinely original mathematical formula—but then reduced the grade to a 90 because of the inordinate amount of time he had taken.

With the master's in psychology behind him, Foster continued to pursue a second degree in philosophy with Paul Kurtz. But just as he was about to begin his thesis, Kurtz announced that he was leaving Trinity to teach elsewhere. He later encouraged Foster to join him in promoting the burgeoning humanist movement, but by then Foster felt too rooted in Hartford to leave. Besides, he may have been experiencing, on a level too deep to be fully conscious, a rejection that Kurtz had never intended; he may have been feeling that the surrogate father had turned out, after all, to be much like the original: willing to enlist Foster in his own projects, while controlling the terms of the relationship from a safe distance.

In 1961, the same year Kurtz left Trinity, Foster's own father died, succumbing at age sixty-five after a decade's struggle with heart trouble and diabetes. Foster's ever more difficult mother never remarried; a lifelong health fanatic, she concentrated her energies on a daily routine of walking and dieting. She announced her determination to live to be ninety—and did, by seven days. On Foster's infrequent visits to her at Gypsy Trail, she continued to subject him, between dollops of brewer's yeast and vitamin supplements, to her unpredictable, explosive mood swings.

In a farewell letter to Foster, Kurtz offered him some parting
advice: He would be “much better off,” Kurtz wrote, if he “resituated” himself. “You have too much to offer, and you should have every opportunity to make the most of it.” But for now this was not a message Foster could hear. After a brief spell of academic success, he lapsed back into his long-settled self-image as someone marginally gifted whose existence didn't much matter. He reverted to lessons he had learned as a youngster:
not
to call attention to himself,
not
to attempt distinction that was “clearly” beyond his grasp. As a child Foster had survived life with his demanding, domineering parents by becoming, on the surface, unobjectionably “nice.” But beneath that accommodating surface lay dormant discontent that had not yet found an expressive channel. For a while longer, Foster would settle for working semi-anonymously in a non-profit environment free from demanding responsibilities. But by the mid-sixties, when in his forties, he would finally find a “cause” able to call out to the full his uncommon talent for nurturance and his tenacious dedication.

JIM

J
im could never bring himself to sleep with people in order to get parts. He thought of himself as a romantic: sex was “a big deal,” a way to get to know someone with whom he planned to spend the rest of his life. Not that he didn't pick people up in bars for casual sex on occasion, or go to Everard, the gay Turkish baths; but even in those places he was searching for a boyfriend, for tenderness and connection. He didn't “do” a lot of sex, though not—as an eighteen-year-old, stereotypically pretty blond—for want of opportunities.

He was, in fact, constantly fending off passes—and not always in a way that (at least in retrospect) pleased him. He thinks he may have been too arrogant and haughty when rejecting a proposition—“How dare you!” indignantly written all over his face. It was not simply a matter of priggishness, though; Jim was also angry at being approached as merely another pretty boy (at eighteen he looked twelve), at his pursuers' consistently ignoring what he knew was his complexity and intelligence.

He blames himself most for having sometimes led people on. He was, he can now admit, “a fabulous cock-tease.” Once he accepted a director's invitation to vacation in Puerto Rico, with the stipulation
that he would have his own bedroom; when Jim discovered, on arriving, that the two of them were sharing a bed, he made a huge stink about it, withdrawing into huffy chastity. “I shouldn't have gone in the first place,” Jim now says. “I knew perfectly well what would happen if I did.”