I naively assumed my English teacher was also a Nick guy, that he, like me, saw himself in Nick. But he does not. Volpe reads Gatsby at the beginning of each summer because he loves the book’s architecture—“There is no other novel that is so structurally perfect”—its word choices—“It is a poem, a long poem; every word fits”—and because every time he begins it again, he is swept up in Gatsby’s dream.
James Gatz’s reinvention of himself, from child of a failed North Dakota farm to New York aristocrat, begins when he is just the age of Volpe’s students, and about the same age as Volpe when he first met Marcy Hargrove. Fitzgerald wrote, “So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen year old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.” In nighttime “reveries,” Gatsby embroidered his story, convincing himself “of the unreality of reality.”
Gatsby is alone when the book begins, and he dies alone, with his life exposed as a sham and almost no one to come to his funeral. “But every time I read it,” Volpe says, “I believe in Gatsby’s crazy dream. I do. I’m a sucker for it. I want it to be true. I want him to have Daisy. I want him to have the love he wants.”
• • •
Love, sex, trust, betrayal, pain, forgiveness—all were a mystery to me when Volpe was my teacher. I was sixteen when I started in his class, a week short of eighteen when I graduated from high school. My friends and I were open-minded, or at least we would have said we were. We were far from bullies or bigots. But we lived in Levittown. We used the f-word—faggot—though I’d say it was largely disconnected from any literal meaning. For me, at least, it was a universal insult, like calling someone a jerk. I didn’t know what it meant when I started using it, and after I found out I probably didn’t want to think about it.
By his mannerisms, by the rhythms of his speech, Volpe was different. He seemed like he could be gay, but no one I knew talked about it. There were no openly gay teachers at our school—I’m not even sure if that would have been professionally possible—and certainly no “out” students. And Volpe had a wife and a child. That a man could be a father and married to a woman (the only kind of marriage permissible at the time) and gay was utterly outside our frame of reference. Oddly, I do distinctly recall that we talked about his marriage. We thought Marcy might not be right for him. She didn’t seem nearly as immersed in literature as he was, and we wondered if he might be happier with someone who shared his love of books. As I said, we didn’t know much.
Fifteen years after I left high school, Lou and Marcy split up and divorced. I came to understand that he was gay, though I can’t say exactly how I learned that. He never had a big formal coming-out to lots of people, and he certainly had no reason to call me up and tell me. When I would see him, his new status was just assumed and accepted. He had a more candid relationship with my classmate Hillar Kaplan, an artist in Los Angeles and one of the group of girls in high school who orbited around him. After his marriage ended, she might say, for example, “Lou, how’s your love life? Do you have a partner?” But my relationship with him was still rooted in the mid-1970s, and we didn’t have those discussions.
When I set out to write about him, Volpe made it clear right from the start that he wanted me to tell a complete story, that I should put in or leave out whatever I saw fit. When I asked him once if he wanted to see the proposal that was circulated to publishers, he declined. He didn’t want me to be influenced by anything he might say about the proposal. Nor, I think, did he want to fit himself into some conception of himself he read in my writing. It was like I was one of his actors. He had trained me, and now he trusted that I would create something that was true and honest, unflinching but not gratuitous.
In the course of my research, people sometimes asked, “Are you going to write about Lou and Marcy?” By which they meant his sexuality. And I always replied that I thought he’d be pretty unhappy if I didn’t. In time, I would visit with Marcy (for the first time since I was her husband’s student) as well as with Tommy.
For a man who is gay, and knows that he is gay, to marry a woman may seem inexplicable now, especially to younger people. But it was far less so four decades ago. “When I began dating her, it was there,” he says. “It was always there. We’ve talked about this over the years, because we’ve remained good friends. And Marcy has said to me, ‘Did you love me? Did you ever really love me?’ And you know what? I did. I did love her. I just wish I could have loved her more.”
• • •
In many ways, Volpe has a younger person’s sensibility. His tastes in music, movies, TV, and drama are as modern as can be. At times I found him almost childlike in the way he lived so relentlessly in the present. Each year brought a new group of students and possibilities, a new play and a new musical to produce. The picture kept changing, and that was the way he liked it. Generationally, though, he could seem older than his chronological age—more a child of the 1950s than the 1960s. He was never a rebellious youth, not a part of the counterculture, not forever young in some stereotypical Baby Boomer way. He was a compliant Catholic schoolboy who sold furniture at a department store to help pay for college before taking a job at a suburban high school.
He never imagined that he would be anything but a married man with a family. “I was conflicted, but my feeling was, This is what is expected of me,” he says. “This is what a young, Catholic, educated boy from a good family does. The thought of going out on my own and having a life wasn’t even in my consciousness. It wasn’t there. And yet I had a very good friend who did exactly that.
“He was a friend from Father Judge. And after he graduated, he went to night school and he came out. He came out! At the time, this was unheard of. This was pre-Stonewall, pre–gay rights, pre-pride, pre-everything. It was like, Oh my God, oh my God, what is he doing? I thought it was totally suicidal. The funny part of it is we went to high school together for four years, and yet we never talked about homosexuality. How bizarre is that? That was the insular world I lived in.”
It will never be easier to be gay than straight. But Volpe, born in 1948, may be part of the last generation of gay men and women in America who believed they absolutely had to conceal their sexuality to others—and, if possible, deny it to themselves. (It is worth recalling that for much of Volpe’s life, sex between two men was technically illegal; sodomy laws prohibiting such behavior in some states were in force as recently as 2003, when the U.S. Supreme Court finally invalidated them in Lawrence v. Texas.) As a teacher, Volpe helped his students find some true self within—even as he was unable to do that for himself. He excelled at reading people perhaps because he spent so many years trying to make himself unreadable.
One night during his marriage, Volpe went to a bar in the town of New Hope, a gay mecca in Bucks County. He just lost himself in the crowd, alone, stayed for a short time, then drove home. Being with someone else, “man or woman, was something I did not want to ever happen.” He did not want to cheat on Marcy and didn’t want to violate his marriage vows or wreck his family. He was both gay and unrelentingly traditional.
When he became a father, he no longer even thought much about his predicament as a gay man living a life that was in part a pretense. “Once Tommy was born, that’s all I cared about. You have this child who comes into the world and it changes everything. Gay is of nonimportance. Straight is of nonimportance. The only thing that matters is you have this child and love this child and do the best you can for him.
“The whole thing, the issue of my sexuality, became more and more buried. I didn’t think about it as much. It just wasn’t a priority in my life. Tommy fulfilled every dream a father could want. He was a wonderful student, a great kid, lovable, personable, a good athlete. I would have loved to have another child, at least one more. I always wanted to know what it would be like to have a daughter. It’s a sorrow of mine, it really is, not to have experienced that.”
As he was ju
st about to turn forty, and with his son still in high school, Volpe spent time one night with a friend, a married man who was part of a couple he and Marcy socialized with. “I sort of suspected that he was gay, but he and I never talked about it,” he begins. “But that night we did, and I talked to him about my gayness, too. We opened up about it. And it was like opening up a door. And then all the sudden there were all these other doors behind it.
“That’s exactly what it was like. It was like one door opening and another door opening and another door, and I thought, Do I start closing them all now? What do I do? Do I close these doors again, even as I’m so close to being who I am? Do I want to close them? And I decided not to. I hid my life—no, I didn’t hide my life, I hid who I am—for over forty years because of the way I was brought up. And I didn’t want to do that any longer.”
What followed, Volpe says, was “a night of reckoning between me and Marcy. I sat down in our bedroom and I told her what happened—nothing really happened between us, but certainly emotionally and psychologically it did. We never had a sexual relationship, we didn’t, but we did kiss. He was much more experienced than I was. We had a few touchy-feely moments, but very chaste, clothes on. And that all came out. And for me that was a big deal. And I think she was surprised that it all came out.
“Marcy and I had never talked about my homosexuality, but she must have known. I can’t imagine deep down inside of her that she didn’t. But I told her that night that I was gay. And it crushed her. It totally crushed her. It was devastating for her.
“But once I said that, I knew it was something that you can’t make go away again. I’ve seen it so many times in literature, where that moment happens and it can never be taken back. There’s the novella by Philip Roth, Goodbye, Columbus, where the Jewish girl, very rich, is going with the very poor Jewish boy in the course of one summer. And she wants to end it. She needs to go on and live a rich life; it was very Gatsby in a way.”
What happens in the Philip Roth story, published in 1959, is that the young female character, Brenda Patimkin, leaves her diaphragm in her clothes drawer, where her mother is certain to find it when she puts her daughter’s laundry away. It seems not to be an oversight, but, rather, something intended to explode the relationship. It is an odd literary reference for Volpe to make, because the person who discovers this evidence of illicit, unmarried sex is someone outside the relationship, the mother. But I think I got the point. He had not explicitly told his wife that their marriage was over. But he had created an irrevocable moment—opened a door—that could only lead to one inevitable outcome.
Lou and Marcy agreed that until their son left home and went off to college, three years away, they would go on as if nothing had changed. “We decided that we would live a life—perfect—so you would never know what was wrong, and that is exactly what we did. In a way, it was very easy. We still had feelings for each other, and we had Tommy, who was the most important thing.”
Tommy was at Holy Ghost Prep, a private Catholic high school. He was a baseball star, one of the top players in the area, a naturally strong and fast child who rode a two-wheeler before he was four years old. The Philadelphia Inquirer once named him its high school athlete of the week, and Holy Ghost would induct him into its sports hall of fame. Lou and Marcy, neither of them athletic, joked that they didn’t know the source of his gift, but figured it must be from Marcy’s birth parents, whom she never knew.
Volpe attended every one of his son’s high school baseball games. His role was to keep the official scorebook and put down the code that marked every measurable moment of the contests: hits, runs, strikeouts, stolen bases, errors, wild pitches. He was dedicated to it. When he broke his right arm in an accident, he kept the score left-handed. He never felt comfortable sitting with the other fathers, so his scorekeeping duties gave him something to do. It was the same as when he socialized with Marcy and other couples. “When the husbands and wives would get together, I never fit in with the husbands. Ever. I’ve never felt like I fit in with any particular group, my whole life. The people I’m most comfortable with are my students.”
There is nothing soft about Volpe. He is just under six feet tall, no gym rat, but he runs and is in shape. He is commanding in his own way, but he didn’t feel that way in the presence of the baseball dads. It was one thing for him and Marcy to joke about how they ended up with such an athletic son, but altogether different to hear it from others. At the baseball games, some of the other men would ask Volpe how he ever produced a ballplayer like Tommy. “I think maybe they didn’t mean to be insulting to me,” he says, “but at that time, that’s how it felt to me.”
When Tommy left for college, Volpe left the bedroom he shared with Marcy. “I established myself in a guest bedroom,” is how he put it. (For someone so deeply involved in theater, he can be surprisingly undramatic.) When Tommy came home that year for Thanksgiving break, his father told him they were splitting up and the reason. Tommy would recall his father being “very straightforward about it. He said, basically, ‘I have something to tell you,’ and he went from there.”
Volpe’s recollection is the same. “I sat him down and said, ‘Here’s the story.’ I told him about me. Interestingly, Tommy’s best friend is gay, a friend from Holy Ghost Prep. He was the best man at Tommy’s wedding. I’m thankful for that. I think it made it easier in some ways—not that it was easy at all, because it wasn’t.”
• • •
Every profession has an ‘old boys network,’ but Broadway is one of the only professions in America where most of the ‘old boys’ are gay,” the actor and comedian Jim David wrote in The Advocate in 2012. “Gay men have commandeered the business of creating theater for so long that being gay could actually be considered a career move.”
There is no single answer to why so many gay men gravitate to the theater, but one of the best explanations is that their artistic contributions are essential to theater’s success. It is a venue that welcomed them always. Theater is a collaborative exploration of the drama of the human condition, and those who are outsiders often are the best people to reflect on that. It is where a great many gay men have gone to find and form community, and where Volpe went. “You can be involved in theater as a gay man and feel completely safe,” Volpe says. “It is not an issue, whether you are a director, costume designer, lighting designer, or an actor, you are part of the family. You can be as flamboyant or as private as you want to be. Where else is that true?
“No one is going to judge you. That’s the biggest thing—that sense of trust. When you are in the theater, it’s like being in church—the church of the theater. There is this unwritten rule: We all respect each other. And I think it has always been that way. When you think about French theater back in Molière’s time, the Greeks, it isn’t something that has just happened. It has always been there. The arts maybe draw in more gays than any other area because of that feeling of being able to have self-expression without being condemned or labeled or ridiculed or bashed.”
Of course, all gay men do not love the theater, any more than all black men excel at basketball or all Asians work with computers. But in all these cases, there is a correlation that has to do with affinity, sensibility, and ability. The whole question is so fraught with stereotype that we often resist exploring difference so as not to be limited in interest or talent by ethnicity, gender, sexuality, or any other factor outside our control. And in doing so, we overlook how those same groupings confer advantage. In the theater, passion and perfectionism and insistence on aesthetic standards are prized qualities, not unruly and unwelcome traits.
The playwright Tony Kushner has described the attraction of gay men to the theater, and their influence on it, in one word: fabulousness. “If you possess it, you don’t need to ask what it is,” he writes. “When you attempt to delineate it, you move away from it. Fabulous is one of those words that provide a measure of the degree to which a person or eve
nt manifests a particular oppressed subculture’s most distinctive, invigorating features. What are the salient features of fabulousness? Irony. Tragic History. Defiance. Gender-fuck. Glitter. Drama. It is not butch. It is not hot. The cathexis surrounding fabulousness is not necessarily erotic. The fabulous is not delineated by age or beauty. It is raw materials reworked into illusion. To be truly fabulous, one must completely triumph over tragedy, age, and physical insufficiencies. The fabulous is the rapturous embrace of difference, the discovering of self not in that which has rejected you but in that which makes you unlike, the dislike, the other.”
The theater for Volpe was where he felt alive and engaged and at home long before he had any idea why. “When my mother first took me, I would go see these beautiful girls in their beautiful costumes and the magical lights and handsome men and think, That’s such a great life—never realizing, being young, that it’s not real,” he says. “I loved it right away. It was so much more interesting to me than seeing a building being constructed. Some people maybe think that as a gay man, you’re only interested in handsome men, or whatever, in the theater. But that’s not true at all. I am mesmerized by beautiful women, mesmerized by them. I look at them and think, Oh my God. They take your breath away. It is not just a sexual thing—it’s sensual, it’s visual.”
Which is what the theater is for Volpe. Sensual, visual, rich in language. It is a more perfect world in the sense that he controls it. The drama and pain expressed onstage do not continue to ripple outward. One door opening does not lead to another and another. It all resolves when the curtain comes down.
As a director, Volpe conveys his love of this world to his students. He brings his sense of beauty and aesthetics and discernment of character to the staging of Truman shows. Are these specifically gay sensibilities? That wouldn’t matter to him. It is who he is and what he loves.
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