WASHINGTON, D.C., BECAME the first place where I actually saw two men holding hands, being openly affectionate, and dancing together. Every Saturday night the George Washington University student union was the home of Gay Pride in the Summertime dances.
On Saturdays our curfew wasn’t until midnight, and with nothing else better to do, several of the program participants decided to go to the dance because the people always seemed happy entering the student union. The first time I resisted, but I sat on one of the concrete banisters surrounding the union and watched with a curious excitement as I saw men walk in as couples. I knew then that if the opportunity to see what gay pride meant presented itself again, I was going to take it.
That chance occurred the following weekend. It was a steamy summer night, and pulsating lights and strains of the Billy Preston hit “Outer Space” drew several of us to the huge room that during the day served as the cafeteria. We paid our fifty cents and went into the dark crowd to join the festive dancing. The music was fantastic and blaring. The immense floor was dark, with the exception of strobe lights circling the crowd as they moved in frenzy.
I danced with several of the girls from the group until I was dripping wet. When the lights came on, I was surprised but pleased to see so many good-looking men, black and white, hugging and kissing.
A few of the kids from the program looked like they were going to throw up, which I thought was kind of funny. Here they were acting as though this was the first time they had seen such behavior, the very same macho boys who had laughed at me when I asked what gay meant. I thought they knew.
As we started to make our dash from the party back to the dormitory before curfew, Pam, a street-smart young lady from St. Louis and one of the few people I felt comfortable with, spotted a very attractive black man who could have been a movie star, or at the very least a model. He had beautiful hazel-green eyes and dark, curly black hair that matched his equally hairy chest. He was shirtless, like many of the men in the room. Pam, who called me “Little Rock” (my first nickname since Ben called me Mike), grabbed my hand and pulled me toward him.
She was ranting about how could this fine “mutherfucker” be gay. With me holding her hand, Pam walked right up to the guy and tapped him on his naked shoulders and said, “Hey, can I ask you something?”
“Sure,” he said as he turned toward us and smiled.
“Are you gay?” Pam blurted. I waited nervously for his answer.
“Yes, I am,” he said.
“But why?” Pam asked with disbelief.
“Are you and your friend straight?” he asked.
“Yes, we are,” Pam said, speaking for both of us. I was just standing there staring at him. The fact that he looked so perfect and shared my desires and appeared proud of it just blew me away.
“Why are you straight?” he asked.
“What do you mean?” Pam asked.
“Why are you straight?” he repeated.
“Because that’s the way I am. That’s just me,” Pam said.
“Then that’s why I’m gay. It’s just me,” he said, smiling.
The man introduced himself as Michael and told us that he was from Washington, D.C. He said that maybe he would see us next weekend. Pam was disappointed that Michael was convinced that he would be gay the rest of his life. I remember how sure of himself he was, how happy he looked.
When we got back to the dorm, Pam told all the girls in the program about Michael and how fine and nice he was. She was certain she could change his ways.
Pam didn’t get a chance, because we didn’t see Michael again that summer. The director of the program found out about our outing and forbade us from ever going back. Of course, I obeyed. I didn’t want to get sent back home for attending parties where men danced only with men.
For the remaining Saturdays that summer, while the rest of the students were coupling up with each other, I would sit near the window of my dorm room and watch the beautiful men of all colors walk hand in hand into the GWU student union.
I learned two things from that experience: The director taught me the fear people have about the unknown, and Michael showed me the pride conveyed in knowing who you are.
I RETURNED TO LITTLE ROCK and Hall anxious to get on with my senior year. I hoped it would be the swiftest of my life. Washington, D.C., had piqued my curiosity about the pleasures of big-city living, and I knew I would eventually return for good. I spent so many times daydreaming about living in a city like Washington, D.C., or New York City, which I got the chance to visit for the first time that year as well.
One of our field trips was a bus ride to New York City, where we saw the Broadway show Don’t Play Us Cheap, which I thought was the best thing I had ever seen since I saw The Nutcracker when I was in the fourth grade at Bush Elementary. We also enjoyed a soul food dinner in Harlem. The bright lights and the beat of the city convinced me that this was a place where I belonged and I was going to find my way back, but first I had to finish my education.
Falling into the familiar high school routine wasn’t easy after my summer experiences. I knew for sure that there was a big world waiting for me. I passed on running for senior class president despite the encouragement of some of my classmates, although I did serve as president of the Bi-Racial Council, a student group established to keep harmony between the races. I felt this was more important, since Hall was now about 30 percent black. Carolyn Higgins, someone I had known from Booker and was always in my homeroom, was elected secretary of the senior class, thus becoming the first minority to win a classwide election.
I talked with Gessler often and even got to visit his home. When I went to see him I experienced another sensation—namely, envy. At first this bothered me, but then I decided to use it for inspiration. I dreamed I’d one day live in a beautiful brick house, with a housekeeper and a two-car garage. I never let Gessler know how I felt, even though I’m sure he would have understood.
Gessler was making the most of his senior year at Hot Springs High School. He had a beautiful girlfriend, Megan, who was homecoming queen and a cheerleader. He was making straight A’s and had been elected senior class president and talked of attending the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville and becoming a doctor. And he constantly told me I was his best friend, something I needed to hear.
There was nothing stellar about my senior year. My grades were good but not great, but still schools like Vanderbilt, Princeton, and the University of Michigan, impressed with my college pre-entrance exams, wrote me letters as if I were a star football player. I eliminated Vanderbilt, because I had read somewhere that they had a high suicide rate, and I eliminated Princeton because I didn’t consider myself Ivy League material.
I was intrigued by thoughts of attending the University of Michigan, because I knew Ann Arbor was close to Flint and I loved watching the football team with their maize and blue uniforms.
I had a cool job as a salesclerk in the boys’ department at M. M. Cohns, the most exclusive store in Little Rock. When I wasn’t working or in school, life was pretty boring. I looked forward to speaking with Gessler, watching college football and Mary Tyler Moore. I know it sounds crazy, but I identified with the Mary character, because it didn’t seem like she had love in her life but she had good friends and seemed happy. She had the kind of apartment I thought I would have one day in New York City or Washington, D.C.
While other boys in my neighborhood spent time playing basketball or searched for private spots to have sex with girls, I spent countless evenings alone listening to the sounds of Smokey Robinson, Al Green, Marvin Gaye, and Stevie Wonder. This was a time when I convinced myself that true love existed only in songs, movies, or on TV. I’d never seen much romantic love in my own home, and if someone as special as Mama couldn’t find it, how could I ever think it would happen to me?
It’s not like I didn’t try to have girlfriends. There were several young ladies, like Yolanda Wherry and Karen Curry, who made my heart beat rapidly, but they both l
ived in North Little Rock, which seemed so far away that romance was impossible.
They were both popular girls, the only black cheerleaders at Northeast and Ole Main, and certainly had better offers than one from a skinny boy from a single-parent home who still thought about a certain Central High football player when he slow-danced with girls at parties. Yet I don’t remember ever feeling happier as a boy than I did when Karen let me wear her silver and blue cheerleader megaphone necklace for a week. If only I’d had a letterman’s jacket to give her in return, Karen might have let me keep that necklace forever and help transfer my affection from football players to cheerleaders.
I had only two dates my entire time in high school. I went to school dances celebrating the beginning of the school term and homecoming, but I always went alone. One of my dates was with a young lady name Beverly Dean, a beautiful and smart girl whom I took to see the movie Love Story, and I ended up crying more than she did. My other date was a memorable one. Rose Crater, my first crush, went to my senior prom with me. She was still one of the most popular girls in Little Rock, having become the first black cheerleader at Parkview High. She also made history when she was elected the first black girl to be homecoming queen at a majority white school.
I remember how my heart started to beat at a rapid rate when I saw Rose in her beautiful aqua prom gown with matching turban. I felt like the luckiest guy in Little Rock, and that remains one of the most special nights in my life. Proms were not considered successful by most of my male peers unless they ended up in a hotel room or the backseat of a limo. In Little Rock there were a lot of prom babies who halted many a college career. My date with Rose ended sweetly, after a pancake breakfast a little after midnight at the International House of Pancakes.
Besides those two dates, I didn’t allow myself to dream of a love life. I had one experience toward the end of the school year that made me realize that leaving my hometown for good would soon be an issue of survival.
I met him when I went downtown to pick up my senior ring. I was at the Woolworth’s lunch counter eating a banana split when he sat down next to me. A couple of minutes later, I realized he was staring at me as he played with his hamburger and fries.
He was older and quite handsome, with rich blue-black skin and snow-white teeth like the movie character Shaft. And just like the black movie detective, he turned out to be a “bad motherfucker.”
Right before he left, he wrote his name and a phone number on a napkin and pushed it toward me. He never said a word. I called him later that evening, and he said he had been waiting to hear from me. We talked briefly, and he suggested we get together later that night. He told me his name was Donald and that he’d moved to Little Rock from Kansas City to be with his girlfriend, who was attending college at Philander Smith. There was no mention of why we were meeting, but I knew it wasn’t to talk about his girlfriend. I told him it had to be late so I could be sure my mother and sisters were sound asleep.
We met behind a baseball field near my house. After small talk, we had sex in his car, a small Chevy Vega, which he had driven from the field into a nearby alley. When we finished, I felt excited, but Donald wore a look of disgust. I asked him if everything was all right.
He looked at me and shouted, “You goddamn faggot,” then he started beating me unmercifully with his large fists. Every time I tried to escape his car, his fists pounded my face. It started raining and thundering and lightning, something that had caused me great fear when I was a child, and I was struggling to find the door handle. It seemed like the rain was falling with the force of Donald’s fists, and I was afraid that he was going to kill me. All I could see were Donald’s fists and Ben’s face in a flashback of my 520 East Twenty-first terror. Suddenly this psycho stopped beating me, spit in my face, and then leaned over me, opened the door, and kicked me with the heel of his shoe out of his car into the cold rain. On the graveled alley I saw blood on my hands. My nose was bleeding. But I didn’t think about the pain of his fists. All I could think about was Donald spitting in my face. It was devastating. No one had ever done that to me. It was like he was saying to me, “You don’t deserve to be a human being. You’re lower than low. You ain’t shit.”
Donald sped off as I lay on the concrete. When I saw that the car was out of sight, I pulled myself up and began to walk home in the rain. The lightning and thunder continued, but I had survived this encounter, and the weather was the least of my concerns. I cried as I walked home, and the rain kept coming, washing my tears away.
I snuck back into my house soaking wet. I knew I had to change my life before somebody killed me—or I killed myself.
CHAPTER 7
My neighborhood street was covered in a stale gray dimness, like it was stuck between day and night. The only visible light was from the porch of the houses on Thayer Street. Our house was silent, with Mama and me up and my sisters still sound asleep, oblivious to the importance of the day.
Mama and I quietly loaded my cardboard boxes full of books, albums, and clothes into my new lemon-yellow Volkswagen. The car was a surprise graduation present from Mama. How she did some of the things she did amazed me. She had been saving money for me to go to college, but when I got a full scholarship, Mama bought me a car instead so I would go in style.
One funny thing about the car is that when Mama bought it, I couldn’t drive. It took most of the summer, with lessons from Mama, family, and friends like Valerie Rice (NaNa’s sister), before I felt comfortable behind the wheel. When I pulled out of the driveway that morning, I didn’t realize that it would be one of the last times I would stay longer than seventy-two hours in either Little Rock or my mother’s house.
The only differences between that day and any other were that I was leaving for college, and Mama’s quiet tears. Maybe Mama realized that she was really releasing me to the world, or her tears may have been those of pride that I was the first one in my family to go to college.
“Now, baby, remember what I told you. When you get on the freeway, pick up speed, look to your left for cars, and watch out for those big trucks,” she said. I think she was more nervous than I was about my first experience driving on the freeway. The image of her in a flowered cotton dress holding the screen door with one hand and caressing her collar with the other is an image fixed in my mind that I will never forget.
I assured her I would be careful and that I wouldn’t go over fifty-five miles per hour. She made me check to be sure I had my Triple A motor card, and I promised to call the moment I arrived.
I repeated her instructions in a teasing voice. The situation needed humor, because I didn’t want to cry. I was finally leaving Little Rock, and I didn’t understand the sadness and fear I was feeling. I knew I would miss my mother and even my sisters, but this was the moment I had dreamed of. I was getting out of Little Rock. I was going to college. The University of Arkansas at Fayetteville awaited me, and I was scared.
Before I turned the key in the ignition, Mama once again told me to be careful and not to forget to find a church in Fayetteville and to pray. I smiled and nodded my head, and then I pulled out of the driveway and headed down the hill toward my big adventure.
In a lot of ways, I guess I was always meant for the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. Gessler was going there, and despite a near-perfect academic record, he had always wanted to attend the university. I figured that since Gessler was white, rich, and smart, he could have gone to any college in the country.
There was no discussion of our being roommates, since Gessler knew he would pledge Phi Delta Theta like his older brother, Brad, and move into the fraternity house. The possibility of my pledging Phi Delta wasn’t discussed either. I knew that not everything at the university was going to be integrated.
There was one reason I was excited to be attending the university. It was the home of the Arkansas Razorbacks. I had always been a Razorbacks fan, even though they had no black players on their teams during the sixties and early seventies. When I was y
ounger, I’d fallen in love with them by listening to games on the radio with the voice of Bud Campbell, and by reading the words of Orville Henry, sports editor of the state’s largest newspaper, The Arkansas Gazette. Mr. Henry was one of the writers I read religiously from seventh grade on. I had decided to study journalism and had hopes of one day writing about the Razorbacks under the tutelage of Mr. Henry.
The Razorbacks brought pride to the small state of Arkansas. I remember in 1969, when then President Nixon came to watch the national championship game between Texas and Arkansas. It seemed as though the entire nation was focused on Fayetteville, Arkansas, and I was so proud, even though the Razorbacks lost on that gloomy Saturday, 15–14. Despite that defeat, the Razorbacks were still my Dallas Cowboys, my Los Angeles Lakers.
My love of sports was the only thing that my stepfather Ben instilled in me as a little boy that I still hold dear today. In fact, I consider watching and attending sporting events one of my passions. I love college football, and win or lose, I love the Razorbacks. Ben would make me watch football games on Sunday, especially his favorite team, the St. Louis Cardinals, and even made me try out for Peewee football despite my tiny size. At first I hated being forced to watch sports, but it made Ben happy. I think he thought that if I was watching sports I would have less time to play house with my sisters and their friends. As I grew older, I developed my own appreciation for the games and for participating in sports when my body began to change and I could finally compete.
Back in the sixties and early seventies most of the black folks, including my mother, seemed to hate the Razorbacks. I assumed that for many, the lily-white team served as a reminder of the segregated South. My mother would get mad at me when I listened to Razorbacks football and basketball on the radio and sometimes would make me turn off the radio. Today we laugh about it, because my mother is almost as big a Razorbacks fan as I am.
What Becomes of the Brokenhearted Page 9
