Right before I left Endicott, my adviser told me they were recommending that I keep my position and suggested I repeat the two-week class. At first I said no. I had never failed at something for which I worked so hard. Besides, I knew the material. My adviser went on to tell me that I had an excellent attitude, was a hard worker, and got along well with others. She went on to say that one day I would look back on this class and laugh.
I was not in a jovial mood at the class going-away party or on the plane trip back to Dallas. When I got back to my new apartment on that Friday night, I collapsed on my rented bedroom furniture and didn’t wake up until early Sunday morning. I was physically and emotionally drained. I wanted to quit and return to the safe haven of Fayetteville, but first I had to show all those rich white boys and girls I was just as smart as they were.
It would have been easy to walk away and look into law school, since I had just turned twenty-one years old. I felt lonely and I missed Mason. Then I thought about some of the people at the university who were surprised that IBM had offered me a job. I knew that a lot of people felt African Americans, as we were now calling ourselves, weren’t qualified when we achieved certain positions. Maybe I wasn’t qualified for this highly technical field, but I felt I had at least tried—if not for me, then at least for people, like my family, who thought I could do anything.
When I reported to work on Monday, everyone in the office knew I had failed the class, and that included the garage attendant. I don’t know this to be true, but it’s how I felt when I entered the building on Turtle Creek Drive. I walked meekly to my desk in the sales pit area and awaited my review meeting with Leon. One of the black service engineers told me that the first black sales trainee in my office had flunked out of the program and I was the first black trainee since he had been fired some five years before. Like I needed to hear that, I thought. I held my head down low as I walked into Leon’s office right before noon.
I was surprised that Leon appeared to be in a very upbeat mood. He asked me what I had learned in the class, and I started spouting all the technical information I had learned. He looked at me and said, “That’s not what I’m talking about.” He then repeated his question. I was silent, because I didn’t know what Leon wanted me to say. I felt like a little boy desperately trying to think of an excuse to avoid a whipping I knew I was due.
Leon then gave me a lecture on how I had not allowed any room for failure, so when it happened I let it overwhelm me. He told me that I had to allow room in my life for both failure and success and treat them the same. What he said made sense. He was not telling me I had to look for failure, but just to recognize and prepare for it as a possibility. It was something I had never considered.
LEON BECAME MORE THAN a manager to me. He was almost like a father or a big brother. When I made mistakes, he would point them out. Like how a black man hoping to make it in corporate America had to give up some things once considered important.
I had cut my huge Afro that I had sported for several years and was wearing my hair in what was called a short ’Fro. In the South jheri curls were just appearing on the hair horizon. One Friday when I jumped into my barber’s chair to get a trim, she suggested I try a jheri curl. I was game, despite the fact that most of the women I knew hated jheri curls on men and called men who wore them “bamas,” a term short for Alabamas, which meant real country. She convinced me that she could make my curls look natural and people would think it was my natural hair. Never mind the fact that they had never seen curls on my head before.
When she finished, I thought I looked good! Damn, I looked great. When I went to happy hour later that evening, some people whom I was familiar with were all asking me what I had done to my hair. I would pat it gently and smile as if to say, It looks good, don’t it? I spent a great deal of the weekend looking in the mirror and spraying my special activator to keep my curls glistening.
On Monday I arrived at work still under the impression that I looked fabulous. My white coworkers knew something was different but seemed afraid to ask. I took my seat at my desk, which was located on the front row, directly in front of the branch manager’s office.
The branch manager was a dead ringer for a young Ronald Reagan. He walked by my desk and did a double take when he spoke to me. A few minutes later my phone rang, and Leon asked me to come into his office for a minute. I walked into his office, and before I took my seat, Leon asked me, “Lynn, what did you do to your hair?”
“I got a jheri curl,” I said proudly as I touched my greasy, saturated curls. Leon had a blank expression on his face. A few seconds later he said, “Lynn, the haircut has got to go.” When I asked him why, he said that my haircut wouldn’t work in this type of environment. When I demanded to know why, he told me he wasn’t going to argue with me but that his supervisor had called him and asked what in the hell I had done to my hair. When I asked him if the branch manager told the white boys what to do with their hair, he said, “I’m not telling you that you have to get your hair cut. But I will say that this is one of your first big career decisions.”
I looked at Leon with his naturally curly hair. He didn’t understand, I thought. Was the IBM management trying to make me like them? I had changed my dress. I laughed at their corny jokes over lunch. I even answered some of my coworkers’ dumb questions about what it was like being black when they had had a few drinks. Now they were trying to tell me what to do with my hair. I told Leon I wouldn’t do it, and he suggested I take the rest of the day to think about it.
After I left the office, my anger continued and all I could think about was finding a good lawyer and suing IBM for discrimination. I called one of my new friends, Ken Baker, who worked for Southwestern Bell in a management position, and told him what had happened.
When he didn’t take my side and agreed with Leon, I began to rethink my position. Maybe Ken and Leon had a point. If I was going to work in corporate America, then I was going to have to play by their rules. I had played by the rules of my fraternity and other organizations while I was in college, and this was pretty much the same thing, like some kind of uniform.
I thought about it for a couple more hours and then I ran to my car and returned to the scene of the hair crime. When I got there I discovered that my regular barber was taking the day off, and I was relieved. She had seemed so proud of her efforts. I jumped into the first empty chair and instructed the barber to cut it off. When I returned to work the next day, Leon gave me a pleasing smile, winked at me, and said, “I think your future at IBM is going to be just fine.”
WHEN I MOVED TO DALLAS, I had never been to a gay bar. There were rumors that the mysterious place called George’s in Fayetteville was a gay bar, but I never went anywhere near there during my college days. I figured Dallas, a big city and all, had to have at least one gay bar. Still, I was afraid to find one and then go alone. All the people I had met in Dallas through work and church were straight—or at least I assumed they were.
Toward the end of my senior year, I found out that Mason, Butch, and I were not the only black men with secret desires. There were several, including members of my own fraternity, another black fraternity, and several grad and law students. We didn’t interact a lot, because everyone was trying to protect their secrets. We used code words in our conversations with each other, like: I’m game for anything or I know what time it is.
I became friendly with a law student, Lance, who tried to seduce Mason the moment I left campus for good. One weekend he came to Dallas, and after a night of cruising several straight bars, he suggested we go to a gay bar.
Since I didn’t know any, I turned to the yellow pages the next day. There were no listings under gay bars, so I tried to distinguish them from their names. Lance and I saw a listing called the Gay Paree, which we both agreed had to be a gay bar. When I called, a black woman answered the phone. I asked her where the bar was located, and she said South Dallas. I was thinking this was too good to be true: a gay bar right in the heart of t
he black community.
I had to be sure, so I asked the woman what their clientele was like. She responded, “What do you mean our clientele? We got a pool table.”
I quickly realized this was not the place we were looking for. I told Lance the Gay Paree wasn’t the spot and he suggested we call the gay information hotline, and sure enough they told us of a gay bar located downtown called the Old Plantation. The friendly voice from the hotline gave me directions, and at about ten o’clock on a humid August night, I was on my way to a gay bar.
During the drive to the club, I was nervous that I might run into someone I knew. I reassured myself by deciding that if they were in a gay bar then they were looking for the same thing I was. The only problem with that theory was that in the late seventies gay bars were considered quite chic because of the great music. I’d heard that a lot of straight men went to these bars to dance with their girlfriends.
When Lance and I entered the club after showing our three pieces of ID (I would later learn that multiple IDs were for black men only), we slowly followed the sounds of thumping music. Once we reached the main ballroom, my eyes became twice their normal size: men dancing with men, men kissing each other, and everybody just generally having a great time. Most of these men were white, with a few black guys sprinkled among the crowd on the dance floor. This was the era of Donna Summer and disco balls, and both were in full effect that night.
We had been in the bar for only about five minutes when my heart began to race. I thought I saw someone from Fayetteville—a tall, chocolate-colored man who I thought was on the baseball team at Arkansas. I pointed him out to Lance, and we both agreed we had seen him on campus. I wanted to leave immediately, but Lance said we should at least see if he was there with a woman or if he was “in.”
Lance took a position on one side of the club and I stood at the opposite end, gazing at this vision of manhood whom I had remembered seeing once at the athletic complex, shirtless. Minutes later, I saw him move toward the packed dance floor with a short, blond man wearing pum-pum shorts. Lance and I met at the bar and decided that he was gay or bi and decided not to leave.
About thirty minutes later, we bumped into him on purpose and introduced ourselves to our former schoolmate, Roger, who told us he had left the university and was playing minor league baseball outside of Arlington, Texas.
I assumed he was into white guys from his previous dance partner, but when I came back from using the bathroom, Roger and Lance were in deep conversation and I felt like an intruder. My first night in a packed gay bar and I felt alone. No one asked me to dance, and I didn’t have the courage to ask anyone. About two hours later, Lance told me he was ready to go and asked me if I minded if Roger came home with us. I told him I didn’t mind, and I ended up sleeping on my sofa. The two of them slept in my bed. It would be the first of many nights when I would leave a gay bar feeling sad and lonely. It didn’t matter that I now knew I wasn’t the only one.
DESPITE FEELING FORLORN and the hard time I was given to gain entry, I would spend almost every Friday and Saturday night at the Old Plantation. It was even harder for darker-skinned brothers who didn’t dress preppy, but there was no other place for black gay men to go and socialize.
This was not the extent of my social life. There was a place I frequented where I always felt welcome. Rascals was a black straight bar located near Love Field, the airport where President Kennedy arrived on that fateful day. It was the place for Dallas’s up-and-coming buppies.
My first blind date was arranged by my manager Leon and convinced me that some women knew what time it was and could deal with men who were confused about their sexuality.
Deborah Long was a good-looking woman, a graduate of Hampton Institute, and when I met her I immediately knew I was going to like her. We agreed to meet at the Dallas Playboy club, which at the time was the hot spot in Dallas.
Deborah strolled through the Playboy Club as if she had a stack of invisible books on her head and carried herself like she knew what it meant to be sexy despite being only twenty-one years old. She had big, bright brown eyes with narrow brows accenting them and flashed a wide smile of victory between sips of her drinks.
After a few hours of engaging conversation, Deborah leaned over to me and whispered, “Every man I’ve met since I’ve moved to Dallas has been trying to get in my pants, but I don’t mind if you want to.…”
I became a bit nervous and took a long gulp of my drink. A voice inside me urged me to give truth a chance. I liked Deborah a lot and didn’t want to lose her friendship before it began, so I took a chance.
I whispered back, “Deborah, sweetheart, I’m sure that would be wonderful, but I think I might be gay.” It was the first time I had said that to a woman who was romantically interested in me.
Deborah remained as calm as a puddle after the rain had stopped and said, “I know. You’re gay, but that doesn’t bother me.”
In the middle of Dallas, Texas, I’d met my first fag hag girlfriend, even though at the time I didn’t know that such a friend existed, or how wonderful they could be.
My employment with IBM was like an entry card with the A crowd, and I quickly became friends with television personalities, doctors, sports figures, and lots of beautiful black women. I became popular with a lot of women because I always knew the latest dances, some of which I had learned at the Old Plantation. I would flirt with women on the dance floor, but most times that was as far as I went. I was still hopeful I would meet a great guy at the Old Plantation.
I loved Rascals, with its polished bar, strobe lights, thumping R & B hits, and a deejay who would call out names of people he knew when they walked into the club or danced well. At Rascals, unlike the Old Plantation, I could always count on great music. Sometimes at the Old Plantation, fondly called O.P., I would have to wait for several records before the deejay would play something I wanted to dance to.
I had my routine down for Fridays: I would leave work a little early, get a haircut, and head to Rascals to secure a parking spot and a good seat before the well-dressed crowd would begin to arrive. It also gave me a chance to fill my body with liquid courage, which I needed so I wouldn’t feel inferior to some of the people I might meet.
After a few drinks, I had no problem striking up conversations with people I considered famous. They didn’t have to be a member of the Dallas Cowboys or on television; it could be someone who had a reputation for being a ladies’ man or someone I perceived as attractive and confident.
With a good-paying job, I had become a member of the black brunch-eating bourgeoisie. Before I moved to Dallas, I didn’t know what brunch was and how it gave you a reason to suck up some libations right after church. Armed with American Express and other credit cards, I was living beyond my means, but so was everyone else I knew. I created a middle-class background that would suit my newfound friends. I told people that my father, though deceased, had been a lawyer and later a family court judge and that I had attended prep school back east. The more I learned, the bigger the lies were about my background.
After Friday-evening happy hour wound down and patrons left for dinner and house parties, I would go to my apartment and change into tight jeans, a muscle shirt, and cowboy boots, and head to the Old Plantation.
Much to my surprise, I started seeing many of the same good-looking professional black men I would see at Rascals. I was beginning to realize that I was not the only black professional man who was seeking the same. I became friends with several of these men, and I began to develop my “sissy sense” or “gaydar,” being able to detect gay men who were undercover about their sexuality. Without any type of initiation, I became a card-carrying member of another fraternity, black men who led dual lives. I would spend a great deal of time at the straight bars on Fridays trying to determine who I might see at the Old Plantation later. It never failed that some of the same womanizing men I admired on Friday would appear at the Old Plantation dancing with other men.
Despite my
sudden social flurry, I wanted nothing more than to be with Mason. I was certain I still loved him, yet I didn’t feel as though I was in the market for permanent companionship with either a woman or a man. When a woman would come on to me, I would cool the situation by telling her I was engaged to my college sweetheart.
Mason and I talked at least once a week, and occasionally I would receive a letter or card from him. At night I would wear one of the T-shirts he had given me, which made me feel close to him. When he had given me the shirts during my senior year, he had made me promise not to wear them on campus or anywhere in the state of Arkansas.
Sometimes when I talked with Mason, I could detect something was different. I got the feeling that he desperately wanted to be completely heterosexual, or he had discovered other black gay men in Fayetteville. He talked constantly about his girlfriend and other attractive black girls on campus, and he would occasionally ask me about certain members of my fraternity by quizzing, “So what do you think is up with him?”
When I journeyed back to Fayetteville for football games, I spent the majority of the time with my fraternity brothers and my ex-girlfriend Cherri and her sorority sisters. I tried to convince myself that life would be better if I could love Cherri the way I loved Mason. Then I began to hope she would marry me, especially since I had learned in Dallas that marriage didn’t preclude one from having sex with men.
Mason and I would share stolen moments in Fayetteville and a few times in Dallas. Whenever we were alone in the same room, he would never mention his girlfriend or a desire to end our relationship. We had this private joke about the “same time next year,” when we would get together for a weekend and would spend the entire time making love. Those moments were special, but so infrequent that I began to think about something more permanent. I wanted to be in love, and I convinced myself it didn’t matter if it was a man or a woman.
What Becomes of the Brokenhearted Page 13
