THINGS WERE GETTING BETTER at IBM, and in the training program, I was making some treasured friendships with people I had nothing in common with. I was one of the few students whom some of the top students would help with assignments, maybe because they didn’t see me as a threat for challenging them for the top spot when it came to class scores.
At times I secretly envied and despised them for their seemingly perfect lives. Everything seemed to come so easy for them, like understanding the right type of clothing and managing money. Once, one of the smartest ladies from my class, Suzanne Procter, a Harvard MBA, had a dinner party in her New York City East Side apartment, and she invited me because I was real tight with one of the best-looking white guys in the class, a former Princeton baseball player, Paul Pecka, whom I affectionately called Princeton Paul. Her apartment was like a page out of Architectural Digest and the dinner party was one of the most elegant I had ever attended at that point in my life.
IN MY FINAL IBM TRAINING CLASS, one based totally on sales calls and presentations, I finished near the top of my class. The applause I heard when I received one of five baseballs given to students who had received a superior rating on a sales call or presentation eased a great deal of the hurt and embarrassment I had felt at the beginning of my IBM career. I had proved that I could compete in this highly technical field. Yet I never considered if being a top salesman at IBM was something I really wanted to do.
After I completed the program, I got a promotion, a huge salary increase (almost doubling my entry-level salary), and my own sales territory. Since I was one of the few black salesmen not only in Dallas but in the country, I got a lot of attention. The regional personnel manager took me to several college campuses to help recruit minority students.
One of these trips took me back to Fayetteville, where I proudly walked around campus in my expensive navy blue suits, starched white shirts, and red power ties, visiting with professors and former classmates. I got to spend time with Mason and Hugh, with whom I had renewed my friendship. Hugh was a good friend, and my infatuation with him was over. I was able to convince the manager from Little Rock that Hugh would be a great employee. Hugh was on schedule to receive a degree in engineering and had a high grade point average. At first the manager from IBM resisted, saying Hugh appeared too shy and hadn’t spent a lot of time with campus activities, with the exception of his fraternity, of which he was president. When Hugh took the aptitude test, he scored in the top quarter and was hired immediately for the Little Rock branch as a systems engineer trainee.
Back in Dallas, I immersed myself in work but still managed to have a social life. I also found a wonderful church located in the Hamilton Park section. I often traveled to Houston to visit Butch and the Cove, my first all-black gay bar. The Cove was a dive located behind a theater, but it was always packed with handsome black men and an assortment of colorful drag queens. The Cove wasn’t as big as the Old Plantation, but it had the most incredible energy. You didn’t have to wait for the deejay to play a black song, and patrons didn’t have to present multiple pieces of identification. I would dance with a freedom I had never known, not worrying about anybody whispering that I danced like a punk. Still, I refused to slow-dance with a man in public. I consider myself a private person and sometimes socially conservative, and I couldn’t see myself doing something that looked like a sexual act rather than dancing in public.
In Houston, I hung out with friends that Butch had made at work, like Vanessa Gilmore, who would turn out to be one of my most treasured friends. Butch talked all the time about the stylish Vanessa, who had graduated from Hampton Institute and was also a good friend of Deborah Long. She could take twenty dollars and create a Sunday brunch in her apartment that would rival any four-star hotel’s.
I also began having a string of weekend affairs that would start late Friday in the bar or in the adjacent parking lot and would last until Sunday afternoon when I drove back to Dallas. These men would come and exit my life in an instant, like a sweet, quick caress. Affairs as fleeting as lightning on a quiet lake.
None of those affairs had the traumatic effect that one in Dallas would have—a one-night stand that would remind me there was nothing gay about being gay when so many men wanted desperately to be straight.
One Sunday, while playing tennis at Southern Methodist University, I met an attractive black guy whom I knew to be one of the city’s star athletes. He was smart, well built, and could turn on the boyish charm with great facility. It didn’t matter that the name he gave me didn’t match the name I associated with his handsome face. I knew he had to protect his image.
The night in my apartment was like a fantasy, a delectable romantic episode that made me think I was in love after one night. When he left my apartment early Monday morning, I began to make plans for a wonderful life with this already established sports hero that would make me forget Mason Walker ever existed.
I couldn’t wait to get home from work to speak with him. I called him, hoping to make plans for the evening, but his warm voice from the weekend sounded distant and impersonal. He asked if he could call back. I agreed quickly. A couple of hours later, when I called to tell him I was going to bed, a female answered his phone, and when I asked for him she told me that my faggot ass had better stop calling this number.
When I called back a couple of days later, hoping there had been some terrible mistake, I got a recording informing me and other callers that the number had been changed and the new number was unlisted. I was humiliated. I didn’t know how someone could be so cruel, even though lots of men showed me every chance I gave them.
THE INCIDENT BROUGHT ON another wave of depression. As a salesman I wasn’t expected in the office every day since nobody there was buying computers, so many days I would drink rum and Cokes late into the evenings and sleep most of the day, waking up only to check with my secretary to see if anybody important was looking for me.
Although I was having some success with my accounts, Leon noticed the change and suggested that I join him and his wife Susan, a beautiful high-spirited Italian woman, for a meeting for an organization called EST that could change people’s lives. Being from the South and the Church, I felt only God could rescue me from my pain. It didn’t sound like something I wanted to be a part of, but Susan and Leon were relentless. I finally went to a couple of EST guest seminars and immediately came to the conclusion that I didn’t think a bunch of white folks would understand the problems of a black man dealing with his sexuality. But Susan and Leon, along with the EST graduates/groupies, persuaded me that EST could solve all my problems. I was in pain, and God seemed too busy, and I was willing to give anything that would finally deliver the love of my life to my doorstep a chance.
When the time came for me to go to the EST seminar, I backed out, telling Leon that I couldn’t afford the weekend sessions and didn’t want to do the training in Dallas because I wouldn’t be open if I might see people I knew. Leon offered to loan me the money and arrange an IBM advanced training class in another city where the EST training was being held.
Against my better judgment, I went to New York City to take the EST training at the New York Hilton hotel. I don’t remember that much about the intensive program except the beautiful hotel and my sneaking out during the Saturday-afternoon sessions to watch parts of the Arkansas–Texas football game. I felt as though I was sneaking out of an all-important college class, knowing that if I got caught, I would have a heavy price to pay.
In a crowded ballroom, people I’d never met confessed deep, dark secrets about themselves. Some were in tears as they recalled horrible incidents from their childhood, many for the first time. I was expecting to uncover some type of sexual molestation from my childhood that would explain my attraction to men, but I knew nothing like that had occurred in my life.
At the end of the two-day session, everyone was hugging and saying that they had “got it.” Forever the follower, I said, “I got it too.” But in reality, what I had gotten wa
s a weekend in New York City and further confusion about whether I was indeed gay and if change was possible.
When I returned to Dallas, I pretended to be more self-assured and confident when I was around Susan and Leon, especially when dealing with the evil curse of my sexuality. I didn’t want them to feel as though they had wasted their money and I had squandered a weekend in New York, stuck in the hotel with a bunch of strangers in search of themselves. I was still in search of myself, and the trip convinced me that maybe if I couldn’t find myself with EST, I could find a more bearable life in New York City.
CHAPTER 10
It took me another two years, but in the fall of 1982, I did something I had long dreamed of but didn’t think I would have the courage to do: I moved to New York City. I had visited Manhattan several times to check out Broadway shows and to party, but the fast pace and high cost of living always frightened me. The glow of Manhattan’s skyscrapers that turned the sky a metallic blue, no matter what the season, had beckoned me only through movies and books. In my dreams I wanted to live there at least once.
Another catalyst for the big move was the dramatic ending of my first live-in relationship. For two years I had been involved with Andre, an SMU law student, but our relationship ended abruptly when Andre felt the need to sleep with one of my close friends. At least, I thought he was a friend.
The breakup was the talk of the closeted black gay community in Dallas. Everybody knew of Andre’s secret affair but me. I was too busy working two jobs, one as a computer salesman, the other as a waiter on nights and weekends so I could pay the house note on a three-bedroom North Dallas condo.
It was a classic case of working too much to provide the material things in life, but not paying enough attention to the things that really mattered in relationships.
When the shit hit the proverbial fan, I got sympathy from our close friends. I actually caught Andre and “my friend” together at my alleged friend’s house on a weekend when he was supposed to be in Austin, Texas, doing research. People I didn’t know became involved in our Peyton Place gay drama.
I was heartbroken and felt once again that no one would love me totally. I told my Aunt Gee about the relationship, but I told her Andre was female, and she insisted that I visit Atlanta for a few weeks so that she could show me love and make me feel better. I knew my aunt’s love was unconditional like my mother’s, but I didn’t feel ready to share who I really was. When I look back, I realize that I needed to share equal blame for the breakup. I think at the beginning of our relationship, Andre, who had pursued me, really loved me. I was too concerned with image and what other people thought; too busy trying to prove that I was the man in our relationship. Andre wasn’t an athlete like Mason, but he was smart and handsome in a pretty-boy way.
I did some cruel things to my partner. On the weekend of my twenty-fifth birthday, I made him move all of his personal belongings from our condo because I had more than thirty-five friends I had made at IBM flying into Dallas to help me celebrate. I insensitively explained to Andre that my IBM friends, especially the women, wouldn’t understand my having a much younger roommate who on the surface didn’t have anything in common with me.
I had to protect my buppie-in-training image, but I didn’t realize how much it would hurt him. He didn’t protest my demands, and even came to the party as an invited guest. The strange thing is that it was on the weekend that I sent him away that I realized how much I loved him. I climbed into the bed, satisfied at the party’s success, and reached to pull him close to my chest. He wasn’t there, and I missed him. I realized later how insensitive I was.
When my relationship ended, the little self-esteem I had left over from college and a moderately successful sales career suddenly disappeared. In my own eyes, I wasn’t good-looking enough, not smart enough, and not the lover I needed to be to have a successful gay relationship.
The first and only time I saw Andre and my former friend in a romantic embrace at the Old Plantation, the bar where we had met, I wanted to die. I wouldn’t stay around to risk seeing them again. It hurt too badly. Since Andre had two years of law school left, I knew I had to be the one to leave.
While I was strongly considering moving to Houston, a bus ride from Atlantic City, New Jersey, became my first step toward making New York my home.
I was attending the Miss America pageant with Lencola Sullivan, the first black Miss Arkansas. Lencola and I had become friends after I wrote her a congratulations note when she won Miss Arkansas and finished in the top five in the 1980 Miss America pageant. At first we were pen pals of sorts, but later I invited her, and she accepted, to several of the parties I held in Dallas. We began to talk fairly regularly on the phone. During one of our conversations, she mentioned she was planning to return to Atlantic City because the pageant grapevine was buzzing that not one, but two, black young ladies had a shot at the title. When she suggested I join her, I jumped at the chance of witnessing an historic event, as a black woman winning the pageant would be.
Lencola, herself, I always felt was a year or two ahead of the times when it came to the pageant. She is a staggeringly beautiful woman, with skin the color of toasted almonds, thick long black hair, and the petite shape of a life-sized Barbie doll.
When I saw her in the Miss Arkansas pageant, dressed in a tight-fitting snow-white gown, looking like a young Diahann Carroll—well, it was one of those times when I wished women were the only thing my heart desired. I must admit to romantic fantasies about her, but as usual, we became close friends and nothing happened but a spectacular lifetime friendship. I couldn’t believe someone so beautiful would be interested in me as a friend.
The Friday before Vanessa Williams’s crowning, I left Atlantic City and took the bus to New York City. I walked into the offices of Wang Labs, located at 666 Fifth Avenue, and handed the receptionist a résumé. A few minutes later, I found myself being interviewed by a sales manager in her early thirties. I, of course, turned on the charm, and a few hours later, Cookie Morris told me if it was up to her, she would offer me a job on the spot, but since she couldn’t she asked if I would consider coming back Monday and meeting her boss. I took this as a sign that now was the time to move to New York, and I could think of nothing else on the bus trip back to Atlantic City. By Thursday of the following week I had a job as a senior marketing representative with Wang Labs, one of IBM’s main competitors in a new field called office automation.
I moved in with Richard Coleman, whom I had met while working at IBM in Dallas. We had instantly hit it off when he was promoted to the Dallas training center. He became my mentor and the big brother I’d always wanted. Richard was gay and seemed proud of the fact, although he sometimes dated women for IBM career movement and had a girlfriend, Stephanie, who lived in New York. He captivated me with his stories of growing up in New York City and what it was like to be gay in one of the world’s most exciting cities. He was tall and extremely handsome, with sparkling green eyes, and was one of the kindest people I’ve ever known. Richard was the kind of man who, when he entered a room, both men and women, regardless of their sexuality, took note.
Richard had been promoted to IBM headquarters in White Plains, but we had kept in touch and I had visited him on several occasions. When he moved back east, he had purchased a huge older house on a corner lot in the town of Mount Vernon. The house was so big, with its twelve rooms, that I was actually afraid to stay there alone when Richard traveled on business, which turned out to be quite often. I had never stayed in a house so big, and it seemed to me that I heard every sound, and I would spend half the night checking all the doors, windows, and the alarm. My fear got so bad that whenever I found out Richard would be traveling, I made arrangements to spend the night in New York City with friends or stayed in a hotel.
Six months after moving to Mount Vernon, I got the opportunity to move to New York City, when Larry Stewart, one of the best-looking guys from Little Rock, who was appearing in the Broadway musical Dreamgirls, got
a leading role in the national touring company and offered me his apartment on the Upper West Side at an affordable $450 a month. I grabbed the offer, even though I knew Larry could return without much notice.
The benefits of living in New York were immediate. I was able to walk to work, something that made me feel like a real New Yorker. More important, my social life picked up dramatically, because now I could stay at the clubs as late as I wanted to without worrying about having to rush to Grand Central to catch the last train to Mount Vernon.
A couple of months later, I would get an unlikely roommate, Lencola Sullivan. I convinced her that she belonged on the Broadway stage and not doing the weather in Austin, Texas. It wasn’t that we planned to become roommates, but when she said she didn’t have a place to stay, I offered her my apartment since I was preparing to go to Boston for two weeks of training. Instead of her staying at my place for two weeks, we ended up living together, in a strictly platonic relationship, for more than two years.
DURING THE EARLY 1980s, New York City had several popular gay bars where attractive black men congregated until the wee hours of the morning. Something called AIDS was only a rumor. The sounds of Stephanie Mills, Donna Summer, and Diana Ross were all a black gay man needed. I was amazed that on any given night, including Mondays, gay bars would be packed with attractive men in business suits, blue jeans, and preppy clothing.
On Wednesdays after work it was not unusual to see Broadway stars having a few cocktails between shows. The clubs included Better Days, The Garage, The Cotton Club, Ninety-six West, and the infamous Nickel Bar, a tiny hole-in-the-wall establishment located on Seventy-second between Broadway and Central Park West. The Nickel was more of a cruise bar because it was so small, but it did have a living-room-size dance floor in the back that jumped on Friday and Saturday nights.
What Becomes of the Brokenhearted Page 14
