The Sex Squad

by David Leddick

  STONEWALL INN EDITIONS

  KEITH KAHLA, GENERAL EDITOR

  Buddies by Ethan Mordden

  Joseph and the Old Man by Christopher Davis

  Blackbird by Larry Duplechan

  Gay Priest by Malcolm Boyd

  One Last Waltz by Ethan Mordden

  Gay Spirit by Mark Thompson, ed.

  Valley of the Shadow by Christopher Davis

  Love Alone by Paul Monette

  On Being Gay by Brian McNaught

  Everybody Loves You by Ethan Mordden

  Untold Decades by Robert Patrick

  Gay & Lesbian Poetry in Our Time by Carl Morse & Joan Larkin, eds.

  Tangled Up in Blue by Larry Duplechan

  How to Go to the Movies by Quentin Crisp

  The Body and Its Dangers and Other Stories by Allen Barnett

  Dancing on Tisha B’Av by Lev Raphael

  Arena of Masculinity by Brian Pronger

  Boys Like Us by Peter McGehee

  Don’t Be Afraid Anymore by Reverend Troy D. Perry with Thomas L. P. Swicegood

  The Death of Donna-May Dean by Joey Manley

  Latin Moon in Manhattan by Jaime Manrique

  On Ships at Sea by Bo Huston

  Show Me the Way to Go Home by Simmons Jones

  Winter Eyes by Lev Raphael

  Boys on the Rock by John Fox

  End of the Empire by Denise Ohio

  Tom of Finland by F. Valentine Hooven III

  Reports from the holocaust, revised edition by Larry Kramer

  Created Equal by Michael Nava and Robert Dawidoff

  Gay Issues in the Workplace by Brian McNaught

  Sportsdykes by Susan Fox Rogers, ed.

  Sacred Lips of the Bronx by Douglas Sadownick

  West of Yesterday, East of Summer by Paul Monette

  I’ve a Feeling We’re Not in Kansas Anymore by Ethan Mordden

  Another Mother by Ruthann Robson

  Close Calls by Susan Fox Rogers, ed.

  How Long Has This Been Going On? by Ethan Mordden

  My Worst Date by David Leddick

  Girljock: The Book by Roxxie, ed.

  The Necessary Hunger by Nina Revoyr

  Call Me by P. P. Hartnett

  My Father’s Scar by Michael Cart

  Getting Off Clean by Timothy Murphy

  Mongrel by Justin Chin

  Now That I’m Out, What Do I Do? by Brian McNaught

  Some Men Are Lookers by Ethan Mordden

  alkla by Ruthann Robson

  Execution, Texas: 1987 by D. Travers Scott

  Gay Body by Mark Thompson

  The Venice Adriana by Ethan Mordden

  Women on the Verge by Susan Fox Rogers, ed.

  An Arrow’s Flight by Mark Merlis

  Glove Puppet by Neal Drinnan

  The Pleasure Principle by Michael Bronski

  And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts

  Biological Exuberance by Bruce Bagemihl

  The Sex Squad by David Leddick

  Also by David Leddick

  FICTION

  My Worst Date

  Never Eat In

  NONFICTION

  Naked Men

  The Male Nude

  Intimate Companions

  Men in the Sun

  The Homoerotic Art of Pavel Tchelitchev

  The Sex Squad

  David Leddick

  ST. MARTIN’S PRESS NEW YORK

  THE SEX SQUAD. Copyright © 1998 by David Leddick. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  Design by Nancy Resnick

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Leddick, David.

  The sex squad / David Leddick.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-312-18174-4 (hc)

  ISBN 0-312-24326-X (pbk)

  I. Title.

  PS3562.E28444S4 1998

  813’.54–dc21

  98-35891

  CIP

  First Stonewall Inn Edition: March 2000

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For

  Frank Andrea

  I would like to thank:

  Keith Kahla, my editor who is precise and practical and good-looking, too. This is my second book for him, and each one is a learning experience for me.

  Mikel Wadewitz, his second in command, who is quick and smart and lots of fun.

  Patrick Dillon, my copy editor. If I seem grammatical and correct in my facts, it is only because of impressive him.

  Kathie Nengel, who puts my manuscript on disk for me, catching many errors and making a lot of sense. And who is so diligent and dependable.

  And, of course, all those myriads of people from my dancing past, some real and some now quite unreal to me. Without their glamour and guts, and richness and rashness of character, there would have been nothing to write.

  I would like to add that, although there are many real characters in this book, it is entirely fiction.

  Content

  St. Vincent’s Hospital

  How I Became a Dancer

  Chicago, Chicago

  Levoy Ping

  Lovers

  Summer Theater

  Sixteenth Street

  Harry Is Left Alone

  Dancing with the Danish Ballet

  The Met

  In the Dressing Room

  Norma and Other Operas

  Neighbors

  How I Loved to Dance

  The Yellow Opera House and the White Virgin

  Minda Meryl

  The Sex Squad

  Alfred Thought He Was Jean Cocteau

  The Supers’ Party

  The Aida Christmas

  Harry Thinks About Antony Tudor

  A Trip to Far Rockaway

  Illy Remembers George Platt Lynes

  Dancing with the Royal Ballet

  Fire Island

  Another Summer Season

  Illy in St. Vincent’s

  Whatever Happened to Belle-Mère and Levoy Ping?

  Sleeping with Rex Ames

  Harry Thinks About Sex

  Getting Rid of Illy

  The New Ballet

  Easter

  St. Thomas

  The Afterword

  Harry Thinks About Love

  Illy’s Death

  After-Afterword

  St. Vincent’s Hospital

  There was a very black nurse’s aide in a very pink dress seated near the foot of his bed. She said, “We have to keep someone with him all the time. He tried to kill himself, that’s why they brought him in.”

  I read the chart at the foot of his bed. Advanced lung cancer. One lung already removed. Seropositive for AIDS. “Shouldn’t he be in an oxygen tent?” I asked.

  “They’re bringing one right now,” she said.

  Siegfried turned his head and opened his eyes. “Hi, Harry,” he said. “Come to watch me die?”

  “He knows you, Doctor,” the nurse said.

  “And I know him,” I told her.

  “I didn’t plan to come visit you, Illy,” I said. “I just sort of stumbled upon you while making my rounds.”

  “You work here?” he sort of mumbled. “I didn’t even know you were a doctor.”

  “Can’t we hurry up that oxygen tent?” I said to the nurse.

  “I’ll go get it myself,” she said, and left.

  I went to stand by the bed and took Siegfried’s hand. Siegfried Ilquist. He had been very handsome when we were dancers together at the opera. The Metropolitan Opera. Thirty
years ago almost exactly. I left the opera in 1958. Now it’s almost 1990. Siegfried Ilquist was considered the handsomest man in New York. He thought his eyes were too small and wore dark glasses whenever he could. Then he was really handsome. He had a great nose–a perfect nose. And beautifully sculpted lips. It was all still pretty much there but covered in fine wrinkles. Like a beautiful statue worn by the sun and the wind. He smiled and squeezed my hand with his eyes shut, his face towards the ceiling. He knew I was looking at him. “Surveying the wreckage,” he would have said.

  He was wearing a hospital gown with little figures on it, tied at the back of the neck. With his eyes still shut, he said, “I disconnected my oxygen tank so I could end all this. But Anne found me and called the hospital. So here I am. Still on this earth.”

  “How is Anne?” I said. I tightened my grip on his hand. He was struggling to breathe. “She’s an advertising writer now,” he said. “And you’re a doctor. It’s a long way from Aida.”

  It was a long way. Illy and I had been sort-of lovers when we were at the opera. I don’t think we were really in love. I, at least, was really in love with Rex Ames. That was before I stopped dancing. Before I went to college. Before I became a doctor. Before a lot of things happened. It was before I was twenty years old, even. Homosexuality? It’s just something you get used to.

  The nurse came back with the interns and set up the tent, put the oxygen tanks in place, turned them on.

  The tanks hissed and Siegfried began to breathe more easily. The nurse put her arm under his shoulders and arranged his pillows; then she pulled him up into a more comfortable position. When she straightened the sheets, I saw how thin his legs were. Those once powerful thighs had dwindled to little more than skin over the femurs. Remembering when they were bronzed and powerful, I thought, Loving people is like loving clouds. His cock dangled down, darkened and small. I remembered that very well, too. Much bigger and wonderfully shaped. It fit the mouth as though the two were designed to fit together.

  When I look at people’s eyes sideways, they look like glass doll’s eyes, and I realize that we are just some kind of machine. How ridiculous it is to fall in love with someone’s penis.

  I straightened his blanket. “I’ll be back, Illy,” I said, “Take it easy. You’re all right now.” He smiled, his lids hooding his eyes. The way he’d always smiled. Something Asiatic about it. Keeping his thoughts to himself. His background was Norwegian. The distant Tartar blood showed a little in his tilted-up eyes with their sheltering lids, or would it be the Lapps from far-off Lapland?

  I walked home to Greenwich Street. Interesting theory, the dual universes. That somewhere there is another planet Earth with another New York and another Greenwich Street. I’ve already lived in that alternate New York. When I was a dancer, my mother and I lived on Sixteenth Street, just a few minutes’ walk from here. My lover Rex Ames once lived just down Bank Street, only a few doors from the corner where I now live in half of an almost Revolutionary-period house. When I used to go to Rex’s apartment, I passed my house but never saw it. We went to the movies together at the old Loew’s Sheridan, which was right across the street from St. Vincent’s. Held hands in the balcony while we watched I Want to Live. (This was pretty unusual and sentimental for Rex.) There was no clue that someday I would be stalking the halls of that same hospital. Now I walk through the same physical places, but different lives were lived there when I was under twenty. It’s almost as though they had been swept away. It’s unimaginable that one can be living in a completely different world yet in the very same place. At least they swept away Loew’s Sheridan. Replaced it with a place where they store garbage cans, I think. That is infinitely more modern.

  The other day, I passed the old building on Sixteenth Street where Mother and I lived, and it has been redone. A new brick facade. No more high iron-railed stoops. Nobody drops their garbage out of the third-floor window into the garbage cans in the street anymore, leaving bits of eggshell and orange rind on the windowsills all the way down. But I’m sure the same narrow little apartments are still inside. Squeezing other people’s hearts into something like a reasonable shape so they can survive on this planet.

  How I Became a Dancer

  We came to New York, my mother and I, when I was seventeen. Just seventeen. To pursue our careers in dance. My mother was the one who wanted to be a dancer. I was just along for the ride.

  My mother’s name was–is–Elizabeth. Everyone back in Michigan called her Betty. Once we left Michigan, she decided she wanted to be called Belle-Mère. She pronounced it Belle-Meer. To rhyme with “peer” and “sheer” and “leer.” And “queer.” Only when I was studying French in college later did I learn it meant “mother-in-law.” When I told her she said, “Who knows? Who cares? That’s the least of the things we did wrong.” We? I still don’t know how much she knows. I’m not going to ask her, that’s for sure.

  My mother was a Red Shoes victim. She did have long legs and red hair, I’ll give her that, but Moira Shearer she wasn’t. Unfortunately, she was thirty-six years old when she saw The Red Shoes, so she couldn’t even do a Zelda Fitzgerald. But, by God, she tried.

  We were from Whitehall, Michigan. The Potters arrived in Whitehall on the Lake Michigan shore at the time of the Civil War. That was my father’s family. My mother was a Glover. I guess the Glovers arrived about the same time, when it was just woods and Indians. When Elizabeth Glover married Harry Potter, it was just what the folks in Whitehall had expected.

  They evidently didn’t expect Harry to run off with Miss Whitehall when I was ten. She was one of the DeBeers girls. As my grandmother Glover used to say, not unkindly but factually, “She was one of those girls from down by the lake.” We lived on a bluff called Christian Hill. I think you get the idea.

  I didn’t see much of my father after he left town. I didn’t see much of him before. Like most fathers, he found having a family crushingly dull. My memories of him, when he was home, consist largely of him lying on the couch listening to baseball games and smoking. That he found interesting. I played baseball quite well in high school–I’m well coordinated–but I never found it interesting. I’m just not a spectator kind of guy. Even when I was a dancer, I enjoyed doing it but I never particularly liked to watch other people do it.

  I’m certain no one in Whitehall expected my mother to become a ballet fanatic. But she did. She dragged me to Detroit to see Roland Petit and Zizi Jeanmaire dance Carmen. I must have been twelve by then. It was pretty hot stuff for a preteen. I’d never seen anyone slide up and down someone else’s thighs in their underwear before. I haven’t often since. Well, that’s not true. Anyway, my mother didn’t seem to think it was too shocking for her child to see. She loved it.

  We followed that up by going to Chicago to see the New York City Ballet. Melissa Hayden in The Cage. More sliding up and down other people’s thighs. I think Belle-Mère might have started to get discouraged at this point except that Maria Tallchief danced a one-act Swan Lake the same evening. And that got Mother all worked up again.

  After that, we went back to Whitehall and she began reading. I remember an avalanche of books pouring across the dining room table. While I was studying Algebra for Beginners, she was reading Beaumont’s Book of Ballets. While my eyes were popping open over the big news about the Jukes and the Kallikaks in Biology 1, she was having to force her lids down a little, too, as she discovered what really went on between Nijinsky and Diaghilev. At least as Romola Nijinsky told it.

  Ballet bibliography must have been hard to find in the back-woods of Michigan in the early 1950s, but Belle-Mère managed it. I distinctly remember she was infatuated with Mathilde Kchessinska, an imperial ballerina. I asked her what it meant to be “the bauble of the Czar,” but she wasn’t answering. I knew damn well what it meant, I just wanted to bug her. Secretly, I’m sure she was crushed that there weren’t any more czars and that there was no hope of her becoming a bauble.

  During that winter, she began to tra
nsform her plans for a dancing career for herself to include me. I guess it became increasingly clear to her that to become a classical ballet dancer, one had to start young.

  I knew something was in the wind when I came home after a freshman basketball game with Rothbury (we lost twenty-seven to eight). She had been to the game and seen me in my baggy shorts. She said, “You’ve got nice legs, Harry.” I’m Harry Junior. “You’ve got my side of the family’s legs. We all have nice legs. Your grandmother still has nice legs, and she’s in her sixties.”

  I had never thought about having nice legs before. Not many boys in Whitehall High had, I would guess. I ventured, “Yeah, but I’ve got big feet.”

  “You’re still young,” she said. “You’ll grow up to your feet and out of your pimples.”

  Her next step was the purchase of a “Do It Yourself” book on ballet. It was by Zachary Solov, whom we were to know much better later. Then we couldn’t have dreamed that someday we would know him. Zachary’s book involved complicated photographs of a slightly overweight young woman in zebra-striped all-over tights. They were kind of stream-of-movement pictures so you could see exactly what she was doing in plié, rond de jambe, frappé, développé, the works. And there was a record that went with it. If you were willing to apply yourself, you could figure out precisely what movements went with what music and you could do a barre. Which we did.

  I was a strange kid. I was playing football, basketball, and baseball. Football not well-I was too slender and couldn’t really run fast–but the other sports not badly. I had promise. I also loved to dance and went to the high-school dances and danced with every girl there. Plain ones, fat ones, pretty ones, popular ones. I was really too young to be dating, but all the girls liked to dance with me because I could dance well. We did something called the Finale then. A kind of jitterbugging. And the two-step. I could waltz and polka, too. Where I learned those, I can’t imagine. I must have seen them done somewhere. Not on television, of course; this was pre-television for most of the families in Whitehall. Some people had them, but not necessarily the wealthiest. Most people regarded television as they did Coca-Cola, Hershey bars, and Cadillacs. They existed but were unnecessary luxuries.