At the age of seventeen my brother joined the Coast Guard, a program requiring six months of active duty and then a period of time in the reserves. The spring of 1960 he shipped off to The Coast Guard Academy in Cape May, New Jersey, for basic training, leaving his girlfriend of four years and now fiancé, Nanci Bostrom, under my care so to speak. Nanci and I did pal around together a lot that summer, and she was always taking me to fun places like the stock car races and amusement parks. She was going to be a great sister-in-law, or so I thought.
Also that summer my parents, Nanci, and I made a trip to New Jersey to visit my brother. Except for the Coast Guard Academy, Cape May was a staid and wealthy ocean side community sporting very expensive homes, the exact opposite of its honky-tonk neighbour, Wildwood. We were staying in Wildwood, and all the way there—rather than focusing on visiting my brother—Nanci and I were making plans for all the fun were we going to have in Wildwood. We enjoyed both, visiting Jay in Cape May and the boardwalk in Wildwood; that fall Jay and Nanci were married. It was a very small shotgun wedding, a party of eight, just parents and siblings. I was the best man.
Warwick Veterans Memorial High School had a student body of over 3000. When I enrolled in September of 1960 my life there seemed less traumatic, it was easier for me to hide in the crowd. Surviving the tenth grade without incident—except for almost cutting a finger off on the band saw in shop class, much to the chagrin of my father who said, “I taught you better than that!"—I was looking forward to spring break, when I would be taking a solo bus trip to Maryland. My brother and his pregnant wife had moved to Silver Springs, where Jay was attending the National Institute of Dry Cleaning (yes, there is such a place) and I was going to visit for five days.
The bus first stopped in New York City, after which the next stop was Philadelphia. In New York a man, probably in his early thirties, boarded the bus and sat next to me. We had quite a conversation all the way to Philadelphia, his destination. Upon arrival he suggested that I break journey there, have dinner with him, and afterward he would drive me to Washington (of which Silver Springs is a suburb). Some instinct told me to give this offer a pass, although it would be a few years later before I figured out what that was probably about.
My next seat companion was a beautiful and sexy twenty-one-year old woman from Woonsocket, Rhode Island. We hit it off really well during the trip, and by the time we arrived in Washington we had become fast friends, exchanged telephone numbers, and agreed to get in touch once we were both back in Rhode Island. As we walked into the bus station I was carrying her bags as well as mine, and when my brother first saw me he thought I had brought a lot of luggage for one boy for five days. When he realized that I was with Francesca his eyes just about popped out of his head. A story he enjoyed retelling for quite some time.
Francesca and I did get together a few times back in Rhode Island, but May/December romances are difficult, even when they are more like June/August. And, of course, we were just friends, because as hot as she was it had no impact on me. She was just a lot of fun and really nice to a kid six years her junior. It did have my brother freaking out for a while though, which was hilarious. Little did he know that four years later he would have been thrilled if I hooked up with a woman like Francesca, or any woman for that matter.
Back at school the remainder of the semester dragged on, and I was anxious for the summer of 1961 to begin. With my brother out of the way, at fifteen I had inherited his snazzy blue speedboat, which gave me access to all of Salt Pond and its sister Potter‘s Pond. No more three horsepower putt-putt for me. Once ensconced at the beach house that June two rather coincidental events occurred....
First, I noticed a very good-looking fellow about my age who looked like Tab Hunter (everyone thought that he was a dead ringer). He was staying at the rental cottage across from the traffic rotary in Jerusalem. After a day or two of stalking and manoeuvring, I managed to orchestrate the crossing of our paths. Subsequently Clyde Pignolet and I became friends. He lived in Wakefield, the small town about seven miles from Jerusalem, with his mother and older sister. He was staying at the beach for two weeks with his father who lived in Hawaii.
The next event occurred while cruising in my speedboat around the north end of Salt Pond at Wakefield. Spotting two fellows in a sailboat, a handsome blond and a real cute redhead (think Prince William and Prince Harry, ten years ago), I lurked about for a while but it did me no good. Before I was able to finagle a meeting they had sailed back into a cove, never having taken note of me at all.
Ah, well, such is life. After Clyde returned to Wakefield I spent a lot of time visiting, and was soon introduced to two of his friends, a handsome blond named Alan Will, and his year younger brother, a real cute redhead named Chris; the two boys from the sailboat. There is a God. That fall my parents and I made the usual trips to the beach house for the weekends, during which I spent most of my time in Wakefield with Clyde, Allan, and Chris, as well as another boy of no interest called Pudgy (he wasn‘t).
When I turned fifteen my brother and I had each chipped in twenty-five dollars, and bought an old jalopy to fix up, a 1940 Chevrolet convertible with a power roof (the power not original). I learned to drive on that car between our big back yard and my grandparents’ next door, but by the time I got my license the following year, November of 1961, we discovered that the Chevy had a cracked block. It was sold, Jay bought a new Hillman Husky, and I got his 1953 Chevrolet four door sedan, which I had painted a 1957 Chevrolet colour called Tropical Turquoise. With my own wheels and nothing going for me junior year at my own school, I spent just about every weekend in Wakefield and became more or less an honorary member of the student body at South Kingstown High School.
While visiting Wakefield I had always stayed at Clyde’s, but for some reason I wasn’t able to do so one weekend, and stayed with Alan and Chris instead. Their remodelled attic bedroom ran the full length of the house, with their twin beds at one end and a spare bed at the other. This was a better arrangement because at Clyde’s very small two bedroom home my sojourns always left his sister sleeping on the living room sofa, so from that point on I became the brothers’ regular weekend guest. For the remainder of the school year I spent just about every weekend in Wakefield.
During the time that I stayed with Alan and Chris, a close friendship had begun to develop between me and their parents, particularly with their father—a professor at the University of Rhode Island and head of the theatre department. One weekend Mrs Will asked if I’d mind sleeping on the daybed in the library, as she had not made up the bed in the boys’ room. That didn’t seem like a problem until ... in the middle of the night I was awakened by Professor Will sitting on the side of my bed, caressing and fondling me. My memory is trying to convince me that it was more affectionate than sexual, but my memory may be trying to rewrite history. It was, nonetheless, discomforting. When I told him to stop he apologized, and I assumed that that was the end of it.
The next time I arrived for a weekend stay, Mrs Will gave me a choice of the library or the boys’ room. Feeling it safer to be with the boys, I chose the latter. However, in the wee hours of the morning Professor Will was at my bedside again, expressing affection so to speak, with his own sons (who I later found out were adopted, which is probably not relevant) sleeping not more than twenty feet away. I turned my back to him and he left, and then I stayed away for a few weekends. He apparently got the message, as that was the end of his inappropriate nocturnal dalliances. Nonetheless, my friendship with him and Mrs Will continued unscathed, and I did remain rather close to Professor Will (emotionally, not physically) for quite some time.
Before the summer of 1962 my parents had sold our house on the beach, including the little house, but did keep the rental cottage down the street for our use (eventually my father retired there). My visits to Wakefield became less frequent, as I was working almost full time at Pawtuxet Paint and Hardware, and my mother was working full time in better dresses at Gladding’s Garden City, much to my father's chagrin ... at the time he was not working. He had been forced out of Louttit by the brothers’ college educated sons, and then spent a couple of years at Louttit’s competitor, Colonial, but that did not go well. Having become accustomed to being the head honcho, a lesser role did not work for him.
Back at school, my senior year at Warwick Vets things were looking up. Much to my surprise, I was invited to the birthday party of the most popular girl in school, the one with the biggest tits. She was the best friend of the girl that John Harris was dating (I believe his only experiment with heterosexuality, not that it ever involved sexuality). When she first asked me I inquired if I should bring a date, but she said she was hoping that I would be her date. Well, gee, sure. We were an item for a short while, which attracted a new kind of attention to me ... horny teenage boy envy.
As enjoyable as that was, when my parents bought a business in Connecticut, Union Launderers & Cleaners, I was more than eager to leave the school system that had been my nemesis since I was five. So I took a pass on their offer to let me stay with an aunt to complete my senior year in Warwick, and we moved to the first floor of a two family house on Linwood Street (ADDRESS #3) in New Britain, decidedly a step down domicile wise. Despite being eager for a blank canvas upon which to paint my new persona, my first look at the exterior of that city’s high school was all that it took for me to reject it. We then scouted around and checked out the high schools in adjacent towns, and I selected the one in Newington where we had friends whose address I could use to feign residence and gain admittance.
Without all of the preconceptions that had been conceived in the first grade and had haunted me since, in this virgin environment I was instantly popular and ended up hanging out with the cool kids, the avant-garde. The ones at the centre of school society, the ones most academically advanced ... the ones smoking pot. That spring we’d frequently go to a place called Beckley’s, an old quarry about a mile’s trek into the woods. There we’d lay in the sun on the grassy bank that hung over the edge of the seemingly bottomless water filled pit—swimming, drinking beer, smoking English Ovals and weed. Sometimes a couple of the guys would climb through the woods to the cliff on the other side, where they would slide down a steep ten foot high embankment to the edge about twenty-five feet or so above the water. Once on the ledge there was no way to climb back up, no turning back, the only option was to jump.
One day I must have had too much brew or smoke, or both, because I decided to give it a try, not realizing it was a mistake until I had reached that point of no return; with nowhere to go but down, I jumped. When I regained consciousness I found myself draped over a big log which was being towed to shore. They told me that I had hit the water more or less butt first, went under, came up once, and then went back down ... at which time the teenage pot heads came to my rescue.
Sustaining no injuries except for a sore buttocks, I had become part of high school legend, and even made it into the ‘predictions’ section of the yearbook, the prophecy being that I’d never try Beckley’s again. They got that right. The yearbook also included my alleged favourite expression, “Let’s go to the pawty!” as many found my Rhode Island accent an absolute hoot. Thankfully it was always in the manner of good natured ribbing, and not the malicious abuse to which I had previously been accustomed.
Quarry folly aside, my year at Newington High was the only school year that I had ever actually enjoyed. Without the fear that had become my constant companion in the past, I seemed to flourish and attained a modicum of self-confidence and self-respect. Nonetheless, I graduated by the skin of my teeth, although I had never been more than a mediocre student. In order to be accepted at university I repeated my senior year at Cheshire Academy, a private preparatory school for boys in Cheshire, Connecticut, whose main claim to fame is that it is ten miles from Choate which the Kennedy boys had attended. First though I was required to attend Cheshire’s summer school as a day student, before I would be admitted as a boarding student in the fall.
By this time my brother had pretty much taken over the running of Union Laundry, my father’s drinking rendering him virtually incompetent, and Jay was a tyrant. As well as a rage-oholic who frequently beat me, which had started years earlier and escalated—especially by this time, fuelled by the fact that I was a footloose and fancy free teenage student, while at twenty he had been married for three years and had two daughters. Now he was a terror, and at times dangerous. Sometimes just looking at him the wrong way would set him off, and frequently he would take me by the shoulders or throat and repeatedly bang my head against a brick wall of the laundry.
After such episodes I would always respond, completely dry eyed and level voiced, “Do you feel better now? Did that make you feel like a man? Why not do it some more, be a real man!“ At times he did. Yet all of those years that I was a whipping boy for his and my father’s rage and violence, they could never get to me, no matter what they did. Practically to his dying day my father would tell people, still marvelling, that no matter what he did to me, no matter how much he beat me, I would never cry. That I’d always respond in that eerie hollow voice, “Feel better now?” “Feel like a man?“ or words to that effect. Emotionally I had shut down at a very early age, my feelings buried dreadfully deep. No one could get to me . . . at least not with physical abuse.
Moving on. Early that summer some of my friends from Newington were attending a six week program at Trinity College in Hartford, and I became quite adept at creating plausible excuses to extricate myself from my brother’s clutches, freeing myself from work at the laundry so that after my classes at Cheshire I could hang out at Trinity. There I met a gaggle of interesting new people, including Harris Friedberg, a former Newington student.
He had transferred to Suffield Academy two years earlier, after being expelled from Newington High. A beautiful poem that he wrote had been printed in the school newspaper, at which time it became obvious that the first letter of each line spelled out ‘GOD DAMN BORQUE’ Newington’s vice-principle. Harris was the smartest and most gifted person that I had ever known, and he was not at Trinity as a student. He was in fact teaching a class there, and a couple of his students were teachers that he had had at Suffield. That fall of 1963 he became a freshman at Harvard ... he was sixteen.
Harris and I became fast friends, and I actually facilitated his loss of virginity. Not personally, he was dating a girl at Trinity. He was an only child, and lived with his parents in a stunning contemporary home on a hillside in the woods of an exclusive Newington enclave. When his parents were away for a few days he wanted to bring the girl home for an overnight. Not wanting the neighbours to see her going into or out of the house, concerned that it might get back to his parents, I drove both of them there one afternoon (the girl hunkered down on the floor as we got near) and upon arrival I pulled into the garage. Mission accomplished—my part at least, the rest was up to them. The next day the ruse was repeated in reverse. No doubt she got more than I ever did, but that was not for lack of opportunity ... just my obtuseness.
One afternoon Harris and I had his house to ourselves, and we were in the family room watching television. He kicks back on the sofa and stretches out, throws his hands behind his head, and reposes there ever so available, seductive even, at which point he announced, “I could really go for a blow job.” Okay, well, maybe in front of someone else that could be construed as an idle thought, but in front of your openly gay friend? It was obviously an invitation, too bad that I was about as thick as the Great Wall of China.
It’s not that Harris was a hunk or anything; I certainly didn’t classify him as good-looking. For a visual, Ichabod Crane comes to mind (though not the Ichabod played by Johnny Depp in the movie). Harris was a skinny and downright gangly young fellow with unruly dark red hair and a pale complexion, but even in those days I had a taste for what we now call geeks, not just the handsome jocks. And I was so overwhelmed by Harris that there wasn’t anything I wouldn’t have done for him, even “that” but it would have been only my second time. It was some time later before I realized the import of that afternoon, and kicked myself for missing that chance.
As further testament to my teenage density, many years later I would be apprised of another missed opportunity. One evening in 1982, while squeezing my way through a crowded Boston bar, a voice spoke into my ear, “How is everything in Rhode Island?” Doing a double take, I stopped in my tracks and turned to see this tall blond fellow smiling at me. “How do you know that I’m from Rhode Island?” I queried. Still smiling he said, “I thought you would end up back there.” Further conversation revealed that this was Kent Gardner, a junior at Cheshire when I was a senior.
After reminiscing a bit he said, “You were a real dumb kid!” “What?” “Remember when I would invite you to my room to have brownies that my mother sent?” “Yes.” “That was never about the brownies! You didn’t pick up on any of my moves, you were clueless!” “Oh.” In truth, despite missing the overtures, I might have been more responsive but the teenage Kent wasn’t that interesting to me. Not so the mid-thirties man. Suffice it to say that it may have taken almost two decades, but that night Kent got what he wanted ... without the allure of brownies!
Back to the summer ‘63. The most memorable part of my Trinity summer was my friendship with Barry Rudd. Having spotted him from afar, I used every trick in the book to get closer (see a pattern here?). We became friends. We became very good friends. We slept together. We showered together. We spent as much time as possible together, and we were not at all shy about hugging in public or other physical contact. There was no question that we were in love, and neither of us would have denied it. It was a love affair of which legends are made, except for one itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny complication.... Barry was straight and didn’t know that I was gay (and no, he wasn‘t deaf, dumb and blind).
At the end of the Trinity program in August, Barry returned to Scarsdale, New York. We kept in constant contact by phone and mail, and sometimes I would spend a weekend in Scarsdale. One of his letters included a poem that read, “Absence is to love, like wind to a fire. It enhances the strong, and extinguishes the weak.” Ours was enhanced and, although Barry was an honours student and had his choice of many universities, when he heard that I was going to Boston University he enrolled at Northeastern so that we could be together. Sadly, a couple of months after our arrival in Boston I told Barry that I was ‘gay’—he immediately dropped out of school and returned to New York. Over the next year or so we made a few of attempts to salvage a friendship, but the rift was terminal. The innocence of our love was tainted by my orientation, and that love was so strong that a lesser friendship was simply not feasible. It still breaks my heart.
Back to 1963. The student body at Cheshire included a large Latin American contingent, and it was from them that I learned my first Spanish word that wasn‘t in the textbooks … maricon, which means ‘queer.’ They got that right. By this time I had embraced my proclivities, discretion be damned! My constant companion was the big hardcover edition of John Rechy’s landmark City of Night; the controversial novel based on his experiences as a male prostitute, which included a character named Lance.
To add to my aura, frequently I could be found in the old town cemetery writing, sitting on the grass with my portable typewriter on a granite bench. Despite severe arthritis my grandmother was a crocheting addict, and every time I returned to school after visiting her, the pocket above the school crest on my regulation navy blue blazer would be sporting the latest crocheted lacy hanky that she always gave me for my “girlfriend”. There it would stay for at least a few days. Maricon? You betcha!
Despite having been involved in theatre from a very young age, privately tutored in drama and speech as early as fifth grade (another one of the rabbits that my mother had pulled out the hat, for her little boy who was different), at Cheshire I gave extracurricular activities a pass. Nonetheless, I was ultimately recruited by the drama club to take one of the leads in the senior play, A Midsummers Night’s Dream. No one was willing to play the role of Oberon, King of the Fairies, and they figured that I would not have a problem with that. They were right. This involvement rekindled my affection for the theatre and gave direction to my future.
The production went well, but not without a some glitches. Cliff Holtzclaw, who played Puck, was hardly able to remember three words of any of his lines, so I spent a lot of time coaching him (which wasn’t a sacrifice because I had a crush on him), then prompting him from the side-lines and during the scenes that we played together. The boys from the Junior School played all the little fairies, and on opening night they were congregated very nervously outside the auditorium. No problem. I gave each a Phenobarbital, not realizing at the time that I was dispensing schedule four barbiturates to minors. Actually, I didn’t think anything of it, because I had been taking Phenobarbital and Miltown for years, adult tranquilizers provided in abundance by my father; no doubt choosing to sedate me rather than deal with me. Well, that night we ended up with a stage full of very groggy little fairies.
One of the teachers at Cheshire was French and had been a playwright in Paris. He agreed to help me prepare my auditions for acceptance as an acting major at Boston University’s School of Fine and Applied Arts, Department of Theater—one of only two undergraduate theatre programs in the country at the time, the other at Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon) in Pittsburgh. Each evening I would get a pass to leave my dorm and go to his apartment to rehearse.
On the third night he “coached” me with a little more than my audition material. It was my first sexual encounter with a man who was actually gay, although the sexual aspect was not at all mutual. Quite frankly, he gave me a blow job. It was my first one. I liked it. A lot! Subsequent evenings our coaching sessions always ended that way, and I seem to remember a weekend or two in New York City as well. Nonetheless, during our entire association the physical part was never romantic or mutual, and in the end I still had never kissed a man.
During this time I was having some doubts about my orientation, not doubts so much but just needing some confirmation. So I scheduled a meeting with Mr Ford, the biggest ‘queen’ on Cheshire’s facility, and he gave me a referral. The next weekend at home I told my mother that I wanted to see a psychotherapist, and she asked me why. When I told her I couldn’t tell her she said, “Then I can’t help you.” So I told her that I thought I was homosexual ("gay" still meant "happy" back then). The next week I started seeing the therapist. During our sessions he repeatedly told me that I reminded him of Laurence of Arabia, which at the time I only knew as a movie that I didn’t understand. Now I get it.
A subsequent weekend at home my mother told me that her hairdresser was "that way" and that he had a good business, a "special friend" and a nice home. When she asked me what I would do if I found out that I was "that way" I said I’d probably find a nice boy and settled down. The sessions with Dr Redmond dragged on, and finally he said that all it would take to get me “straightened right out” was a few sessions with my mother. Typical old school psychology—it’s the mother’s fault. Hold your horses, Doc! My goal was to find out if I am homosexual. If I’m not, then I needed to stop thinking and doing the things that I have been thinking and doing. If I was, well then, cool ... I’ll just carry on! That was the last I saw of Dr Redmond, and when my mother asked why I had stopped seeing him I assured her that my issues had been cleared up.
During that school year at Cheshire I spent a few weekends in Boston—Cambridge actually, visiting Harris at Harvard, and Tufts University in Medford visiting another Newington friend, John McClure, and his girlfriend Rita, whom he had met at Trinity that summer. The beer always flowed freely, so there is a lot that I don’t remember. Yet I do remember dating a gal named Liz Loeb, the niece of Richard Loeb who, along with Nathan Leopold, committed the infamous 1924 abduction and murder of fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks. Their history making trial resulted in life sentences and not the death penalty, thanks to the brilliance of Clarence Darrow.
Some weekends were also spent with Barry in Scarsdale, and we’d frequently take the train into New York City and hang out in The Village. We mostly frequented ‘gay’ bars as they usually didn’t card, Barry was only seventeen, and we were always running into Tiny Tim who really freaked us out. This was before he had gained his fame tiptoeing through the tulips, and we could never figure out if he was a man or a woman. Then he hit the big time with a gig at Julius‘—a ‘gay’ bar famous for all the years of dirt hanging from its ceiling—and before we knew it Tiny was tiptoeing onto the Johnny Carson show, marrying Miss Vicky, and then dying. We knew him when.
One week I spent on the road in my mother’s station wagon, mattress in the back, first visiting Alan Bernstein at a camp in upstate New York where he was a counsellor. We had become friendly at Cheshire towards the end of the school year—yes, another unrequited crush (although I think it could have happened had I not been so uncertain); then on to Silver Springs, Maryland, for a few days to visit John McClure’s girlfriend, Rita. It was in front of The White House that she taught me how to parallel park. Imagine that, parking in front of The White House. In addition, after a life changing rite-of-passage one crazy weekend in Provincetown, that little tip of Cape Cod became my favourite destination.
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