By the way I reacted William knew he had blundered and he tried to fix it, only making it worse. “Brian, it’s okay. I’ve known for almost as long as I’ve known you, and so has the rest of the family.”
Stunned, I asked, “Everyone?”
“Yup.”
“Since I was little?”
“Yup.”
“Why hasn’t anybody ever said anything to me?” By then I was angry and crying.
He took me by the arm and said, “C’mon, let’s go inside. I guess it’s time for a family meeting.”
In the living room he seated me on the couch and called the rest of the family. Everyone except my sister, who had stayed in Amherst, came in, wondering what was going on.
William suggested that everybody sit down. My mother, who could see I was crying, sat beside me, and even though she had no idea why I was upset, put her arm around my shoulders as I sort of melted into her.
“I guess I’ve created a problem,” William said. “When I met Brian outside, I jokingly asked him how my favorite fairy was and he was shocked. When I told him the whole family knew, he burst into tears. I guess I’m sorry that I said what I did, but it’s probably more than time that we all talked about it with Brian.”
My mother hugged me, just saying, “Oh dear.”
In a very weak voice I asked, “You all know?” They all nodded. “How long have you known?”
Mom said, “I was quite sure when you were about 4 years old. You didn’t seem to be interested in things the other boys were, like toy soldiers and trucks. You were more interested in dressing up and playacting.”
William added, “I think it was the dressing up that first got my attention.”
“Don’t all boys dress up?” I asked.
“Sure, but most boys are more likely to dress as soldiers or cowboys. You were always interested in capes and frilly stuff and even some of our sister’s old dresses.”
By then I was growing angry. “And none of you ever said anything to me! You all just talked and joked about it when I wasn’t around! Why didn’t anyone say anything to me? Here I’ve been trying to pretend I was like the rest of you, and it was hard. I was so afraid. And now I find you’ve kept it from me for years.” Then my tears came again.
My mother quietly rubbed my back and finally said, “I guess I thought I didn’t want you to worry about it. I just wanted you to be yourself, but now I see that by our not saying anything we kept you from being yourself. I’m sorry.” The others murmured their agreement.
Finally I said, “I think I want to be alone.” I got off the couch and went up to my bedroom, where I threw myself on my bed and bawled and bawled until I had nothing left.
I must have dozed off, because the next thing I knew, there was a quiet knock on my door. “Can I come in?” William asked. I opened the door and returned to my bed, where he sat beside me.
I have to say that William was my favorite sibling. He was the one who always seemed to understand me, and I looked up to him because he was strong, and fun, and he had a lot of friends.
He hugged me and said, “I’m so sorry this came as such a shock to you. You’re right. We should have said something years ago, at least before your hormones kicked in and made things more confusing for you. You have every right to be angry, and none of us blames you for that. Now we just want to know what we can do to help you.”
I shook my head, saying, “I have no idea.” Then a thought panicked me again. “Do you think the kids at school know?” I tried to think of things I’d said or done that might have given them a clue.
“I doubt it,” he said. “I think if they suspected, someone would have said something to you. Who’s your best friend right now?”
“Parker.”
“Has he said anything? Do you think he knows?”
“He hasn’t said anything, but I think, if he suspected, he would have asked or something. I don’t imagine he wants to be known as the friend of a queer.”
“Don’t think that way,” William said. “I have queer friends and we all know It, and everybody’s okay with it. Oh, sometimes someone outside our group makes a snide comment, but most of them have learned not to tangle with the group. Of course, you don’t have a group yet, but you probably will in time. Meanwhile, try not to worry about what other people are thinking.”
“That’s not so easy,” I said, giving a little smile.
“I know. Kids your age always worry about what other kids are thinking; it just goes with the territory. But if you can survive for a while, you’ll grow out of it. Meanwhile, if you have problems, you need to go to Mom and Dad, and if you think it’s something you don’t want to talk about with them, you can always call me. I’m here for you and I’ll come home anytime you need me.”
I thanked him and said that I needed to think about things alone for a while. I stayed in my room the rest of the afternoon. I thought about calling Parker or going to his house, but I had no idea what I’d say to him, so I just sat until Mom called me for dinner.
Dinner began on the quiet side. It was like nobody knew what to say. Finally I asked my other brother, Wayne, how his drive from New Bedford was. He answered and everyone seemed to relax a bit, knowing that I wasn’t going on being angry. I mean, who could be angry at my family for long?
At the end of the meal, as I stood up to go, I said, “I love you all and I know you love me too.” And I left with a smile on my face.
By the next morning I realized I was relieved that my family knew. I didn’t have to pretend with them anymore. I could just be myself.
But I also knew that I was going to have to continue to pretend at school. I couldn’t bear the thought of the other kids learning my secret.
Through the rest of the school year I continued to be on edge and anxious in school, but nobody said a word. Even in the showers, where boys often made remarks about “fairies” or “pansies,” nothing was said to indicate that the other boys knew.
Of course, newspaper and magazine articles about queers in government occasionally appeared through the summer. Most of them played up the notion that queers were security risks because of the possibility of blackmail. When reporting on numbers of men who had been dismissed from their jobs, the articles would say that it appeared that in many cases guilt was assumed by association rather than by admission or direct evidence. Soon, they began to call the events in Washington “The Lavender Scare.” None of the articles reported anyone being dismissed because he had given away national secrets.
Over the summer, I learned that Parker was as interested in the news as I was, but he only had access to the Cape Cod paper, so I began saving the Boston and Washington papers when my family was through with them and giving them to him. Most of our conversations concerned politics and the imminent presidential election. It seemed that both parties were trying to woo General Eisenhower, who had become incredibly popular by the end of the war. Ike, however, had said very little and nobody knew, if he ran, which party he would choose.
Summer vacation came and with it the lazy days of playing ball, going to the beach, and sometimes visiting other towns or relatives. Parker and I biked to the beach nearly every day. In those days there were high school kids the town had hired as lifeguards, but most of the time they had little to do except watch. I thought it must be a pretty boring job, but I enjoyed seeing the boys’ muscular bodies. There was one blond senior whom I had always thought was cute, but I was too shy to even say hi to him.
It was only a mile or so to the beach and the roads weren’t very busy. They were typical Cape roads of the time with no curbs and no sidewalks. Pedestrians walked in the streets, and drivers were usually careful. Of course, nobody wore bicycle helmets in those days. I don’t even know if they existed.
Parker and I always went single file on the roads. One day, as we were riding to the beach, Parker looked back to say something to me. As he turned towards me, his front wheel went off the pavement and into the soft sand. The bicycle flipped sideways and Parker flew off. He hit his head on the sand and lay stunned for a few moments, while I stood beside him.
A passing car stopped. The driver got out and came over to us. He was nobody we knew, probably a summer tourist. He asked Parker if he was okay, and Parker sat up, shook his head gingerly and said he thought he was. The man reached out and took Parker’s arm to help him up. Parker jerked away from the man and exclaimed, “Let go of me! What are you, a faggot?”
The man immediately let go, said he was just trying to help, and went back to his car.
I stood frozen in place. Now I knew what Parker thought of homosexuals and it frightened me.
Slowly, Parker got up and checked himself over. He had a few bumps and scrapes but no broken bones. He said his head was really hurting and he wanted to go back home. I rode with him, watching him carefully. When we got to his house, he looked at me and said, “I’m sorry. I don’t know where that business about faggots came from. I don’t really hate queers. I wish I could find that man and apologize.”
Parker was fine the next day, so we returned to the beach, where we swam and sunbathed. We had brought our lunches and we stayed most of the day. Sunscreen was not used very much in those days, and we just burned and then tanned. Because Parker’s skin was so fair, even though he often wore a T-shirt, he burned at first, but he put sunburn lotion on the burns and thought no more about it. By the end of the second vacation week we were both so tanned that burning wasn’t an issue.
One afternoon when we were on the beach building a fort in the sand, we heard a scream and then the lifeguards started shouting, “Sharks! Sharks!” They were pretty brave because they both ran into the water to get the boy who had been bitten.
Sharks were not very common near shore in those days. On the rare occasions when one ventured in near the beach, its fin was usually spotted and the alarm was sounded. But in this case, nobody had seen the fin until the shark attacked. Of course, at the first cry, everybody had quickly rushed out of the water.
When the victim was brought to shore, we saw that it was Roger, a boy we knew from school. His thigh was torn and bleeding badly. While someone drove to the nearest phone, the lifeguards tried to rig a makeshift tourniquet on his leg. We stood by, feeling helpless, and then Parker ran to the edge of the beach grass and vomited. I wasn’t far behind him. Finally, the ambulance came and took Roger off to the hospital in Hyannis.
Everyone on the beach began to drift away quietly. Parker and I got our bikes and rode to my house, where we told Mom what had happened. That evening she called around and found out that Roger had survived the ride to the hospital, where the doctors did what they could before sending him by ambulance up to a hospital in Boston. A week later, we learned that the doctors had been able to save Roger’s leg but that he had lost a good deal of muscle in his thigh.
Of course, what had happened didn’t keep us away from the beach, but it did make us much more careful.
The days we weren’t at the beach, most of us were at the field next to the skating pond playing baseball. These were pickup games and boys came and left during the day. Nobody really kept score. The only ground rule we had was that any ball hit into the pond was an automatic out.
We didn’t have a lot of fancy equipment in those days. Boys who had them brought their bats, some of which had been broken and repaired. The balls we played with were old. Some of them had lost their covers and were wrapped with electricians’ tape. When a ball got too old to use, the owner would unwrap the yarn inside just for fun and cut away the rubber under the yarn until he got all the way down to the cork core. We had no cleats and just played in sneakers. Catchers wore no face masks or other protection and used regular fielding gloves. Of course, we had no batting helmets. Our gloves were well worn and treasured for years. Since most of us discarded our shirts and just played in shorts, we used T-shirts for bases.
I wasn’t a good player, so when I arrived at the field, I just joined a team. Parker, on the other hand, who was as good at baseball as he was at skating and other sports, was always coveted by both teams. He was a pitcher, of course, and I for one never got a hit off him. When he realized that the game was becoming one-sided, Parker would stop pitching after a couple of innings and go play in the outfield. Whenever he batted, the outfielders on the opposing team moved far back. In the late afternoon, we would pick up our equipment and our shirts and walk home.
One day near the end of the summer, I had a newspaper article that I wanted to share with Parker, so at the end of the game I invited him to my house. We went up to my bedroom and I found the article and gave it to him. Both of us were shirtless because we knew we would shower before dinner.
As he sat reading, I couldn’t help but admire his sexy body. I breathed in his boyish, sweaty scent and began to grow hard. When he finished reading, he looked at me for a moment before leaning over and kissing me on my neck.
I tried to quiet the churning of both fear and delight in me before I said anything.
When I could finally speak, I asked, “Why did you do that?”
He didn’t answer for a moment. Then he said, “I have no idea. It was just impulsive.”
“Are you queer?”
“Absolutely not.”
My growing excitement was dashed and I said, “Neither am I.” Of course, that was a lie, but I certainly wasn’t about to tell him the truth.
“I guess I’d better leave,” he said, getting up. I followed him down the stairs and to the front door, where he turned and asked, “Are you mad at me?”
“Of course not. Like you said, it was just impulsive.” He nodded and left, while I went upstairs to take my shower.
Damn, I thought, for just a minute I was so hopeful.
That night I lay in bed, with my hand on my cock, picturing Parker’s naked chest and then, in my imagination, removing his shorts and underwear, exposing his rampant cock.
When I finished jerking off and cleaning myself, I sighed, lay back, and tried to sleep, but sleep would not come, and I lay awake until the early hours of the morning, thinking about what could have been but wasn’t.