Then, turning from me to our friends—his friends, for the most part; both in Vienna and later, back in New York, most of Larry’s friends were older than I was—Larry would say, “Bill is a fiction writer, but he writes in the first-person voice in a style that is tell-all confessional; in fact, his fiction sounds as much like a memoir as he can make it sound.”
Then, turning back to me—just me, as if we were alone—Larry would say, “Yet you insist on anachronisms, dear Bill—in the sixties, the top and bottom words are anachronisms.”
That was Larry; that was how he talked—he was always right. I learned not to argue about the smaller stuff. I would say, “Yes, Professor,” because if I’d said he was mistaken, that he had absolutely used the top and bottom words, Larry would have made another crack about my being from Vermont, or he would have shot the breeze about my saying I was a pitcher when, all along, I’d looked like a catcher to him. (Didn’t everyone think I looked like a catcher? Larry would usually ask his friends.)
The poet Lawrence Upton was of that generation of older gay men who basically believed that most gay men were bottoms, no matter what they said—or that those of us who said we were tops would eventually be bottoms. Since Larry and I met in Vienna, our enduring disagreement concerning exactly what was said on our first “date” was further clouded by what many Europeans felt in the sixties, and still feel today—namely, that we Americans make entirely too much of the top-or-bottom business. The Europeans have always believed we were too rigid about these distinctions, as if everyone gay is either one or the other—as some young, cocksure types tell me nowadays.
Larry—who was a bottom, if I ever knew one—could be both petulant and coy about how misunderstood he was. “I’m more versatile than you are!” he once said to me, in tears. “You may say you also like women, or you pretend that you do, but I’m not the truly inflexible one in this relationship!”
By the late seventies, in New York, when we were still seeing each other but no longer living together—Larry called the seventies the “Blissful Age of Promiscuity”—you could only be absolutely sure of someone’s sexual role in those overobvious leather bars, where a hankie in the back left pocket meant you were a top, and a hankie in the back right pocket signified that you were a bottom. A blue hankie was for fucking, a red one was for fist-fucking—well, what does it matter anymore? There was also that utterly annoying signal concerning where you clipped your keys—to the belt loop to the right or left of the belt buckle on your jeans. In New York, I paid no attention to where I clipped my keys; I was always getting hit on by some signal-conscious top, and I was a top! (It could be irritating.)
Even in the late seventies, almost a decade after gay liberation, the older gays—I mean not only older than me but also older than Larry—would complain about the top-or-bottom advertising. (“Why do you guys want to take all the mystery away? Isn’t the mystery an exciting part of sex?”)
I liked to look like a gay boy—or enough like one to make other gay boys, and men, look twice at me. But I wanted the girls and women to wonder about me—to make them look twice at me, too. I wanted to retain something provocatively masculine in my appearance. (“Are you trying to look toppish tonight?” Larry once asked me. Yes, maybe I was.)
I remembered, when we were rehearsing The Tempest, how Richard had said that Ariel’s gender was “mutable”; he’d said the sex of angels was mutable, too.
“Director’s choice?” Kittredge had asked Richard, about Ariel’s mutability.
I suppose I was trying to look sexually mutable, to capture something of Ariel’s unresolved sexuality. I knew I was small but good-looking. I could also be invisible when I wanted to be—like Ariel, I could be “an airy Spirit.” There is no one way to look bisexual, but that was the look I sought.
Larry liked to make fun of me for having what he called a “Utopian notion of androgyny”; for his generation, I think that so-called liberated gays were no longer supposed to be “sissies.” I know that Larry thought I looked (and dressed) like a sissy—that was probably why I looked like a bottom to him, not a top.
But I saw myself as an almost regular guy; by “regular,” I mean only that I was never into leather or the bullshit hankie code. In New York—as in most cities, through the seventies—there was a lot of street cruising. Then, and now, I liked the androgynous look—nor were androgynous and androgyny ever words that gave me pronunciation problems.
“You’re a pretty boy, Bill,” Larry often said to me, “but don’t think you can stay ultra-thin forever. Don’t imagine that you can dress like a razor blade, or even in drag, and have any real effect on the macho codes you’re rebelling against. You won’t change what real men are like, nor will you ever be one!”
“Yes, Professor,” was all I usually said.
In the fabulous seventies, when I picked up a guy, or I let myself be picked up, there was always that moment when my hand got hold of his butt; if he liked to be fucked, he would start moaning and writhing around—just to let me know I’d hit the magic spot. But if he turned out to be a top, we would settle for a super-fast 69 and call it a night; sometimes, this would turn into a super-rough 69. (The “macho codes,” as Larry called them, might prevail. My “Utopian notion of androgyny” might not.)
It was Larry’s formidable jealousy that eventually drove me away from him; even when you’re as young as I was, there’s a limit to enduring admiration being a substitute for love. When Larry thought I’d been with someone else, he would try to touch my asshole—to feel if I was wet, or at least lubricated. “I’m a top, remember?” I used to tell him. “You should be sniffing my cock instead.” But Larry’s jealousy was insanely illogical; even knowing me as well as he did, he actually believed I was capable of being a bottom with someone else.
When I met Larry in Vienna, he was making himself a student of opera there—the opera was why he’d come. The opera was partly why I’d chosen Vienna, too. After all, Miss Frost had made me a devoted reader of nineteenth-century novels. The operas I loved were nineteenth-century novels!
Lawrence Upton was a well-established poet, but he’d always wanted to write a libretto. (“After all, Bill, I know how to rhyme.”) Larry had this wish to write a gay opera. He was very strict with himself as a poet; maybe he imagined he could be more relaxed as a librettist. He may have wanted to write a gay opera, but Lawrence Upton never wrote an openly gay poem—that used to piss me off, more than a little.
In Larry’s opera, some cynical queen—someone a lot like Larry—is the narrator. The narrator sings a lament—it’s deliberately foolish, and I forget how it rhymes. “Too many Indians, not enough chiefs,” the narrator laments. “Too many chickens, not enough roosters.” It was very relaxed, all right.
There is a chorus of bottoms—numerous bottoms, naturally—and a comically much-smaller chorus of tops. If Larry had continued his opera, it’s possible he would have added a medium-size chorus of bears, but the bear movement didn’t begin until the mid-eighties—those big hairy guys, consciously sloppy, rebelling against the chiseled, neat-and-trim men, with their shaved balls and gym bodies. (Those bears were so refreshing, at first.)