“Lord, if I keep talking like this you’ll come to the conclusion that I’m a latent heterosexual!
“About the different men, there was one scene that’s worth mentioning. There’s this fellow I know, a very successful Wall Street lawyer, and genuinely ACDC. Married, solid position, a couple of girlfriends on the side, and he also makes the gay scene. And doesn’t try to hide who he is, you know, none of this slouching around 42nd Street and keeping his name a secret. He figures that anybody he meets in a gay bar is apt to be gay, so what’s to hide from him? Which is perfectly sensible, but not everybody has that much self-assurance.
“I’ve gone with him quite a few times. He’s very generous with cash presents and very gracious about it, and he’s damned attractive and I like him. One thing he likes to do is take me to straight parties. Not his family’s set, obviously, but the circle of friends he’s apt to see when he’s squiring any of his female girlfriends. He passes me off as a girl and no one suspects, and generally his friends will ask me for my phone number — I give a phony — or ask my date for my phone number afterward. And then we go back to his apartment in town and ball each other, and the whole deception aspect of it turns him on tremendously...”
I had not intended to return to the subject of my own reactions toward Brendan, but I cannot entirely dismiss the feeling that they may be relevant to an understanding of Brendan, and indeed to an understanding of various aspects of homosexuality in the broader sense.
On re-reading the material quoted, I find it does not sufficiently convey the tone of the time we spent together. Our interview sessions covered a period of about eight hours spread over two days, during which time Brendan seemed to change sex periodically, drifting from boy to girl and back again any number of times. There were times when I found myself quite consciously avoiding his eyes because the liquid intensity of his stare was so disturbing to me. At other times he stopped vamping me entirely and I related to him as to any male, and was completely at ease conversationally.
At one point he said, not as a boast but as a flat statement of fact, “I can get any man I want.”
I told him that sounded like hyperbole to me.
“But I think it’s true, Jack. Not that I’m never rejected. I don’t mean I’m Iris Irresistible. I get turned down, and usually the turndown turns me off and I don’t keep pursuing. But if I keep pursuing, if I want it badly enough, I generally get my man.”
“Like the Mounted Police?”
“I could get you.”
“I doubt it.”
“You wanted me before.”
“I thought you were a girl.”
“So?”
“So I know you’re not.”
“Uh-huh. And you’re gradually getting used to it. You’re getting less and less shocked at having been turned on by me before. You held hands with me before.”
“True.”
“Would you hold hands with me now?”
“I don’t know.”
“Scared?”
“Probably.”
“So you’ll do the ostrich number? Bury your head in the sand and pretend I don’t exist?”
“Not exactly that.”
“Do you know what you’re afraid of?”
“Of course.”
“It’s cabbage. ‘I don’t like cabbage and I’m not going to try cabbage because I might like it and I already know I hate it.’ Your mind is made up and you don’t want to be confused with the facts.”
“There’s no way to win, is there, Brendan? If I don’t want to, it means I’m repressing it. A equals A and B equals A.”
“Absolutely.”
“Let’s just say I’m not interested. And that I want you to stop coming on.”
“If that’s the way you want it.”
“It is.”
“I’ll let it alone then,” he said, the throatiness suddenly gone from his voice. “Of course,” he added, “think of the benefit if you tried it and found out you didn’t like it. You could stop worrying about it.”
“I’m not worrying about it.”
“Lucky you. But I’ll let it alone. Of course, you can always change your mind, can’t you?”
“I doubt that I will.”
“But you have the option. And you do have my number, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Lovely.” The eyes again. “And that’s only fair, honey, because you better believe I’ve got your number.”
Cary
“Sometimes I wonder why in the hell I come down there. Oh, that’s easy to answer. The money. I’ll take the subway in and catch a movie and have something to eat, maybe a couple of drinks, and instead of the whole evening costing me money I come out ahead of the game. Maybe I wind up with ten or fifteen bucks more than I started with.
“See, it’s not a matter of I get up in the morning and say to myself, well, tonight you’re gonna make it to Times Square and hustle some queers. I won’t lay it out in front like that. I live out in Queens, you know. Over in Bayside. The old man is in construction and I got a sister finishing high school this year. Sometimes I’ll think about getting out on my own. You know, an apartment of my own in Manhattan. The only thing is that this place is so expensive if you want to live halfway decent. What do you have to pay for a decent apartment? I don’t mean some rat hole on the Lower East Side, because who wants to live like that? But a halfway respectable place on the Upper West Side, maybe the Village. I’ve been to guys’ places that are no bigger than my bedroom in Queens, with a refrigerator and a stove in one corner so they can call it a kitchenette, and a toilet you couldn’t turn around in, and they’ll tell me they’re paying a hundred, a hundred and fifty a month. More if it’s a really decent neighborhood. If it’s the East Side, you got to take that number and double it.
“Even if I was working, if I had a good job, that’s a lot of dough to put out just for a place to stay. And I have to say I’ve got a good deal where I am. My old lady is a great cook, you know, and the house is always clean, and it’s really very convenient for me. The only hassle is the subway but I’m never on it in rush hour so it’s no big deal, just that it’s a waste of time. But one thing I got is time. More time than I need, time all over the place.
“Another thing, my folks don’t hassle me lately. It used to be a hassle. While I was in high school, and the first couple years I was out. Where were you, what were you doing, who were you with, all of that shit. And then after I graduated it was a whole lot of what are you going to do with yourself, when are you going to start looking for a job. I can’t see spending my life like the old man, busting my hump with a pick and shovel. I just can’t see it. He makes decent dough, I guess, but he comes home every night beat as hell and just puts himself in front of the television set and pours the beer down. I don’t think he even knows what he’s watching, unless it’s a sports program. He watches the Mets in the summer and football in the fall and the Knicks in the winter, the few games that they broadcast, and the rest of the time he just puts on one channel and watches it until it’s time for him to hit the rack. Whatever comes up on that one channel, that’s what he watches. And pours the beer down. I suppose it’s a life, but I can’t see it.