“You write an awful lot about queer stuff, Boyd. Is there anything you want to tell us?” I get that sometimes. I have an awful lot of things I’d like to tell you, but “I’m Gay!” isn’t one of them. I’m not gay. I’m not even any fun. So, why all the interest in gay topics? Well, it’s simple: I’m not even interested in homosexuality as a topic unless I feel like it’s unfairly being attacked, and then I’m very interested.
When I joined Kappa Alpha Order, I swore, on pain of death, to Defend the Right, Protect the Weak, and Guard the Honor of Women. Now, to be fair, between the Boy Scouts, the United Methodist Church, The Millsaps Honor Code, The Pledge of Allegiance, and the Famous Monsters of Filmland Club Code of Honor, I’ve sworn to an awful lot of things, and I do actually try to attend to them, some more than others, but there’s something about those three that always stuck with me. If I’m going to tattoo something on my heart, Defend the Right, Protect the Weak, and Guard the Honor of Women is a pretty good choice.
If I say defending the freedom of homosexuals is “defending the right,” some people will, as happened most of yesterday, argue with me that the Apostle Paul said it wasn’t right. I argued about what Paul said (or, in my opinion, didn’t say). However, even if my interpretation of what Paul said is absolutely incorrect, then I will still stand my ground and say that defending the freedom of homosexuals is right, even if that means, in your eyes, that I’m not a very good Christian. It’s not your eyes that I’m trying to please.
Some people will take offense if I suggest that defending the lives of homosexuals is “defending the weak.” Nobody ever wants to be called weak. Allow me to explain myself. In this country, in this society, and even more in the world outside of this country, homosexuals as a class are politically and socially marginalized. Because they are politically and socially marginalized, men like Ron Desantis feel emboldened when they write and pass laws to curtail the rights of homosexuals and even the ability to mention homosexuality in educational circumstances.
Tony Kushner is a far greater writer than I could ever pretend to be. He’s what’s known as an “EGOT”. He’s been nominated for an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony. He’s also won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Medal of the Arts. In his play, “Angels in America,” he introduces the fictionalized version of the very real Roy Cohn.
I despise Roy Cohn. Very few times have I said that I hate somebody, but I hate Roy Cohn. I hate him for what he did to innocent people. That’s the only reason I will ever hate anyone. I have a very important rule about my writing: I won’t ever use my words to out anyone who didn’t out themselves. That’s a promise I made quite a while ago to somebody very important to me. I will break that rule with Roy Cohn. Roy Cohn was a gay man. I will out him, despite my rule, because Roy Cohn would use the sexuality of other men to destroy them, and he did.
My first exposure to Roy Cohn came in 1977 when he and Gore Vidal fought a televised battle to the death on PBS. I didn’t then understand the issues Vidal and Cohn were discussing; I didn’t even understand that Vidal was gay. What I could tell, what I understood in my child-like brain, was that Roy Cohn was a man capable of great evil and great violence. Had he been given the opportunity, he would have killed Gore Vidal. Vidal actually loved getting that kind of response from people he hated. He once needled William F. Buckley so much that Buckley said on national television, “Now Listen, you queer! Stop calling me a crypto-nazi, or I will sock you in the goddamn face, and you’ll stay plastered!” For 1968 television, that was quite a show. Today, Fox News would run it as an ad for “My Pillow.”
In “Angels in America,” the fictionalized character of Roy Cohn visits his fictionalized doctor, and they discuss Cohn’s diagnosis of AIDS. In it, Cohn describes the political and social structure of the United States and where he saw gay men fit into it, even though he was one.
“Your problem, Henry, is that you are hung up on words, on labels, that you believe they mean what they seem to mean. AIDS. Homosexual. Gay. Lesbian. You think these are names that tell you who someone sleeps with, but they don't tell you that. No. Like all labels they tell you one thing and one thing only: where does an individual so identified fit in the food chain, in the pecking order? Not ideology, or sexual taste, but something much simpler: clout. Not who I fuck or who fucks me, but who will pick up the phone when I call, who owes me favors. This is what a label refers to. Now to someone who does not understand this, homosexual is what I am because I have sex with men. But really this is wrong. Homosexuals are not men who sleep with other men. Homosexuals are men who in fifteen years of trying cannot get a pissant antidiscrimination bill through the City Council. Homosexuals are men who know nobody and who nobody knows. Who have zero clout. Does this sound like me, Henry?”
Kushner took some heat for his characterization of Roy Cohn and his summation of what homosexuality in America means. Telling the truth often means you’ll take some heat. Homosexuals in America are going through a period where forces are testing to see if they are politically weak. I will defend them.
I was a member of a fraternity at Millsaps College in the 1980s. Some would say that was my major. I performed a hell of a lot better as a KA than I did as a business student. In those days, we had what we called the “fraternity rush,” where each prospective new student would travel between the four fraternity houses, trying to impress the fraternities that they would make a great member and the fraternities tried to impress on them that they would make a great fraternity. The “Rush” part comes from trying to do the entire goddamn thing in five days.
Each fraternity prided itself on how selective they were about new members. Everybody wanted only the best, although the definition of “best” changed from fraternity to fraternity. Since the freshmen boys going through rush were a pretty diverse group, there would be boys your fraternity didn’t want each year, but somebody else did, but then there would sometimes be boys that nobody wanted.
If you were openly rude to a rushee, you’d get in quite a bit of trouble. No matter how much of a geek you thought he was, if you called him one, you’d end up in Dean Good’s office. If you made too much of an ass out of yourself, the fraternity could end up on probation.
That doesn’t mean we didn’t find a way to express how much we didn’t want some of the rushees. We couldn’t be rude, but we could take them around the house and show them the outside compressor for the air conditioning, up in the attic where Cheek and I had just installed new insulation and things of that nature. One year, Brother (name redacted) bought a box of Popeyes fried chicken so he could sit on the toilet and greet unliked rushees while he ate with his pants down. (Just between you and me, that was pretty funny.)
We figured out ways to be rude where we couldn’t get in trouble for being rude. I usually didn’t participate in this. I don’t talk to strangers well. Not well at all. Generally, during rush, I would try to find something to fix or try to find a rushee who smoked; then we could go on the back porch and smoke together and get out of this whole turkey dance. Rush made me very uncomfortable and very nervous.
One night, I went to check on Meredyth and Larissa, who were providing the food and tending to the punch-circulating machine that we stole from McDonald's (long story) and generally being more hospitable than any of us when this very small, very frail creature, wearing white linen pants, a white leather oxford shirt, and a pencil-thin black tie stuck his hand shaker out to me saying, “I’m Robert. I’m Gay!”
No one had ever said “I’m Gay” to me before, so it was something of a shock. I knew who Robert was. The other boys had been saying pretty cruel things about him all week. At first, I didn’t know why he picked me out, so I tried to exhibit the “don’t bug me” air I always used in situations like this.
“Your name is on the cafeteria,” he said.
“Thanks, Uncle Boyd,” I thought. The cafeteria building was named after him, not me. “My name is Boyd, but I guess you know that.” I shook his hand.
“Why do people in all of these fraternity houses keep trying to show me the plumbing?” He said.
“I don’t know, but ours is malfunctioning. Excuse me, I have to go upstairs and fix it.”
That night, the Kappa Alpha Order cut Robert from the fraternity rush, as did Kappa Sigma, Pi Kappa Alpha, and Lambda Chi Alpha. Robert failed out of rush. Every year, one or two people fail out of rush. Usually, with boys, it wasn’t that big of a deal. “fuck those guys, anyway.” they’d say, and get on with their lives.
It was another matter with girls. My friend Beth failed out of rush. I sat with her, crying in the dark, for about eight hours. Beth didn’t like it when you could see her cry, so the lights were out. A man once called my father and said he would kick my daddy’s ass if he didn’t do something about those goddamn sororities when his precious daughter failed out of rush. I once saw his precious daughter knock an Italian girl out cold with a single punch at CS’s. All told, telling somebody they’re not wanted is one of the worst things you could do to anybody.
After rush, I would see Robert on campus. He’d wave wildly and say, “Hey!” I thought, “What the hell did I ever do to deserve this?” Even though I never spoke to him, never had a class or anything else with him, Robert decided I was his friend. I don’t know why. Maybe since my name was in three-foot letters on the side of the building, I was the only guy from Rush whose name he could remember.
At that time, if you had asked me who was the most beautiful person on campus, I would easily say it was the Lebanese girl I used to tell stories to in the Sanders Dormitory for Girls until it came that time of night when all boys must leave the dorm, and sometimes Boyd didn’t leave on time. If you asked me now who the most beautiful creature that ever went to Millsaps was, that wasn’t my late wife; I would say the same girl. My wife’s not dead, by the way, just late. In my defense, I like older girls. My wife graduated from Millsaps before I got there, so I can’t really compare.
It didn’t escape my attention that Robert made up his eyes nearly the exact same way my paramour in Sanders did. This, I thought, was odd. Maybe they read the same beauty magazines. Robert, in the parlance of a culture I don’t really understand, was what you might call a “twink,” and he wore makeup to school like a girl.
Studying the work of Lon Chaney, Dick Smith, and Rick Baker from childhood, I had a keen interest in theatrical makeup. Rick Baker was a monster maker, but I developed a sense of traditional “beauty” makeup from studying him. It is mostly the same thing, just applied differently. Even today, if you wear makeup, I know a great deal about how you do it and probably how to improve it. Robert's wearing makeup surprised me, but it intrigued me as well.
One day, a gleaming white, brand-new Porsche 911 Carerra pulled up beside me under the Academic Complex. The windows were tinted, so I couldn’t see who was driving, but it was the prettiest car I’d seen all year, and it damn near ran me over, so I wanted to know. The window rolled down:
“You wanna ride?”
I was in quite a conundrum. I wanted to ride in this car very much, but it was close quarters inside, and Robert was terrifyingly gay. The seats were beautiful tan leather, probably reindeer or something outrageous. After making sure nobody could see us, I got in, and we roared out from under the Academic Complex in the fastest goddamn car I’d ever been in.
Frantically speeding through dilapidated mid-town neighborhoods, Robert roared with laughter at my discomfort. All I could think about was the headline in the Clarion Ledger: “Son of businessman dies in firey roadside crash with his gay lover.”
Moving from mid-town to downtown, the streets were mostly empty because it was Saturday. The full throat of the Carerra ripped and echoed through the towers of downtown Jackson. I asked Robert if he wanted to go to the Mayflower and get a cup of coffee and maybe a piece of pie. He told me that his father worked downtown, and he didn’t want to take a chance on his father seeing him with a man.
“We’re just friends.” I awkwardly insisted.
“It doesn’t matter,” Robert said. I could detect an element of fear in his eyes.
I knew who his father was. I knew he was rich. He was rich enough to buy a Porsche for a son he didn’t approve of. We made our way through West Jackson toward the Zoo, and Robert began telling me the truth of his life. Sitting in the parking lot of the zoo, watching through the fence where the camels and the giraffes loped boredly across their enclosures and stretched their necks toward the delectable leaves of trees they couldn’t quite reach, Robert told me that his father hated him, his mother drank herself to sleep, he had no friends, everyone at school hated him, he’d never had a boyfriend, and most days he wanted to die, and he’d tried. That’s when he showed me the scars.
I told him, “Look, I don’t know anything about all this gay stuff, but I’ll be your friend. You might not like my friends in the fraternity, but I know people in the art department, too, and they might like you.”
I’d seen men cry before, but men cry like men; Robert cried like a woman. I found it very distressing. More than anything, I found what my world was doing to this creature distressing. He didn’t mean anyone any harm. He was like a fawn. He just wanted a safe place to exist.
This business of being around people who didn’t want to live was distressing and very personal to me. In high school, I was involved with a woman who was my very first real girlfriend. One Thanksgiving night, I had to break down the door to her father’s bedroom, where I found his body, with two holes in his head and most of his blood still spreading out across the bathroom floor. I could smell it. His pistol was smoking on the floor a few feet away. I could smell that, too.
Robert wasn’t fierce and fearless like Gore Vidal. He wasn’t conniving and machiavellian like Roy Cohn. He was afraid and hurt. He was friendless and very unloved. Robert wasn’t cutting himself to get attention; he didn’t want to live. He didn’t want to live because nobody wanted to be his friend.
I would have been Robert’s friend. I would have sat with him at lunch and I would have played pool with him at CS’s. I was physically big enough that if anybody gave me shit about hanging out with a queer, I could make them take it back, and if anybody wanted to make him go away, I could stop that too.
I would have been Robert’s friend, or at least his protector, as I had sworn to defend what was right and protect the weak, but he dropped out of school, and I never saw him again. His father shut down his practice in Jackson and moved to South America, where Robert’s mother was from. There were rumors about why his father shut down his practice. If you were a lawyer in Jackson in the eighties, there would always be rumors about your practice. In the case of Robert’s father, I hoped they were true. Nobody should feel like their father hated them because of something they had no control over.
I've changed all the names in this story except for Tony Cushner, Roh Cohn, Meredyth, Larissa, and Gore Vidal. Everyone else in the story is entitled to their privacy. I’ve prayed for the life of Robert using his real name. I hope one day I’ll see him again, and he’ll tell me all about how he found happiness and acceptance in life, even if it had to be away from Jackson.