The gay sex news from 60 years ago. It started with an e-mail exchange with my first male lover (Larry Schourup) about the course of our relationship back then. I’m pleased at having dredged up so much, but it is of course largely imaginative reconstruction, fictobiography, not bald narrative — I post often about the fragility of memory and the undependability of it due to its constant alteration over time — but I think I got a lot of emotional tones right.
I then wondered whether he invited me or whether I had simply advanced on him (something that later in life I rarely did). And got a wonderful reply, which I quote from here with LS’s permission.
The event, as summarized in my 8/7/26 posting “Crazed lunatic, ax murderer”:
return with me to 1969 and my first male lover, Larry. I was in fact his first male lover as well. We both had had sexual experiences with other men, but what developed between us was a passionate connection of affection as well as raw sex, and I moved him into my household — along with my wife, Ann (yes, it was a gigantically messy situation in which I behaved very badly, while Ann and Larry carried themselves off as genuinely nice adults) — but as a resident in the guest bedroom.
LS’s take:
I saw you as a heroic figure, way out of my conversational league. [AZ: heroic makes me gasp, especially as an assessment of me at 28, when I was filled with guilt and shame over guys having tagged me all my life up to then as a fairy-boy — even though I hung out with women, in fact in part because I hung out so much with women. So they taxed me for an assortment of wrong reasons, but in fact I did desire other guys, painfully, and had been aware of my nature from childhood.]
… Before dinner, you said you and Ann both thought it would be fine, if I wished, for me to upgrade my situation a bit by moving from my dreary rooming house to your place. I was concerned about whether I’d have the social skills I would need to fit into my new environment, but also felt game and entirely positive about the move. A few days later you came in your car to get me and my stuff…
All this to say (with enormous gratitude) that, yes, you advanced on me.
A knock on his door, and then some hot sex. The gratitude was mutual.
Getting picked. (in e-mail to LS) In recent postings I’ve written about my twice “marrying up”, becoming partners with people out of my league — because they picked me (most of my boyfriends, notably Dean Allemang and Roy Calfas, also picked me and not vice versa). Eventually, other people (Ann’s old friend Bonnie, Jacques’s sister-in-law Virginia — both still alive, big cheers) explained to me somewhat impatiently that I got picked because of what I am like, it wasn’t some fluke; I wasn’t the last desperate choice for the team, I was the best there was. I find this hard to accept (I understand my faults only too well), but I’m working on it.
Surely you see the parallel between your case and mine. I advanced on you not just because I found you smokin’ hot sexually, capable of giving me the sex I so crazily desired (though that was true), but because I appreciated the kind of person you were: clever, playful, passionately committed, thoughtful, and generous — considerably more polished than you gave yourself credit for. Young and not very experienced, but still top of the line. (DO NOT PROTEST THIS)
My college roommate Frank (for 3 years, during which I saved his life and then he saved mine) was the first person I recall who just came up to me and said “I want to be your friend”. (It was a kind of trade: he was a performer, an actor, singer, and artist, who wanted an appreciative audience on tap, but he was also an emotionally volatile guy who needed a counterweight and had the sense to know it.) Frank educated me, gave me a ton of intellectual and artistic experience, topped by getting me to take intro linguistics with him — where I found my life’s work.
Then early on in grad school, I got a similar offer from Bruce Fraser, who had watched me for a little while and, yes, just came up to me and said he wanted to be my friend, I was smart in ways he was not, good at the abstract reasoning in linguistics, while he had solid practical intelligence about how to get things done, we’d be a good team. As it turned out, he was also one of the world’s nicest people, and you couldn’t ask for a better friend. (This is where I tell you what a lucky life I’ve had, knowing all these wonderful people. And you are obliged to say, whoa, that wasn’t dumb luck, you idiot, that was you, shining through. Will I never learn?)
The Frank Mitchell chronicles. All this brings me to one of my My Most Memorable Characters (or however Reader’s Digest put it). Frank Mitchell of Lexington KY, who was — the quick take — an ornamentally faggy black man whose function was to serve drinks at big parties in the houses of the rich. But in fact knew everyone and everything about them and silently weighed all of us and (still silently) pronounced moral judgment on our lives. There wasn’t an ounce of malice in him (thank god) and he was truly delightful to be around (if he approved of you), but he was in fact someone of great weight. (Social fabrics are vastly more complex than most people credit.)
Frank comes into my story when Ann (in college) needed someone to drive her some considerable distance — from (I think) Lexington to New York — and a young Frank was hired for the task. Early on in the trip, Frank said, “Miss Ann, I understand you’re a writer”. Ann admitted this was so, and Frank steamed ahead: “Well, then, there are some things you should know”. And proceeded to describe, in exquisite detail, from his personal experience, pretty much every sexual act two black fags could engage in. With some evaluation of the emotional payoffs. Electrifying stuff.
Jump ahead, then, to later times. Ann and I are making regular trips to Lexington, a very strange experience for me. (Suddenly I have this parallel life.) Once we’re in Kentucky, Ann loses her married name (which nobody can pronounce anyway) and becomes a well-known figure of the Southern aristocracy. My saving graces are amiability; knowledge gained at Princeton about how to dress properly; and the degree from Princeton, which was sort of Woodrow Wilson’s Southern university (any connection to Princeton is social gold; a university professorship pretty much doesn’t mean shit). Ann’s Kentucky family and collateral connections are genuinely nice people, and they accept me, with real warmth.
So at Christmas, a party at Keene’s — Ann’s father’s — place. Frank is serving. I am inspected. He gets me, all the way, I have no idea how (I’m a whoring faggot in deep disguise — also a lot of other, socially more decorous, things, but I’m that too). We exchange happy smiles of mutual recognition, bits of Lexington gossip. Tentatively voice our shared dislike of Keene’s current wife, Velma (most viciously: she’s a mean, racist redneck, who has quickly managed to insult Ann, our daughter Elizabeth, and me, as well as all of our black friends (our household is a nest of civil rights activism) — but she genuinely loves Keene, and he’s crazy about her.
But I have gotten the Frank Mitchell Seal of Approval. And it turns out that I care a lot about that.
Ann then dies, still in her 40s, and Keene descends into dementia, withers, and dies too. With our daughter, plus my man Jacques, I go to Lexington for Keene’s memorial service.
Frank, still on the job, now going gray, gets to examine my guy. I think I call Jacques my husband (we have the certificate from the City of Palo Alto, but it’s not a marriage license, because there aren’t any same-sex marriages in our country yet). Frank smiles big, tells me I picked well; I tell him that Jacques picked me; Frank laughs, says, well then, he picked well. For a moment, we are all very happy together, but then the sadness of the occasion washes over us, and we spend some time trying not to snipe too venomously about Velma’s awfulness. The sun sets.
Note. Some of you know that I am on occasion the writer of speculative fiction, in the magical realist mode. The section above on FM is not that. It’s certainly crafted, and no doubt amplifies vividly on the events, but it’s about things that did, roughly as reported here, happen; I did not make Frank up. But yes, I understand that you could look at the whole thing as a Greek comedy translated to Lexington KY.
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