where?”
“You know. Go,” I said, emphasizing the word.
Jack pulled out quickly and backed away.
“I didn’t say I was going to,” I said, turning to look at him. “I just said it kind of felt like it.”
“You’re sure?” he asked, looking doubtfully at my ass.
“Pretty sure,” I said. “Just try it some more.”
I guess the thrill of this new activity outweighed Jack’s fears of an imminent explosion, because he mounted me again, and this time he kept pumping until he came. When he pulled out, he rolled onto his back and I turned over. Noticing my hardly-erect penis and the unstained state of the sheet, Jack asked, “Didn’t it feel good?”
“It felt good,” I said. “Just different. I think we need to do it some more.” Truthfully, I really didn’t see what the big deal was. It had felt good, but not as great as Jack seemed to think it did. Besides, my ass was gummy with Vaseline, which I knew from other experiences was almost impossible to get off.
“Why don’t you try it now,” Jack suggested, rolling over.
Having had the advantage of going first, I was slightly better prepared than Jack had been. I was not, however, prepared for how good it felt when I finally sank into Jack’s behind. I know I gasped, and I know I didn’t last long. I think Jack’s experience with girls, limited as it was, had taught him at least a little about holding off climax. I, being new to intercourse, had no such advantage, and it wasn’t long before I lay, shaking and sweaty, on Jack’s back.
“Is it like that with girls?” I asked him.
“No,” said Jack. “Not even close. This is a lot better.”
“So we can do it again?” I said.
“Yep,” Jack replied. “And guess what, you’re not a virgin anymore.”
“But I thought Margaret Alice said this didn’t count,” I objected.
“That’s because Margaret Alice has two places to put it in,” explained Jack. “We only have one. So now you’re not a virgin.”
Having lost my virginity to Jack, I felt I’d become a grown-up. And now that Jack and I had expanded our sexual repertoire, we went at it as often as possible. We became reckless, doing it in our bedrooms during the day, sometimes while our mothers were downstairs making us snacks of chocolate chip cookies and glasses of milk. We experimented with alternatives to the vile Vaseline, trying salad oil, shampoo, and even the stuff Jack used to condition his baseball glove before discovering that plain old Corn Huskers Lotion worked perfectly well and wasn’t quite as difficult to wash off.
We never worried about who was the “man” and who was the “woman.” It would be another five or six years before someone asked me if I was a top or a bottom (at which time I still wouldn’t know what the question meant). Our roles, at least in bed, were interchangeable. One of the advantages to being almost completely ignorant about what it meant to be gay was that we were equally ignorant about many of the misconceptions others had about homosexuals. We knew that men who slept with men weren’t well-liked, at least enough to keep what we did together between us, but the sometimes violent hostility that would later be directed at the gay community had not yet shown its face to us. The year before, three people had been arrested for staging a sit-in at Dewey’s restaurant in Philadelphia after diners assumed to be homosexuals were denied service. But apart from a brief mention in the newspaper, the event resulted in little public notice.
In talking about this fairly remarkable absence of either pro or anti-gay activity with an historian friend years later, he remarked, “They still had the blacks to beat up. They just hadn’t gotten around to us yet.” True, the African-American community was taking more than a little abuse at the time. But history was about to change again, and it would take me and Jack with it.
CHAPTER 9
There used to be, at Knoebels Amusement Park in Elysburg, Pennsylvania, a ride called the Scrambler. It consisted of three arms extending out from a central hub. From each arm hung four individual cars. As the Scrambler turned, the cars spun independently in the opposite direction of the arms’ rotation, so that the feeling of speed was intensified and riders were quickly disoriented. Disembarking from the car at the end of four or five minutes, walking was difficult, and the area around the Scrambler often appeared to be populated by drunkards as people struggled to regain their balance. Our family made at least one trip to Knoebels every summer when my father had a week off from work, and Jack and I were sure to take several turns on the Scrambler, reveling in the intoxicating effects.
In the waning years of the 1960s, living in America was like riding the Scrambler on a daily basis. Just as we would regain our footing from one startling event, another would come and send us reeling in the other direction. On the same day in 1967, January 10, Edward Brooke, a Republican from Massachusetts, became the first black man elected to the United States Senate by popular vote, while in Atlanta, vocal segregationist Lester Maddox, who in 1965 chose to close his popular Pickrick chicken restaurant rather than serve black customers after the signing of the Civil Rights Act, was inaugurated as the new Democratic Governor of Georgia. This peculiar dichotomy was emblematic of the social upheaval rocking the nation. As if the entire country had slipped down Alice’s rabbit hole into Wonderland (appropriately, Jefferson Airplane’s psychedelic “White Rabbit” was a staple on radio in 1967), we peered, bewildered, into the funhouse mirror of American culture.
In San Francisco, the Summer of Love was about to unleash its message of peace, love, and LSD. But in suburban Philadelphia, interest and concern was focused on the arrival of the first Marine combat troops in Vietnam and President Lyndon Johnson’s announcement of plans to enact a draft lottery. Until then, the armed forces had operated under the old system of registering all men aged 19 to 26 and calling them as needed, from the oldest down. Although nearly one million men had already been drafted to fight in the conflict against the National Liberation Front, those of us approaching the age of eligibility more or less considered ourselves safe, assuming that it would take a very long time to work through all the men currently in their twenties. Under the newly-proposed system, we could be called much earlier, a proposition that thrilled no one.
Still, we believed the threat to be a distant one. We also believed that the ugliness in Southeast Asia would soon be over. Demonstrations, the burning of draft cards, and defections (or, as my father called them, “desertions”) to Canada and Europe were increasing. The conflict in Vietnam had sharply divided America, and it seemed we would either have to end our involvement in what appeared to many to be a losing battle or risk humiliation both home and abroad.
Given the current debate over gay marriage, it’s interesting to remember that it was only in June of 1967 that the Supreme Court struck down state laws banning interracial marriage. Little did I think, when that news made the front pages of every newspaper, that 35 years later Thayer and I would ourselves enter into civil union, first in neighboring Vermont and, more recently, in Canada. The idea of two men marrying seemed as remote then as that of a white woman marrying a black man must have in 1942. Yet the world had changed considerably since World War II, and now, in the midst of another war, it was changing again, moving forward one step at a time. (Is it coincidence that changes in social policy occur historically in the midst of war? And will we finally see gay marriage instituted nationwide only after the sacrifice of another million lives?)
It never occurred to me at 17 that I might one day marry Jack. Our identity as a couple was sketched only in the broadest of strokes, confined as it was to the privacy of our own bedrooms. We were not free to walk down the street holding hands. I could not wear the letterman jacket he received after his winning season or his class ring on a chain around my neck. Still we took girls to the movies and dances. I sat in the stands, holding hands with Melania Brewster, watching Jack carry a football down the field. Afterward, I kissed the sweat from his skin as we celebrated his victory. We were invisible to the world, which made it impossible to imagine a life together beyond the moment.
In