COMING UP … COMING OUT

This is the story of my coming out. In telling it, I have tried to recreate the voice of the eighteen-year-old Ralph whose formative years were steeped in an alcoholic home. Although I was insecure and scared, I projected a cocky, superior persona to the world. Before college, I had successfully avoided facing difficult feelings and, despite my cynicism, I was a romantic at heart.

Prior to coming out in the summer of 1970, a long process of “coming up” occurred as the truth rose up from the depths of repression and passed through the layers of denial and defenses that had helped me survive my childhood.

With no role models, no one to talk to and no support, my gayness rose to the surface against all odds and helped me take the first step toward my authentic self.

COMING UP

I stood pasted against a wall watching a bunch of young, well-dressed men in name tags sucking up to fraternity members. I was deeply conflicted about being in another elitist institution after an eight-year stretch at an all-boys school in St. Louis. Upon arriving at the University of Virginia on my eighteenth birthday, I had fully intended to dive into the roiling socio-political crucible that was college life in 1969. What the hell was I doing here?

After a few weeks on campus, I was still hiding out in my dorm room overcome with a baffling homesickness for my alcoholic parents and a paralyzing fear of meeting new people. When an upperclassman appeared at my door with an invitation to a rush party, it took me a few days to work up the courage to show up at the frat house.

When I recognized him standing near the fireplace, I peeled myself off the wall and sidled over. After a few minutes of stilted chatter, I could see in his eyes that he was done with me. He suggested that I talk to someone else and moved on to a more suitable recruit. While I was looking for the exit, my eyes settled on Peter across the mahogany-paneled room.

He looked totally out of place. His muscular body bulged in his ill-fitting, J. C. Penney’s blazer and his tie was three inches too short. Though he clearly lacked the pedigree of many other guys in the room, he radiated an air of self-confidence. As soon as he saw me checking him out, he strode right over and extended his meaty hand.

“Hiya, I’m Peter White.”

After recovering from his vigorous fist-pump, I introduced myself and he started his monologue.

“I can’t afford to join this fraternity, I’m only here for the free booze …” he paused and winked at me. “ … and the girls.” I liked his forthrightness, it allowed me to drop any pretense about wanting to be a frat-boy myself.

As he talked, I realized that we had something in common despite our different backgrounds. Like me, he was not from a rich family, but he was often among the rich. However any other similarities stopped there.

While I grew up in upper-middle class circles, Peter was a working-class kid. While I lolled by the pool at the Bath & Tennis Club in St. Louis and assiduously avoided the expensive snack bar, he spent his summers working for well-heeled New Yorkers at a boating club near Tuxedo Park.

“My friend Bob Duvall is about to star in a new sci-fi movie, THX 1138,” he proclaimed in a loud voice, looking sideways at the Sweetbriar College girls scattered around the room.

Being an inveterate movie-freak, I vaguely recognized Robert Duvall as a minor movie actor who had played the mute Boo Radley in To Kill A Mockingbird. In those pre-Godfather days, I doubted if anyone else in the room recognized his name. In my mind’s eye, I imagined Peter eavesdropping in on conversations while crewing on Duvall’s boat or overhearing the remark about his new movie role as “Bob” tossed him the keys to fetch his car from the parking lot.

I was a film buff of the All About Eve variety, so science fiction didn’t impress me. Still, I was a bit intrigued by Peter’s brush with Tinseltown.

Despite his oafish self-aggrandizement, I was flattered by Peter’s eagerness to impress me. It didn’t take long to figure out that he was an opportunist who saw me as a rung on the social ladder. Our conversation was bordering on the longest I’d had since landing in college when I decided not to set him straight about my true status as the scion of an alcoholic father whose finances had been circling the drain for the last few years. For some strange reason, I wanted Peter to stick around.

When he paused to take a swig from his drink, I seized the opportunity to steer the conversation toward my usual sarcasm.

“I hate these parties with everyone slithering around desperate to be admitted into this snooty snake pit. There’s something so tragic about it all.” I sniffed in my most blasé, Addison DeWitt voice.

I waited for him to pick up the ball and toss me back a similarly derisive retort, but Peter just gave me a quizzical look.

“Oh yeah,” he chuckled like I was making a joke.

I then realized that Peter was an unworthy opponent for verbal jousting, my game of choice. His physical presence telegraphed that he was built only for sports, a world light-years away from mine. I took a different tack.

“What dorm are you in?”

“Hancock. You?”

“Dabney II, second floor.”

“Hey, I’m just across the way. I’ll stop by sometime and we can go get some beers.”

“Okay,” I replied without much enthusiasm .

I hadn’t made any friends at college because most of the guys in my dorm were Southerners. They were cordial but they considered me an outsider, or worse yet, an unrepentant Yankee. I suspected that Peter was having the same challenges, but I wasn’t going to hold my breath on the off-chance that we might meet again.

“Okay, catch ya later,” Peter said, abruptly ending our conversation.

He turned and slinked over to a bubble-haired blonde in a mini-skirt. I put down my paper cup and headed for the door.

Walking back to my dorm room in the early evening, I couldn’t shake the notion of maybe seeing Peter again. By the time I got to my door, I tried to shrug it off. In bed that night, I was still trying to put it out of my mind.

The next afternoon, I sat alone on my side of the cinderblock room embroiled in my French homework. I looked up when I suddenly heard a familiar voice booming from the doorway.

“Hiya! Remember me?”

Before I could answer he sauntered right in and plopped down on the cot-like bed next to my desk chair. He leaned back against the wall and gave a loud yawn.

 “Geez, I’m so tired. I hardly got any sleep last night, if you know what I mean.”

He gave me another louche wink while I tried to hide my surprise that he had sought me out in a three-story building, each floor lined with long rows of doors. Since he didn’t know my last name, he must have made a made a real effort to find me.

His presence left me puzzled. When he launched into a vivid account of last night’s blonde invasion, I remained the silent virgin. I tuned out his words and took a better look at this young man on my bed.

He was handsome in a horsey-faced way. His pronounced overbite created a slight lateral lisp and his thick-lipped mouth exposed large, slightly crooked teeth. His clear-blue eyes sparkled as he spoke and the autumnal light from a nearby window shimmered in his mane of curly, red-blond hair. His pinkish-white skin was the only fragile aspect of this strapping jock who was blessed with being totally at home in his body.

Unused to being sought out by golden boys, I was a dark-haired, bespectacled, uncoordinated mortal who typically shape-shifted into the woodwork to avoid getting bullied by such demigods. Where Peter was an early bloomer, my face and physique were still stuck somewhere between puberty and manhood. My soft, round face displayed thin, pouty lips and a weak chin. I gave my skinny, boyish body only minimal attention, just enough to keep it clean, clothed and fed.

“Smoke a joint with me?” Peter asked pulling one out of his shirt pocket.

“Sure,” I replied with all the cool I could muster since I’d only smoked dope a couple of times.

I got up, closed the door and opened the window. When I sat back down, Peter stuck the entire joint into his mouth and drew it slowly from his wet lips. He fondled it with his fingers before lighting it up. When he passed it to me, I was already tingling inside.

After a few tokes, we started to commiserate over class loads, lousy cafeteria food and the usual grievances of college freshmen. He inhaled the pot and kept on talking while holding his breath.

“I’m on an athletic scholarship. If I don’t keep up my grades …” he paused before exhaling a thick plume of smoke “… I’m out on my ass!” He shot me a rakish grin as he handed back the joint.

I drew the smoke into my lungs and decided not to mention that my status as a full-paying, out-of-state student was only due to a recent inheritance from my great-aunt. I wanted to encourage his rich-boy fantasies so that he’d stick around. It wasn’t just that I was lonely, I was used to that. As I exhaled and passed back the joint, I began to relax, then let myself bask in the glow of his attention.

For my part, I let loose with some of my usual snarky wit and watched it fly over his head. He chuckled anyway since everything seems funny in a marijuana haze, and his good-natured goofiness began to grow on me.

Peter started to drop by every day for the next two weeks. Possessed with an uncanny sense of knowing when my roommate would be gone, he flicked on his blue high beams, flashed his toothy grin, said “hiya,” and crossed to his customary spot on my bed.

He stretched out on my single bed, taking up its full length while I sat glued to my desk chair. After several unrequited crushes at prep school, I was accustomed to hiding such feelings, mostly from myself. But something inside of me opened up at college. I couldn’t deny that Peter was actually pursuing me and suddenly all things seemed possible.

If my roommate had been in the room, I’m sure that he would have noticed the sexual energy sparking between us. Our mutual attraction was getting hard to ignore, but even if I had acknowledged it, I wouldn’t have known what to do about it.

I had never seen gay porn, just Playboys and medical books. Both left me feeling naughty, but erotically uninspired. By the time I got to UVA, I was so clueless about sex that I thought one actually blew on a man’s penis during a blow job.

When I started masturbating, I cobbled together a scenario of my teenage crush-of-the-moment holding his swollen cock inside some faceless female’s mouth while her cheeks puffed out like a wanton flutist. In the silent movie of my imaginings, the iris shot zoomed in on the reactions of the guy’s face relishing the experience. The girl was out of the frame, but since she was somewhere in the picture, I figured that I wasn’t queer.

Unlike my masturbatory fantasies, there was no female avatar between Peter and me, only a thick, transparent apprehension born of ignorance and fear. I couldn’t apply the same crackpot logic to deny what I was feeling … and I was feeling a lot.

Peter continued his frequent visits, snuggling onto my bed, smoking dope and flirting. Lately, when he took a pause in his monologues, his pillowed head looked deeply into my eyes until I filled the air with words to break the spell.

Some evenings we drank 3.2 beer in a cracked-vinyl booth of a local tavern. Once we got settled, Peter eyeballed some half-drunk co-eds at the bar.

“Hey, they look like they’re ready for some fun.”

He looked back at me and shrugged.

“Too bad I have an early practice tomorrow. Maybe next time …”

At closing time, we stumbled back to the dorms together, parting ways in the courtyard. If we bumped against each other along the way, it made my night.

When we were together, my physical sensations began to transform into a kind of horny gratitude for Peter’s presence. On the rare days when he didn’t stop by my room, I was bereft. If I saw him playing shirtless touch football from my window, I’d turn away roiling with jealousy over the time he was spending time with his jock friends.

Somewhere along the way, I had become a hopeless, possessive goner. I had handed over all control of the relationship to Peter. I was smarter than him, but I submerged this part of myself for the sake of keeping him around. Letting him call the shots and bending to his will seemed like a small price to pay. I wasn’t crazy about his personality, but my strong attraction and his insistent courtship outmaneuvered my waning defenses.

When we smoked dope together, I began to detect opportunity in his limpid eyes. Ever the seducer, he was feeling me out before making a first move and I was beginning to let myself hope that he’d make that move. Although my desire terrified me, I was warming up to the idea of him someday showing me what to do with it.

One weekend Peter asked me to join his buddies and their girlfriends on a road trip to DC to attend a Sly and The Family Stone concert. While I wasn’t wild about the idea of sharing Peter with his friends, I’d do anything to be with him.

We met the others at the appointed spot outside of campus and, after some brief introductions, we divvied up four cars. I could barely contain my delight when Peter and I wound up alone in one of them. As we watched the others disappear onto the highway ramp, Peter made a sharp left turn and headed towards the Blue Ridge Mountains.

“I don’t feel like going to that concert, do you?”

“Nah, I’ve heard all those songs a thousand times,” I replied nonchalantly as a killer whale of anticipation rose up inside of me.

“Wanna go on a hike?”

“Sure, why not?”

At twilight, he pulled into a parking lot at the foot of a mountain. We sat on the trunk and shared a joint that I badly needed to stoke my courage. I felt awkward in nature in the daylight and downright petrified in darkness. Peter noticed my nervousness.

“Don’t worry, I’ve climbed this trail a few times, just follow my lead.”

He jumped off the car, tossing the roach to the ground.

“Better get going, it’ll be night soon.”   

He marched toward a nearby path in thick-soled lumberjack boots as I bumbled behind in worn-out tennis shoes, praying that he wouldn’t look back. By the time we were halfway up the mountain, the sun started to set and a thickening gloom surrounded us. Animal noises rose in the woods as my excitement for Peter mingled with terror of the hidden wildlife.

“C’mon. Not much farther now,” he called from his higher position.

His voice lured me up the treacherous terrain like a siren’s song. Emerging from the black forest, a full moon cast a spectral glow on the stony mountaintop. I saw Peter’s silhouette propped against a crag and huffed my way toward it, finally tossing myself beside him on the boulder.

We breathed heavily together for a while. He lit another joint while I leaned back on the moonlit rock and looked up at the stars peppering the sky. From the summit, they didn’t seem so far away. My fingers lightly touched Peter’s hand as he handed me the joint. My eyes adjusted to the moonlight as I turned to look at his face. It was smiling back at me without the phony, toothy grin.

“This is my favorite place in the world,” he said before taking another long drag. “I’ve never shown it to anyone.”

When he passed back the joint and looked up at the stars, I continued to gaze boldly at his profile, just inches away from me. Overcome with sudden lust and unexpected affection, I turned my head away and sucked on the joint. As its musky vapor filled my lungs, I decided to let go and free-fall into whatever was to come.

“Let’s just enjoy the moment,” he said as if reading my mind.

He took back the joint and flicked it into the dark chasm before us. As I watched the ember arc and tumble into the abyss, I realized that I wasn’t scared anymore. Alone on a mountaintop with Peter, I felt like I was in the right place for the first time in my life.

We didn’t talk. We didn’t move. We just looked up at the night sky. When I heard Peter’s soft snores beside me, I wasn’t disappointed. Just lying next to him was more than I could hope for. I closed my eyes and fell asleep beside a man for the first time in my life.

I awoke to a dewy morning and the sight of a vast, misty valley stretching ahead of us. The sun had begun to seep through the clouds overhead as a bunch of black eagles stitched back and forth through a light fog.

Loud screeching pierced the idyllic scene. I looked up at two big, angry raptors hovering above us, talons bared.

Peter startled awake and let out a frightful scream.

“Oh! Oh! … Jesus! … What the fuck!”

The eagles flapped away.

“It’s OK,” I said. “It’s just a couple of birds.”

He settled down and yawned, stretching himself out on the rocky slab. He sat up, rubbed his eyes and took in the panorama before us.

“God that’s beautiful!”

As much as I wanted to sit and savor the moment with him, I felt a sudden urge in my bladder.

“I’ve got to take a leak.”

As I hauled myself up and headed for the backside of the crag, I glanced back and saw Peter stepping over a patch of rubble toward a smaller boulder at the very edge of the mountain. It was a long pee that made me feel a little light-headed. I propped my arm against the stone wall as a yellow stream thundered out of me with a force known only to young men. I was becoming fully awake and, though hungover, I was still at peace.

I emerged from behind the crag and saw Peter perched a few yards ahead on the rock overlooking the ravine. I returned to my former spot, laid back and drifted off for a while.

I don’t know how long I was out when Peter’s voice awoke me.

“Look, Ralph! Look!”

I opened my eyes. He stood naked on the rock, fog and birds and hazy sun in the background. I briefly looked down at the ground before letting my eyes slowly work up to his bare feet curled on the stone. His bare, muscled legs were dusted with fine blond hair, his pale sex lolled atop the thick, ginger copse of his groin, his hairless, flat stomach and hearty chest were alabaster-Greek. I took in the perfect curve of his neck as I made my way up to the back of his curly head.

He turned and looked at me with a seriousness I hadn’t seen before. He slowly rested his hand on his cock, an almost solemn gesture on this mountaintop temple. I sat frozen as he fired a blue-eyed beam of sheer passion at me. With eagles all around us, he was Adonis rising from his stone half-shell, but I was Prometheus chained to his rock.

I turned away.

I wasn’t ashamed, I was scared. My heart pounded in my eardrums. I couldn’t move. I didn’t know what to do so I waited for something to happen. He didn’t call me again and I was too afraid to look back at him.

I soon heard him shuffle back into his dank clothes and listened to his boots approaching. When I looked up, his fully dressed figure was rushing by me.

“We’d better head back,” he called back, his tone was all business.

I pushed myself off the rock and fell into line eight feet behind him. We hiked silently down the mountain. The forty-five-minute drive back to campus passed without a word between us. When he pulled up to my dorm, I climbed out of the car.

“See you later?” I asked holding the door ajar and wincing inside at how lame my voice sounded.

“Sure,” he replied. “Later.”

He flashed his trademark smile, pulled the door closed and peeled away.

When I got up to my room, I fell onto the bed. I tried to sleep but I couldn’t stop berating myself. He had made his move and I was too much of a wimp to take him up on it.

As I closed my eyes, I told myself that I couldn’t trust him. Then I convinced myself that if I went to him on the mountain, he would have told everyone that I was a fag. No, I had done the right thing! I had kept my reputation intact. But as I drifted off, one last thought haunted me.

Reputation! What reputation? I don’t know anybody.

Of course, Peter didn’t come by anymore. When I encountered him playing touch football in the quadrangle, I’d give him a feeble, finger-y wave and he’d shoot a quick nod in my direction before turning his sweaty, muscled back to me. If I saw him at the bar, he shot me that roguish smirk, raised his eyebrows and rolled his eyes toward some random girl that he was plying with drinks.

COMING OUT

I sank into a mourning that lasted for months, a grief that I couldn’t share with anyone. I missed Peter desperately but I avoided any place I might run into him until the school year ended. My sadness began to lift about halfway through my summer back in St. Louis. I still thought about him a lot but I had yet to put a name to what I felt for him. I only knew that those feelings had changed me.

A few weeks after my time with Peter, I had bumped into Denny, an old middle-school friend on the UVA campus. We had drifted apart in St. Louis after attending rival prep schools but soon re-kindled our friendship. His companionship helped quell my unspoken pain and we became quite close, so much so that we planned to share a two-bedroom apartment in the fall.

Back in St. Louis for the summer, we were polishing off a six-pack on a hot, August night when Denny took a long pull off his beer.

“Since we’re going to be roommates next year, I have to tell you something.”

He drained his can and looked right at me.

“I’m gay.”

I suddenly felt a deep breath rise inside of me, a breath that I’d been holding for years.

“I think I am too.”

And that was it, five mono-syllables that by-passed my brain. When I heard them escape my mouth, I was startled, but I didn’t want to take them back.

When he took me to a gay bar the next night, everything started to fall into place inside of me. After a few nights in the bar, It didn’t take long to realize that my sexual identity was my ticket out a restrictive future that had been mapped out for me. My gayness had put me into a melting pot of all kinds of people, the first place where I felt like I fit in. Even though I waited a while to lose my virginity, I was relieved to finally know that I wasn’t a sexless wonder.

When I returned to UVA, I searched the campus for Peter. I wanted another crack at him and I wanted to be the pursuer this time. I wanted to make up for my cowardice on the mountain, to atone for rejecting him when he offered himself to me. Most of all, I wanted to put my newfound sexual expertise to good use by making amends with my body.

But Peter was nowhere to be found. I figured that he had likely flunked out and lost his athletic scholarship due to too much dope and too many women. It happened all the time, a thinning of the herd after freshman year. Denny and I soon fell in with a gay group on campus that was underground, but vigorous, and Peter sank into the deep end of my mind.

When memories of Peter resurfaced a few years ago, I went online to see what the eagle represents as a spirit-animal. A woman named Trish Phillips’ posted these lines on a website on animal symbolism:

When an eagle appears, you are on notice to be courageous and stretch your limits. Do not accept the status quo, but rather reach higher and become more than you believe you are capable of. Look at things from a new, higher perspective. Be patient with the present; know that the future holds possibilities that you may not yet be able to see. You are about to take flight.

This passage made me flinch because I wasn’t courageous that morning on the mountain. I didn’t take flight from the rock, I blanched in the face of a life-changing opportunity.

I told myself that these words were just new-agey bullshit. The squawking birds were territorial, not prophetic. We were probably just too close to an eagle’s nest that is always situated in high places.

In retrospect, if I had gone to Peter that morning, I probably would have been just another notch on his belt. Worse yet, if anything had developed between us, it would have doomed me to marking time in the closet while he gallivanted on the football fields and picked up girls. Since I didn’t know any other gay people, I might have even stayed in the shadows and never come out.

In spite of it all, I can’t shake the thought that it would have been a great first time if I had just taken those few short steps toward Peter on the cliff.

My actual first time was with a guy named Scottie who picked me up at The Onyx Room, a gay bar in St. Louis. He was thirty years-old with passable looks; dark-haired, brown-eyed, handsome enough. When he came on to me at closing time, I was tipsy and ready to get rid of my tiresome virginity. I looked him over for a few seconds and figured that he’d get the job done.

I was nervous-chatty in his apartment as I downed multiple rum and Cokes. During a pause, he leaned over and pulled me toward him. We deep-kissed on the sofa for a long time. Eventually, he tugged down my pants and gently laid me out on the floor.

When took me in his mouth I learned what a real blow job was. He fellated me for the better part of an hour with craftsman-like patience. After he came, I held back my orgasm with every sinew in my body. My cock was so hard that it hurt, but I had never come in front of anyone before. As much as I wanted to be deflowered, I wasn’t quite ready for that level of intimacy with a stranger. I soon got over that.

As Scottie drove me back to my parents’ house, I stared out the window half-listening while he told me repeatedly how much he had enjoyed my eighteen-year-old body. I didn’t say anything because my thoughts were elsewhere.

Ever since I had admitted that I was gay, I knew that once I committed the act, there’d be no turning back. I wasn’t sure how I’d feel about being a real, “practicing homosexual.”

A few months earlier I’d watched Boys in the Band with an old girlfriend. On our way out of the theater, I turned to her and proclaimed:

“Well, I guess I’ll never turn queer!”

“Well, I should hope the hell not!” she replied.

All the way home with Scottie, I thought back to those sad characters in the movie. Now that I was a real queer, was tonight my induction into their self-hating club?

As I watched the suburban houses pass by, I realized that I was abandoning my straight-white-male-privilege forever. In those days, I didn’t think of it in exactly that way, the words that came into my head were:

Well, now I can never be President or have children.

It took me precisely five seconds to realize that I didn’t want to be either a world leader or a father.

I had never really belonged with the entitled, white people that I grew up around, so what was I really giving up? After years of hanging out in their world, I had seen that great wealth made life more comfortable but it didn’t guarantee happiness or personal success.

As for children, I never wanted them. As a teenager, I remember watching long-suffering parents trailing after their ill-behaved offspring in playgrounds and thinking: Do I have to do that?

So, as easy as that, I tossed aside my straight birthrights like a wad of someone else’s gum that I had peeled off the bottom of my shoe.

Scottie kissed me softly before dropping me six blocks from my parents’ duplex. I stood and watched his car disappear, then turned towards home and braced myself for the guilt and shame to wash over me. Instead, a twin sense of lightness and elation welled up inside of me. In the end, embracing my gayness was more than a conscious choice, it was one of the few pure, ecstatic experiences of my life.

In the early morning light, I sprinted toward my parents’ home swept up in a surge of joy that nearly lifted me off the ground like … well, like an eagle, I suppose.

Post Script: I didn’t stop coming out after I accepted my gayness. In fact, my life has been a series of such ah-hah moments preceded by long periods of growing awareness (i.e. “coming up”). It is a process that I have experienced when confronted with truths that I resist in myself. Truths like addictions, codependency, grief and even love, to name a few.

Coming up usually took years while coming out often took only a few seconds or minutes. I believe most people, no matter what their sexual orientation, experience similar transformations whenever they transition from one version of themselves to another.