No entry has meant more to me than this. Meant as my homage to ‘nelly gay men’ it is something of that and equally a summation of my sexuality. I fear it would’ve been better for me to spend a week or a month and not just a couple of hours writing this. Instant self-publishing isn’t always a blessing.
My love and esteem to every sexually atypical person who has ever been born. Gay, straight, transgendered, intersexual, or choose your own label. Below are a couple of thousand feeble words trying to record my joy in loving a select slice of you.
There’s more to love than boy meets girl.
Fall 1972. I’d entered Armstrong State College without having to complete high school. Actually I’d take a special calculus course (two classes back to back) in the summer session. My best two friends were Victor Story and John Emmet Belue. One afternoon when Victor came home from work they kissed. It was their way of coming out to me.
I didn’t care. Not having read about it in a book I didn’t consciously know about homophobia*. Stonewall was three years past but gay people didn’t really exist in the popular press. Not many days passed, one, two, a week - I wish I knew. What do you know: I’m gay too! (All written about in more depth in my sexuality pages.**)
Neglected sexuality floods in, knocking me down, lifting back up, showing me a world filled with beautiful boys. Boys who were blonde and pale, brown and dark, tall, short, in suits, in jeans, some with intelligent eyes, others dopey looking all as beautiful as song or sentence. The overreaching, intoxicating, overpowering desire that most discover earlier came to me in my young manhood as I was passing from seventeen to eighteen. (Frustration as well: I was fat but the fat was quickly shed so that I might remain sane.)
So I ogled and cruised on the streets and buses of Savannah. It felt so good, hurt so much.
I don’t remember the first guy I looked at with my newly enlarged vision. I do remember Charlie Poole. Charlie was a pale, skinny mildly fey boyfriend of a butch Jewish guy who’d become Victor and John’s landlord. I went to see a college performance of Brecht’s Good Woman of Setzuan. Can’t tell you a thing about the play but the nelly, long-necked beauty in the cast’s image is still with me thirty-one years later.
I felt helpless and trapped at home, indifferent to Savannah’s less human charms. I shed my fat and moved to Atlanta with Gordon.
I was ready to lose my virginity. David Paul McCorkle, who admired my ‘steely blue eyes’ and ‘scary’ deep voice, was the first boy I got naked with. (And not much more, I’d been drinking and was a flop, not that made it any less exciting - for me anyway.) A small point of self-respect: David and I remained friends for many years. In my moves I lost track of that vulnerable fellow, pity Google couldn’t help me find him again.
I can’t trace my mind’s insides clearly enough: was it coincidence or a fluke that David embodied what evolved into my theoretically ideal sexual partner: 5’8” (perfect height for holding in the lap), pale, a very sweet and kind, stereotypically nelly gay boy of the early 70s. Um … well I really like very tall, very thin guys as well. I guess my fascination most easily fixates on the extremes.
David took the initiative as would boy number two, a small boned, probably illegally young little queen. He was pale blonde sissyboy who was very aggressive sexually. It formed my pattern: I never approached anybody. They had to (in a couple of cases literally) jump into my lap. (Number two was a failure as well: one of his roommates amused himself by throwing ice on my back. Happily that didn’t continue.)
To divagate for a moment: before I met either of them I saw a guy wearing eyeliner in Atlanta’s Piedmont Park. I didn’t speak to him. But I was stunned by a jolt that went directly to my cock. There wasn’t precedent, at least to my memory. It was as if the young man with just a touch of makeup had appeared from outside my imaginings. A moment of almost painful erotic surprise.
Back then a certain wild eyed boy from freecloud was my erotic ideal. Androgyny was fashionable in the 1970s. Glam rockers with bogus bisexuality were popular for a time. Probably why in my dreams the ideal nelly gay boy has an English accent.
Not approaching other boys wasn’t a sign of massive confidence in my studly desirability. I was timid shit. I was never convinced of my own attractiveness. With a red face I’ll confess there was a very brief time in my days of virginity that I wondered if my penis was big enough. I’d never thought about my penis before except for the trite adolescent curiosity about finding a more interesting way to manipulate it in privacy. Fucking the couch cushions, say. (Measurements long since removed from my website.)
I could say it was an instance of the power of buried cultural imagery. But that is easy glib nonsense. I think it was just the talk of the first gay men I met in Savannah. The kind of queers of the time who rode around cruising and pointed out a man they’d readily sleep with if he were available but dismissed as “all meat and no potatoes.” Probably the sour species is still about; thankfully I haven’t met any in years.
Not all of the guys that I slept with were nelly. If you were nice looking and said “wanna trick” I was yours. Somehow none of the guys were either big or hairy. (OK, maybe three weren’t feminine. Almost all of them were young enough to get me tossed into prison. I - a teenage pedophile - was probably filtering people out without knowing that I was sending silent messages.)
In the almost vanished parlance of the time I was “butch” and almost all of them were “fem.” As gay men become visibly indistinguishable from hets they’ve divided themselves into tops and bottoms. Having been forcibly fucked by a couple of femme guys the idiom did and does seem silly. (Which is unfair: even for gay men what you can do with your body is subject to conditioning you can’t control. ‘Even for gay men’ doesn’t make huge since, otherwise we’d all be pansexual.)
There was one hirsute bodybuilder who wanted to sleep with me and I with him. He had an incorrigible honesty that reminded me much of Victor. (Victor was butch for sure and John’s femininity varied from just barely to extremely so depending on how high he was.) A testimony to the sex appeal of personality. Sadly the logistics never worked out.
But! For a short time I did have limp wrists. I think this was John’s influence. A sort of gay socialization. Probably many “Oh Marys!” originate in something like that. It fell away after maybe a couple of weeks. It didn’t fit. Nietzsche’s one must give style to one character is something I’ve always felt was true for most of us. I’ve never been able to work up patter or a persona that doesn’t harmonize fairly closely with I see really going on in my psyche. So my wrists returned to the horizontal.
Trying to rein myself back to my intended theme: from the drunken writer to the boy who’s great beauty frightened me the gay guys I’ve fucked, caressed, loved have never been ‘manly.’
I’ve sometimes wondered if I became a lover of nelly gay guys because they made themselves available to me. If it had been the heterosexualist homosexuals of nowadays would my sexuality become like those of the characters of Queer as folk. That my eighteen old self was transfixed and remembers a boy in eyeliner this many years later is an answer of sorts.
Somewhere in City of Night John Rechy says no one can make you feel more masculine than a drag queen. I didn’t associate with any. But it struck a powerful resonance with me when I read it. Probably also a superpower of feminine gay men.
Working for Atlanta’s gay newspaper, the forgotten Atlanta Barb, kept me mixing with people more than I ordinarily would. When I left the paper I was at loss for soft bottoms. I’d never liked gay bars and didn’t intend to start going to them. So I ran my first personal ad.
“Androgynous/masculine seeks androgynous/feminine.” If I didn’t remember that personal ad I wouldn’t be sure that I consciously knew that I liked feminine gay guys. The best answer I received proved to be from somebody I knew. (A guy who said he was Marcel DuChamp’s last lover, Rose Selavy (which was Duchamp’s own name for himself.) He made a pretty guy in a dress, no wig, and no makeup (for me, the most lovely kind). We had a good laugh. Years later we met again when I was living with a woman. We had more respect for each other than (nothing to do with this narrative.) I think we could’ve been sexually interested in each other. But I was living with someone.
I moved to San Francisco. Gay sex was easily had in the 70s, nowhere more than in San Francisco. I found myself saying no to indignant men with moustaches. The “Castro clone” look: short hair, facial hair was in vogue. Tall, dark curly hair, army boots, flannel, jeans I was a stereotype of the desirable gay man in San Francisco in the 1970s. While I would find myself in bed with a torturingly lovely femme guy my sexual activity actually declined. (Every single gay man I do remember sleeping with back then was fem. I wasn’t sure whether straight acting guy was going break down in tears or to try to kill me when I turned him down.)
I’d often had fantasies of sleeping with a classical hermaphrodite: woman’s breasts, man’s penis. I answered a personal ad in The Advocate (a tabloid back then with thousands of personals). The voice that answered was ugly and said I’d have to make a donation. I was ignorant of transsexuals’ economic needs. Maybe if my understanding had been evolved enough I would’ve decided to make that contribution. Not wanting to pay for sex I slammed the phone down and dismissed personal ads as a bad idea.
That I said “androgynous/masculine” in the personal ad back in Atlanta surprises me almost every time I recall it. Masculine wasn’t ordinarily a word I’d apply to myself (I’d have treasured the remark by the guy who told me I had ‘feminine consciousness’ if I’d felt he’s said it for any reason other than my giving him some cigarettes.) It would only be after a bunch of therapeutic Live Journal entries that I would finally accept masculine as a reasonable description of myself. I preferred to hem and haw with ‘conventional acting’ as though that was somehow better. I’m masculine, I guess. Doesn’t mean a sissy can’t get me where he wants me or put me in my place.
I lived with a very womanly but not feminine woman for several years. A long stretch followed when I was sexless, asexual - hard to say what. I simply didn’t think about it. Say, I’d been so deeply hurt that ideas of love and sex died.
Years later sex again came alive to me. This web site took its first form. An early page contained a short page speaking of my love for ‘soft boys. Baldly: I knew what I liked and knew what I wanted. (Not that I could think of it is such graceless terms.)
During the years when I was dead to the ideas of love and sex I didn’t fail to notice the pretty lads who came into Books Do Furnish A Room. There were plenty of handsome enough boys. But only three are alive in my memories. All were gracefully swishy. Two had ponytails, one lives a couple of blocks away (and I was foolish enough to tell Charles this - but that was before we became involved).
Trivial instances but I find myself drawn to those minor moments. And this was meant to be my celebration of feminine gay guys. Really it is about me but this kind of personal truth is necessarily autobiographical. That I might seen see dozens of nice looking young fellows and that only a tiny remainder lives on my mind is another unequivocal summation.
Looking for love on the web, I became a regular in a number of Yahoo clubs (since replaced with Groups). Mostly they were unsatisfactory. It was about this time my sexuality evolved to include classes of people I never thought of as potentially attractive, for example, gay transvestites.
The Yahoo Clubs had many flaws and faults. (Like the Yahoo members themselves who would IM without reading your profile or their with perceptions so distorted by their own lusts they couldn’t grasp the profile even if they read it.) The clubs for feminine gay men were often dead or involved in unhappy role-playing or filled with people whose idea of male femininity consisted of wearing women’s panties. Ignoring the (ahem) straight crossdressers who wanted to meet for what they called a date many of the crossdressing clubs were filled with guys who wanted to be slapped and called bitch. Nothing wrong with that, really, but it wasn’t what I wanted as the primary focus of a potential romantic entanglement. I did have a good time in one club and was worth it for my friendship with one inestimable person who crosdresses.
I did meet some nice feminine guys online. Annoyingly most of them were hundreds of miles away. Chatting was my idea of a heavy chore but I would sometimes chat with a few of them; they seemed so happy to find acceptance even at a distance.
One day I got an IM on AOL one day from a nice fellow. He gave me his phone number. And the night I called him I heard the voice of a Southern nelly guy. To many people it is a familiar sound, to some an annoying one. I was, as they say, enchanted. I didn’t care what he looked like. I had to meet him. Charles and I live together now.
Now there’s any easy place to stop. But I won’t.
Right after I met Charles, I said to Gordon that I’d “forgotten how someone like that can make me feel.” Our life together is built on more than my initial delirium. But it was as if I’d been injected with something confusing and powerful.
How did I wind up with this particular sexual crochet? In the two and a half years of my Live Journal I’ve all but described unmasculine gay men as demigods: above and outside gender.
OK, that is bullshit. Many are male bitches, unhappy, unable to get along with people, dwindling into small groups that find fault with everybody else. I’ve been as annoyed by and angry with some of them as the modern conventional homo (straight people - sorry - well, if you folks are uncomfortable, get over it).
In the old days they were the ‘funny boys’ who confused and disappointed their father. Who didn’t fit it. They became aloof and sarcastic to survive. Others shrunk into themselves and died feeling wholly alone.
The above is still true. Except that many in the gay subculture reject them because they are disgraceful, even humiliating. They make the conventional 21st century queer uncomfortable - they might embarrass him in front of his straight friends. They tell the majority that nasty thing they think about queers is true.
I’ll posit that my adoration of feminine men is a rejection of my daddy. Big Mack was tall, handsome, tough enough for a knife fight in a bar and physically strong, what regurgitatitors of pop psych crap call an alpha male. Little Richard grew up terrified of this man. I didn’t want to be like the old bastard. Maybe that is why I grew up with much of my momma
