In One Person

(Like my final draft classification, or
re
classification, I’m not sure what my stupid pass to the New York Athletic Club was called.)
    “Are you crazy, Billy?” Elaine asked me. “Are you trying to get yourself killed? That place is notoriously anti-
everything
. It’s anti-
Semitic
, it’s anti-
black
.”
    “It is?” I asked her. “How do you know?”
    “It’s anti-
women
—I fucking know that!” Elaine had said. “It’s an Irish Catholic boys’ club, Billy—just the Catholic part ought to have you running for the hills.”
    “I think you would like Arthur,” I told Elaine. “He’s a good guy—he really is.”
    “I suppose he’s married,” Elaine said with a sigh.
    Come to think of it, I had seen a wedding ring on Arthur’s left hand. I never fooled around with married men—with married
women
, sometimes, but not with married men. I was bisexual, but I was long over being conflicted. I couldn’t stand how conflicted married men were—that is, when they were also interested in gay guys. And according to Larry, all married men were disappointing lovers.
    “Why?” I’d asked him.
    “They’re freaks about gentleness—they must have learned to be gentle from their pushy wives. Those men have no idea how
boring
‘gentle’ is,” Larry told me.
    “I don’t think ‘gentle’ is
always
boring,” I said.
    “Please pardon me, dear Bill,” Larry had said, with that characteristically condescending wave of his hand. “I’d forgotten you were steadfastly a
top
.”
    I really liked Larry, more and more, as a friend. I had even grown to like how he teased me. We’d both been reading the memoir of a noted actor—“a noted
bi
,” Larry called him.
    The actor claimed that, all his life, he had “fancied” older women and younger men. “As you might imagine,” the noted actor wrote, “when I was younger, there were many older women who were available. Now that I’m older—well, of course, there are many more
available
younger men.”
    “I don’t see my life as that
neat
,” I said to Larry. “I don’t imagine being bi will ever seem exactly
well rounded
.”
    “Dear Bill,” Larry said—in that way he had, as if he were writing me an important letter. “The man is an
actor
—he
isn’t
bi, he’s
gay
. No wonder—now that he’s older—there are many more younger men around! Those older women were the only women he felt
safe
with!”
    “That’s not my profile, Larry,” I told him.
    “But you’re still a young man!” Larry had cried. “Just wait, dear Bill—just wait.”
    I T BECAME, OF COURSE , a source of both comedy and concern—with the women I saw and the gay men I knew—that I regularly attended wrestling practice at the NYAC. My gay friends refused to believe that I had next to no homoerotic interest in the wrestlers I met at the club, but my crushes on that kind of wrong person had been a phase for me, perhaps a part of the coming-out process. (Well, okay—a slowly passing, not-altogether-gone phase.) Straight men didn’t often attract me, at least not very much; that they could sense this, as Arthur did, had made it increasingly possible for me to have straight men for friends.
    Yet Larry insisted that my wrestling practices were a kind of high-energy, risky cruising; Donna, my dear but easily offended transsexual friend, dismissed what she called my “duck-under fixation” as the cultivation of a death wish. (Soon after this pronouncement, Donna disappeared from New York—to be followed by reports that she’d been sighted in Toronto.)
    As for the wrestlers at the New York Athletic Club, they were a mixed lot—in every respect, not only in how they treated me. My women friends, Elaine among them, believed that it was only a matter of time before I would be beaten to a pulp, but I was not once threatened (or deliberately hurt) at the NYAC.
    The older guys generally ignored me; once someone cheerfully said, when we were introduced, “Oh, you’re the
gay
guy—right?” But he shook my hand and patted me on the back; later, he always smiled and said something friendly when we saw each other. We weren’t in the same weight-class. If he was avoiding contact with me—on the mat, I mean—I wouldn’t have known.
    There was the occasional mass evacuation of the sauna, when I made an after-practice appearance there. I spoke to Arthur about it. “Maybe I should steer clear of the sauna—do you think?”
    “That’s your call, Billy—that’s