In One Person

thought.
    “It’s not what?” I heard Martha Hadley ask him. I remember pausing on the stairs. “I know you can say it,” she said gently to him. “You’re wearing a tie—you can say
tie
, can’t you?”
    “It’s not …
tie
,” Atkins managed.
    “Now say
mmm
—like when you eat something good,” Mrs. Hadley told him.
    “I can’t!” Atkins blurted out.
    “Please come in,” Mrs. Hadley said again.
    “It’s not
tie
—
mmm
!” Atkins struggled to say.
    “That’s good—that’s
better
, anyway. Please come in now,” Martha Hadley told him, and I continued down the stairs and out of the music building, where I’d also heard snippets of songs, choral voices, and a second-floor segment of stringed instruments, and (on the ground floor) another in-progress piano practice. But my thoughts were entirely on what a loser and an idiot Atkins was—he couldn’t pronounce the
time
word! What a fool!
    I was halfway across the quad, where Grau had died, when I thought that the hatred of homosexuals was perfectly in tune with my thinking. I couldn’t pronounce
penises
, yet here I was feeling utterly superior to a boy who couldn’t manage to say
time
.
    I remember thinking that, for the rest of my life, I would need to find more people like Martha Hadley, and surround myself with them, but that there would always be other people who would hate and revile me—or even try to cause me physical harm. This thought was as bracing as the winter air that killed Dr. Grau. It was a lot to absorb from one appointment with a sympathetic voice-and-singing teacher—this in addition to my disturbing awareness of Mrs. Hadley as a dominant personality, and that something to do with her dominance appealed to me sexually. Or was there something about her dominance that
didn’t
appeal to me? (It only then occurred to me that maybe I wanted to
be
like Mrs. Hadley—that is, sexually—not be
with
her.)
    Maybe Martha Hadley was a hippie ahead of her time; the
hippie
word was not in use in 1960. At that time, I’d heard next to no mention of the
gay
word; it was a little-used word in the Favorite River Academy community. Maybe “gay” was too friendly a word for Favorite River—at least it was too neutral a word for all those homo-hating boys. I did know what “gay” meant, of course—it just wasn’t said much, in my limited circles—but, as sexually inexperienced as I was, I’d given scant consideration to what was meant by “dominant” and “submissive” in the seemingly unattainable world of gay sex.
    N OT THAT MANY YEARS later, when I was living with Larry—of the men and women I’ve tried to live with, I lasted with Larry the longest—he liked to make fun of me by telling everyone how “shocked” I was at the way he picked me up in that gay coffeehouse, which was such a mysterious place, in Vienna.
    This was my junior year abroad. Two years of college German—not to mention my studying the language at Favorite River Academy—had prepared me for a year in a German-speaking country. These same two college years of living in New York City had both prepared me and
not
prepared me for how underground a gay coffeehouse in Vienna would be in that academic year of 1963–64. At that time, the gay bars in New York were being shut down; the New York World’s Fair was in ’64, and it was the mayor’s intention to clean up the city for the tourists. One New York bar, Julius’, remained open the whole time—there may have been others—but even at Julius’, the men at the bar weren’t permitted to touch one another.
    I’m not saying Vienna was more underground than New York at that time; the situation was similar. But in that place where Larry picked me up, there was some touching among the men—permitted or not. I just remember it was Larry who shocked me, not Vienna.
    “Are you a top or a bottom, beautiful Bill?” Larry had asked me. (I was shocked, but not by the question.)
    “A top,” I answered, without hesitation.
    “Really!” Larry said, either genuinely surprised or feigning surprise; with Larry, this was often hard to tell. “You look like a bottom to me,” he said, and after a pause—such a long pause that I’d thought he was going to ask someone else to go home with him—he added, “Come on, Bill, let’s leave now.”
    I was shocked, all right, but only because I was a college student, and Larry was my professor. This was the Institut für Europäische Studien in Vienna—
das