In One Person

the seventies—there was a lot of street cruising. Then, and now, I liked the androgynous look—nor were
androgynous
and
androgyny
ever words that gave me pronunciation problems.
    “You’re a pretty boy, Bill,” Larry often said to me, “but don’t think you can stay ultra-thin forever. Don’t imagine that you can dress like a razor blade, or even in drag, and have any real effect on the macho codes you’re rebelling against. You won’t change what real men are like, nor will you ever be one!”
    “Yes, Professor,” was all I usually said.
    In the fabulous seventies, when I picked up a guy, or I let myself be picked up, there was always that moment when my hand got hold of his butt; if he liked to be fucked, he would start moaning and writhing around—just to let me know I’d hit the magic spot. But if he turned out to be a top, we would settle for a super-fast 69 and call it a night; sometimes, this would turn into a super-rough 69. (The “macho codes,” as Larry called them, might prevail. My “Utopian notion of androgyny” might not.)
    It was Larry’s formidable jealousy that eventually drove me away from him; even when you’re as young as I was, there’s a limit to enduring admiration being a substitute for love. When Larry thought I’d been with someone else, he would try to touch my asshole—to feel if I was wet, or at least lubricated. “I’m a top, remember?” I used to tell him. “You should be sniffing my cock instead.” But Larry’s jealousy was insanely illogical; even knowing me as well as he did, he actually believed I was capable of being a bottom with someone else.
    When I met Larry in Vienna, he was making himself a student of opera there—the opera was why he’d come. The opera was partly why I’d chosen Vienna, too. After all, Miss Frost had made me a devoted reader of nineteenth-century novels. The operas I loved
were
nineteenth-century novels!
    Lawrence Upton was a well-established poet, but he’d always wanted to write a libretto. (“After all, Bill, I know how to
rhyme.”)
Larry had this wish to write a gay opera. He was very strict with himself as a poet; maybe he imagined he could be more relaxed as a librettist. He may have wanted to write a gay opera, but Lawrence Upton never wrote an openly gay poem—that used to piss me off, more than a little.
    In Larry’s opera, some cynical queen—someone a lot like Larry—is the narrator. The narrator sings a lament—it’s deliberately foolish, and I forget how it rhymes. “Too many Indians, not enough chiefs,” the narrator laments. “Too many chickens, not enough roosters.” It was very relaxed, all right.
    There is a chorus of bottoms —
numerous
bottoms, naturally—and a comically much-smaller chorus of tops. If Larry had continued his opera, it’s possible he would have added a medium-size chorus of bears, but the bear movement didn’t begin until the mid-eighties—those big hairy guys, consciously sloppy, rebelling against the chiseled, neat-and-trim men, with their shaved balls and gym bodies. (Those bears were so refreshing, at first.)
    Needless to say, Larry’s libretto was never made as an opera; his career as a librettist was abandoned in-progress. Larry would be remembered only as a poet, though I remember his gay-opera idea—and those many nights at the Staatsoper, the vast Vienna State Opera, when I was still so young.
    It was a valuable lesson for the young would-be writer that I was: to see a great man, an accomplished poet, fail. You must be careful when you stray from an acquired discipline—when I first hooked up with Larry, I was still learning that writing is such a discipline. Opera may be a flamboyant form of storytelling, but a librettist also follows some rules; good writing isn’t “relaxed.”
    To Larry’s credit, he was the first to acknowledge his failure as a librettist. That was a valuable lesson, too. “When you compromise your standards, Bill, don’t blame the form. Opera is not at fault. I’m not the victim of this failure, Bill—I’m the perpetrator.”
    You can learn a lot from your lovers, but—for the most part—you get to keep your friends longer, and you learn more from them. (At least I have.) I would even say that my friend Elaine’s mother, Martha Hadley, had a greater influence on me than Lawrence Upton truly had.
    In fact, at Favorite River Academy, where I was a junior in the winter of 1960—and, Vermont boy that I was, given my naïveté—I