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HIGH GEAR

SEPTEMBER 1976

A GAY GENERATION

AGO

MITCHELL MENIGU

Michael Madigan's interview with "Jim," "Sixteen and Gay," in the July 1976 issue of High Gear awakened memories of my own sixteenth year a generation ago. Although Jim and I are individuals and may not be typical, still in many ways we probably represent attitudes and experiences of others of our generations. Comparing Jim's sense of himself as a young gay man and mine in the forties, I am aware of the benefits that the gay liberation movement has created and, at the same time, of certain qualities of human experience that do not change.

Jim's world as a gay youth is much broader and more open than mine was. I knew that I was gay, but for a long time I did not know the term that would denote me. Gradually through reading came across such terms as "invert," "neurasthenic.” "pervert,' and

"homosexual." All carried a negative connotation, suggesting, as I learned when I searched further for their meanings, that was suffering from a neurotic condition that made the state of my mental health suspect.

As a matter of fact, once identified what I had been called, I still could find little to explain me. Psychology textbooks echoed each other with brief, hedging discussions. I discovered Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis and despaired to find my feelings catalogued among so many other kinds of aberrant behavior. Freud's letter to the mother of a young homosexual, which I came upon by chance, brought further despair. He suggested to her that psychoanalysis would be no help. The one positive effect of reading Freud's letter was to end the sorrow that I, not being a famous movie star, could never afford the expensive sessions with an analyst who would make me like everyone else.

I felt my difference from my friends strongly. I submitted to the patterns society had set up for us, dating and trying to enjoy necking in movies or in the back seat of someone's father's car. I related well personally to the girls I dated, but I simply wasn't interested sexually. When my friends and I would discuss our

dates, I was most excited by the thought of my friends' having been sexually aroused.

The most difficult aspect of my life at sixteen was that I did not know anyone else who shared my feelings. I thought that there was one other fellow at my school who might be like me, but I didn't like him and hoped that he represented some other kind of problem. My erotic fantasies tended to focus on classmates who were not friends of mine; I suspect that with friends a kind of incest taboo was operating.

I was a youth in a period when sex itself was a taboo subject not an activity to be discussed openly or to be engaged in outside of marriage. I felt guilty about all sexual thoughts but especially about those that somehow involved me with other males. The mechanics of sex in my fantasies was a problem for me. I imagined myself in the kinds of situations that I saw in movies, picturing myself simulthe male taneously as and female, but the typical Hollywood fade-out left what happened after the kiss a mystery.

Not that I had not had sexual experiences. It was a matter of my not accepting those furtive, ugly, and guilt-inducing episodes as consisting of the actions that would bring me the fulfillment that I sought, the kind the movies taught me to expect. In fact, like Pauline Kael, "I lost it at the movies."

My first real sexual encounter came about when I saw The Jolson Story at the Hippodrome and a man who seemed much

older (he may have been thirty). propositioned me in the men's room. He did not seduce me; he merely offered what I thought I might want. That experience set the pattern for the other infrequent sexual encounters of my youth. Almost always my partners were anonymous. We had sex in men's rooms, corners of dark alleys, and in parked cars while keeping a nervous lookout in the rearview mirror. Sex was a physical release but never fulfilling pleasure. I always rode the streetcar home feeling guilty and dirty.

Finding my anonymous partners was a problem in itself, as was my growing belief that anonymity was necessary in