THE FEMININE VIEWPOINT

by and about women

"I remember"

There were three of us. Seymour, the oldest, Mary, the next, and me, Fran, the youngest.

I remember so much, and yet so little about him. When you're just a kid, you don't know if anything is the matter. I guess Mom and Dad didn't know either, till he joined the army and was wounded. Then the doctors called them, and told them just what it was that made Seymour "different". There was a diary he kept, about all that happened in service-a diary that the Army made him burn!

It was hard for Mom and Dad to realize just what it was all about, and hardest of all for them to accept the fact that their only son was a homosexual. But I'm way ahead of my story, so I'll try to remember from the beginning.

We weren't rich people, but always managed to live in the "right" neighborhood. Seymour, as a baby, was beautiful. He looked like a girl, really— curly hair, big eyes, and what with the way Mom dressed him, Eton suits and starched cottons. He was so beautiful the women stopped and actually drooled over him. Maybe that started it-the road he was to take.

As we grew up, and Seymour was at an age where football, handball and such would have been the usual dream of boys, Seymour was different. Art, bicycle-riding, good books were his youth. Yet the boys liked him and treated him like one of the gang, except for the nickname they gave him, I remember that name, "Clarence", because it hurt me in the way a little girl can be hurt. For no particular reason, "Clarence", to me, meant a "sissy", and the thought of my brother being one was hard to bear.

From later years, I can remember his dates. There were lots of girls, never the same one twice. Mom used to ask him about it, but he would laugh and say that he liked to "play the field".

Graduation from high school . . . graduation from college . . . his first job, a chorus-boy in a Broadway show! I remember that. Little did I know. I thought it was so grand that my brother was in a Broadway show.

Then those parties, when Mom and Dad were out for the evening Seymour closing my bedroom door and telling me to go to sleep. Once, for an instant, I saw my brother with his friends. They were all men. Seymour was dressed in Mom's clothes, and they were all talking to one another as men talk to their women-lovers.

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