WHITHER THE WANDERING BRAVE? By Rolland Howard

It is 11:30 p.m. and we have just completed another "work party" at which we put out another newsletter covered by some beautiful artwork and containing articles on our cause. We have mailed them out to subscribers and friends and dropped in at Denver's "gayest" bar. I stroll about through the crowd, nursing a beer and exchanging pleasantries with beautiful young men in smart, casual clothes chosen to show slender young masculine physiques at their best, and with other men who are not so young nor so beautiful, but who are nonetheless friendly. I nod once more the futile nod at those other young men a minority, happily-who have been habitues here for years with a much better record of consistent attendance than mine, but who exhibit, as if their lives depend on it, an attitude of aloof superiority, speaking to very few, and maintaining on their faces a look (lip curled disdain fully, looking down their noses) which some psychiatric theorizers have described as a frozen reaction to their earlier exposure to the malodorous uncovered pot.

I have long since noted that the mass attitude in the bar varies from night to night, and I have tentatively classified them. Some nights are drunk nights, when virtually everyone is alcoholically out of control. Some nights are jolly nights, and people dance and tell jokes and their exchanges are humorous and everyone laughs a lot. Some nights are sexy nights when, as Dorothy Parker might say, everyone is "lusting after" someone else. And some nights are hostile ones, and people are "catty" or "bitchy" and one or two actual outbreaks of minor physical violence occur. Tonight appears to be one of these last, and I decide not to stay beyond one beer.

And then I hear my name and I see Dan beckoning to me from a stool at the bar. I join him and he asks me if I will buy him a beer. I do.

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Dan is a full-blooded Indian from a Mid-western reservation. I met him several years ago, when he was rooming where I did. He was only a boy, then, experimenting with his new freedom from the reservation. Slightly built, dark and very handsome, he had been wearing an eye-patch to cover the unseeing hole left when he lost an eye in an automobile accident on the way to Denver. Harvey, a friend of mine who owned the rooming house was trying to get some public agency or other to provide a glass substitute for the boy, and two months and several dollars later, he had succeeded.

Since then, I had seen Dan only occasionally. Only slightly educated, he took odd jobs in mountain towns and when he came to Denver I would see him with first one older man and then another. I hoped that at least some of them had more interest in him than the mere bedroom-companionship a square meal could buy.

The last few times I had seen him, he was always with the same man; a short, thirty-fivish, well-dressed man with a mustache and a possessive air. Now Dan was telling me he had been "married" to this one for two years, and was getting"sick of it."He has been considering heterosexual marriage. I tell him in my cynical fashion, but as sympathetically as I can, that “marriage," as he and his companion think of it, means the union of a man and a woman, and that two men or two women may have mutual dependencies, or companionship, or sexual play, or close friendship, or even love, or combinations of these, but not marriage in the usual sense. Nevertheless, I continue, don't marry a woman as a social "front" or out of bittemess; marry her, rather, when you know that's what you really want to do.

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He has been too drunk too often of late. "Tell me," he says now, should I do stay at home or come down and drink?” "Must you decide between the two?" I ask, somewhat surprised at the simple polarity of his subjective debate. "Why can't you do both? Come down for a beer or two when you feel like it, and spend some time at home." He simply shakes his head slowly, somewhat hopelessly, I think.

I have noticed some new scars about his upper lip and I inquire about them. "Didn't I tell you about that?" he asks, surprised, and proceeds to do so. Another night, same bar. He is offered a lift home, and accepts. His "benefactor"' walks him to his car in a parking lot where they are joined by several other young men who Dan assumes are other friends from the bar. All get in the car. They drive out on a lonely country road and beat this dispossessed American senseless, take his billfold and wristwatch and leave him at the edge of an orchard. Recovering and regaining the high way, he eventually is assisted into town and left at a hospital where six stitches are put into his already worldvorn young face.

"You've really had a hard go of it," I smile, trying to keep my own spirit high enough to support his.