Adam and I Sleep Together, Sort Of

Madison, Wisconsin, July 1981

When I was in college in the early 1980s, gay people were never mentioned in class or on the quad.  They never appeared on tv or in movies.  There may have been a few gay people around, but they never came out willingly.  To find them, you had to look for clues.

How about Adam Horowitz, manager of the Student Union bookstore?  You never saw him with a girl.  When pressed, he claimed to be in love with an icy Hitchcockian blonde, but gave no more details.

Of course, you never saw him with a boy, either.   We had a "date" in March 1981, with a thwarted kiss under the Bell Tower,  but that was the only time I saw him away from his counter in the bookstore.

Until the summer of 1981,  when the Film Club took a road trip to Madison, Wisconsin, about 3 hours away, for an Italian Film Festival, two days of Fellini, Antonioni, Pasolini, and Zeffirelli. Though Adam wasn’t a member, not even a student, he asked if he could tag along. The president gave her eager consent, obviously planning an aggressive seduction – she was a senior, with less than a year until graduation, and landing a mature “older man” who owned his own business would trump even a Fratboy.  But Adam ignored her and spent all of his time with me.

On Saturday night, after Pasolini’s Canterbury Tales, we had a late dinner at a Mexican restaurant called Casa de Lara, and then the others suggested that we drop into the nearby Whiskey River Saloon for a beer – but I wasn’t 21 yet, and besides, I was still too Nazarene to stomach such places. As I weighed my choices, enduring the disgusting hospital smell of a saloon or being abandoned on the street, Adam wrapped a paternal arm around my shoulders and pushed us off into the night.



We strolled jauntily through the crowds on State Street, talking of Pasolini and then of  A Many Colored Land by Julian May, which had just been published to delirious acclaim among science fiction fans. We browsed through a record store and a hippie bookstore, where I bought a copy of Allen Ginsburg’s long beat poem Howl.

When we finally arrived at the hotel room that four of us were sharing,  Adam did endless sit-ups in his underwear while I lay atop his bed, watching.

"How should we arrange this?" I asked.

"What?"

"The...um...sleeping arrangements."  My face began to burn. "Um...maybe we should bunk together.  Then Bruce and Lars won't wake us up when they come in.”

“They’ll probably be back any minute, though."

“It'll be easier," I insisted.

 "I guess."  We climbed into bed.  Adam pulled the covers up only as far as his waist, so if I glanced casually over I could see his belly, hard and flat and xylophone-ribbed, his thick chest just brushed with hair, his heavy, blue-veined arms and shoulders. He continued to talk, desperately, of underground comix and Scrooge McDuck and Isaac Asimov and The Prisoner, while I waited, so close that I could feel the heat from his skin.

"Did you know that Allen Ginsberg is gay?"  I interrupted.

Adam turned on his side, so he was facing away from me.  "No, I didn't.  Well, goodnight."  He turned off the light.  And, a moment later, Bruce and Lars arrived, rowdy and joking.


Adam permitted some touching and fondling during the night, but attempting anything more got me rudely shoved away.  I couldn't tell if Adam was inhibited because Bruce and Lars were in the next bed, because I wasn't his type, or because he was straight, so I gave up.  And next day, after Pasolini's Arabian Nights, we drove back to Rock Island.

Later in the summer, Adam went to a comic book convention in Chicago, where he met and fell in love with a graduate student in art history from Ohio State University.  He returned to pack some things and lock up his bookstore -- the college later sold the stock cheap and turned it into a tv lounge -- and move to Columbus, without ever naming his...girlfriend?  boyfriend?  or using a pronoun.  I got one postcard, stating how deliriously happy he was.  And then silence.

Internet research reveals that Adam is now a newspaper editor in a small town in the Midwest, still deeply involved in comic book fandom, and...gay, straight, bi?  Asexual?  I still don't know.

People of our generation were trained to keep silent.  I imagine Adam is sitting in his newspaper office right now, thinking "Was Boomer gay, straight, bi?  Asexual?"


See also: Kissing Adam at the Bell Tower.