Lane and I Track Down the Gay Baron of Eindhoven

West Hollywood, February 1992

Have you ever wondered what happened after Allies liberated the Jews and other prisoners from the concentration camps in 1945?

A few of the prisoners returned to their homes.  But 800,000 had no homes to return to, or refused to go back to the neighbors who wanted to kill them.

 They were put into displaced persons camps or residential facilities for up to two years, until a friend or relative could send for them, or until they could be repatriated

When she was liberated from Auschwitz, Lane's mother Rosa was sent to a residential facility run by some Catholic nuns in Weert, Netherlands, just over the border from Germany.  She spent her first two weeks walking up and down the streets, stopping in every pastry shop, and eating all she could hold.

Then she set about returning to life again.  She was planning to become a journalist before the War, so she found a typewriter and began writing.  She brought articles around to the local newspapers, first in German, then, as she learned the language, in Dutch.  Soon she was making enough money to move into an apartment with a female friend.

But in August 1947, an American cousin found Rosa and offered to bring her to Los Angeles.

Palm trees and movie stars!  She eagerly agreed.

That's all we knew about Rosa's life in the Netherlands until after she died unexpectedly in February 1992, a few days after her 67th birthday.

When Lane and I were sorting through four decades of cards, bills, business papers, old school assignments, clipped magazine and newspaper articles, Jewish society newsletters, playbills, programs, and miscellaneous records, we found a packet of old letters addressed to Rosa at the Zusters Birgittinessen, and then at her apartment in Weert, and finally at her cousin's house in Los Angeles, with the postmark Eindhoven, Netherlands.

It's hard to decipher one side of a conversation in a foreign language after 47 years, but we got the general plot: Rosa was dating a member of the Dutch nobility, a Baron Hein Van Tuyll, who lived about twenty miles away in the Eymerick Castle.

In February 1947, Hein apparently proposed, and Rosa turned him down.  She explains why: Je niet moet trouwen.  We zullen vrienden altijd (You should not marry. We will always be friends).  

He gamely continued to write to her every week through 1947, when the letters suddenly stop.

The Van Tuyll family is important in the Netherlands.  Hein's father was the first president of the Dutch Olympic Committee.  This statue outside the Olympic Stadium was erected in his honor.

This is the family coat of arms: three hounds, a crown, and two half-naked wild men carrying flowers.

"You should not marry," I repeated.  "Maybe Hein wasn't the marrying kind.  Could your Mom have been dating a gay guy?

"We should go to the Netherlands next summer," Lane said, "And look him up."

"Look up your mother's old boyfriend, and ask if he's gay?"

"It wouldn't hurt.  Or...maybe he has a hot gay son who will invite us to live in his castle.  We would be sort of like brothers, after all."

I was hesitant.  We spent last summer looking up Lane's heritage in Poland, and now we had to do it in the Netherlands?  But I could wrangle a side-trip to Amsterdam out of it, and maybe even Paris, so I agreed.

In the days before Google, family research was tough.  We couldn't track down Hein, but we found his son: 41 year old Sammy, the current Baron Van Tuyll.  We made the call, and got an invitation to visit.

Disappointingly, he didn't live in the family castle.  He had a house in Den Haag, where he worked for the Dutch Ministry of Finance.

Den Haag, Netherlands, June 1992

We spend three days in Paris (not nearly enough time), overnight in Brussels to look at the Grand-Place and the Mannekin Pis, and then take the 2 1/2 hour train trip across the border to Den Haag.

We're only going to spend a few hours: in the late afternoon, we'll get on the train to Amsterdam, where the bars and bathhouses of Warmoesstraat await.

But we have time to see the Escher Museum, walk through the Haagse Bos, an ancient forest in the city center, and meet the Dutch deputy minister of finance at the Allard Restaurant.

Sammy is youthful-looking and athletic, surprisingly hip, a rock musician as well as an economist.   But straight -- he shows pictures of his wife and four children.  We show him the letters.

"You must not marry.  We should be friends," he translates.  "I can't imagine what your mother meant.  Papa married in 1947.  There were never any problems between him and my mother, none that I could see."

Remembering the evidence that my grandfather was gay, I ask "Did he have a lot of male friends?  Maybe Rosa didn't want to compete."

"Oh, yes, Papa was very sociable.  He had a passion for sports.  He was always bringing home athletes: football players, rowers, bodybuilders...."

Lane and I exchange glances.  "Was he into bodybuilding?" I ask.  "I used to work for Muscle and Fitness."

"He didn't lift weights himself, but he loved bodybuilding as an art form.  I remember when Reg and Marian Park came to dinner -- a former Mr. Universe -- he was as excited as a schoolgirl with a crush on a pop star.  And this in a man who is the godfather of Queen Beatrix!"

A crush on Reg Park?  Shouldn't marry?  Was Hein gay or bi?

We keep our suspicions to ourselves.

Lane offers Sammy some of the letters. He takes four, including the last, written to Rosa in Los Angeles.

It ends with "After all, my dear Rosa, vriendschap is het enige dat telt."

Friendship is all that matters.

See also: A Beefcake Tour of Amsterdam

The Boy Who Refused to Leave My Room in the Rain

Long Island, October  1999

I met Ozzie at one of Ravi's Bear Parties on Long Island: a 21 year old NYU undergrad, tall, muscular, with smooth dark skin and an enormous Kovbasa beneath the belt.

He was Moroccan, from in Tangiers, on the Strait of Gibraltar, where his father worked at the Continental Hotel, He spoke Standard Arabic, Moroccan Arabic, English, French, and Spanish.

Obviously I wanted to do more than go down on him!

There was only one problem: I had (and still have) an inviolable rule, drummed into me through ten years in West Hollywood: you must end the evening with the same people you began the evening with.  No abandoning them halfway through for a trick.

I always came to the Bear Parties with Yuri, who lived in a graduate student apartment at Setauket University, about thirty miles in the wrong direction from NYU.

The Bear Parties were on Wednesday nights, and I had class on Wednesday and Thursday both, so it made sensee to drive with Yuri and spent the night in his room afterwards, rather than taking the train all the way into Manhattan, and back again.

Besides, there were distinct advantages to spending the night in Yuri's room.

I wasn't going to abandon him tonight to escort a Cute Young Thing back to Manhattan, and I wasn't going to suggest sharing: Ozzie wasn't Yuri's type.  He liked older men with bodybuilder physiques.

But Yuri, always easy-going, said "Not a problem.  If you like him, I don't care.  We will share him."

But what about the sleeping logistics: "Are you sure there's enough room for three?"

Graduate student apartments were nicely appointed, but the bedrooms were quite small.  Yuri had a single bed, a desk, a dresser, and a bookcase, with a single window looking out onto the parking lot.   When I spent the night, we did a lot of cuddling.

He thought for a moment.  "Ok, we will put blankets on the floor."

It was raining when we left Ravi's house.  I thought it odd that Ozzie wouldn't run out to the car with us; we had to drive up to the front door and fetch him.

"I don't like the rain," he said, bursting into the back seat.  "It doesn't rain much in Tangiers."

On the way back to Setauket University, he told us his coming out story.

Tangiers was once a gay mecca, home to William Burroughs, Alan Ginsberg, and an army of less well known gay men.  When King Hassan II took the throne in 1961, he instituted a crackdown on "decadence" and "Western immorality," but there were still lots of sex tourists from Europe and America.  They would pick up local boys for afternoon trysts in exchange for gifts or a few dirham.

"I never did anything like that.  I was a good Muslim boy, not a prostitute.  But there was a hot British guy who used to drive past the bus stop every day and smiled at me.  And one day it was raining, so he stopped and asked if I wanted a ride."

He got more than a ride.

Except his mother happened to be out shopping, and saw him getting into a car with a foreign man twice his age.

There were questions, accusations, and Ozzie was outed.  A week later, he was at a private school in upstate New York, exiled as a "disgrace" to the family.

His parents sent him a check every month, and sometimes he telephoned his older sister, but he hadn't been back to Morocco for five years.

"I hate the rain!" Ozzie murmured, staring out the car window.  "The first time I picked up a guy in the rain, I got kicked out of Morocco.  The second time, it was a ghost."

Yuri and I glanced at each other.  Rather a depressing turn to the conversation!

But Ozzie warmed up when we got back to Yuri's room and spread blankets on the floor.  He was too big to swallow all the way, but Yuri and I both went down on him at the same time, and then he turned Yuri onto his stomach to finish with interfemeral.  Then he went down on both of us simultaneously while we kissed.

7:00 am.  Yuri's alarm clock goes off.  Enough time for a brief session, mostly handling Ozzie's morning wood, then breakfast: Cheerios.

7:40 am. Yuri packs up his stuff.  He has a class at 8:00 am, and I want to do some work in my office, so it is time to say goodbye.

"If you walk down that street for about five blocks," I tell Ozzie, "You'll hit the train station.  Take the Long Island Railroad to Jamaica Station, then transfer to Penn."

Ozzie looks out the window.  "It's raining pretty hard.  Could I stay here awhile, until it lets up?"

I glance at Yuri.  He shrugs  "I guess ok."

7:45 am.  Yuri leaves.  Ozzie and I go back into his room and make out.

8:30 am.  Ok,  It's still raining, but I have things to do.  Ozzie turns on the tv.

9:00 am.  I really have to get to the office to prepare for my 11:00 class.  It's still raining.

"You can take an umbrella to the train station," I suggest.

"I'd rather wait until it stops raining, if you don't mind."  He kisses me on the cheek.  "We can find something to do, right?"

Sighing, I go down on him again.  This is becoming less erotic and more like a chore

9:30 am.  I have class soon, and I want to go to the gym, but I can't leave Ozzie alone in Yuri's apartment.   He could steal something, or do some damage, or call his friends for a wild party.

I knock on the doors of Yuri's roommates, hoping that they'll chaperon.  But they're not in.

10:00 am.   I shove an umbrella into Ozzie's hand.  "Ok, you're going to either go to the library and wait for me, or go home, but you can't stay here.  Your choice.

No twist ending.  It was just really annoying that I couldn't get Ozzie to leave, Kovbasa or not."

See also: Ozzie Hooks Up with John F. Kennedy Jr.