Do Levis Show Bulges Better than Armani Wool Slacks?

Wolcottville, Indiana, July 1983

When I was a kid, my family was distinctly working class.  Dad worked in the factory, and Mom worked at the mall.

Our house was about the size of small apartment.

90% of dinners consisted of spaghetti, macaroni and cheese, tuna casserole, fried eggs, or -- shudder -- chipped beef on toast.

My parents' relatives were distinctly working class, too.  Not a college graduate among them.  A lot of pick up trucks, country-western music, and Goodwill t-shirts and jeans.

Fundamentalism.

Country western music!

So it came as a shock to discover that I am related to one of the wealthiest families in the world.

In 1982, when I was in grad school in Bloomington, I found out that Dad was adopted.  His biological father was the "black sheep" son of a wealthy northern Indiana businessman.

More research revealed a connection with the McCormicks of Chicago.

You know, Interntional Harvester, the Chicago Tribune, McCormick Place, McCormick School of Engineering, McCormick Theological Seminary, the Art Institute of Chicago, Villa Turicum, the House-in-the-Woods?

A vast dynasty of industrialists, publishers, politicians, and philanthropists descended from the eight children of Virginia inventor Robert McCormick (1780-1846)?

It's a complicated genealogy: I can give you the details if you're interested.  But it turns out that I had a 3rd cousin named Justine McCormick Grossman, 73 years old, daughter of a senator, granddaughter of the U.S. ambassador to Russia and France, living on a farm near Wolcottville, Indiana.

It was only a few miles from Rome City, but Aunt Nora, Dad's older sister, didn't know her.  I guess when you're adopted, you have enough trouble keeping up with your biological father, no time to worry about second cousins.

A relative who was wealthy, sophisticated, a world traveler, who listened to Mozart instead of Willie Nelson, who went to the opera instead of Nazarene revival meetings, who served beef bourguignon instead of chipped beef on toast!  And who, I assumed, was gay-friendly.  After all, weren't rich people tolerant of eccentricities?

So I called.  It took a few minutes to impress upon her who I was, but then she began to reminisce about life in the 1930s:

"My cousin Frank, your grandfather was quite a scandal in our family!" she told me in a scratchy voice.  "He ran off to become a singer in a music hall, of all things!  And then he married his...his housekeeper, who was young enough to be his daughter!  My, how tongues wagged!"

"So -- when his wife died, and he wasn't able to take care of his kids by himself, the Davis family adopted them.  Why didn't... um...a McCormick adopt them?"

That is, Grandma Davis is great and all, but why didn't you become my grandma, and raise my Dad and his sisters in luxury, and give me a car for my high school graduation, and send me to Harvard?

"Oh, your grandpa wanted nothing to do with the McCormicks.  He preferred to spend his time with riff-raff, actors and artists and music-hall singers.  Like that Lloyd Davis."

My Grandpa Davis?  Hey, I thought rich people were accepting of eccentricities and foibles!

I was starting to rile up a bit, but I calmed down when Justine began describing her two children and four grandchildren.  Her grandson Cyrus, named after the original Cyrus, was a theater arts major at Indiana University.  He went by his middle name, Michael.

My cousin, the scion of the ultra-wealthy McCormick family, was walking on the same campus as me?

He was probably more liberal.

Maybe we would become friends.  We would hang out in House-in-the-Woods or Cavigny, sail on his yacht, fly over to London and Paris, chat about caviar...

Or we would become lovers.  He no doubt had a handsome, aristocratic face, dark hair, a gym-toned physique, and an enormous Mortadella beneath the belt.  I knew from my doomed pursuit of Richie Rich that virgin wool slacks show baskets a lot more effectively than our working-class Levis.

I fantasized about going down on him as we lay on the silk sheets in the gild-and-wood bedroom where he once prepared for polo matches and studied his Latin lessons.

Cousin Justine was mistaken -- there was no one named Cyrus Michael McCormick Grossman Hawthorne on campus.

"Oh, maybe he graduated already," she said.  "You know how time flies when you get older.  I think he's in Philadelphia now.  Let me look up the address for you."

The address was around the corner from a Philadelphia gay bar listed in my Gayellow Pages.  Michael was obviously gay!

Still, too far to go for a rich relative, gay or not, so I forgot about it until the summer of 1983, when Cousin Justine died.  Her daughter found my name in her address book, and had her assistant invite me to the funeral.

It was an odd prospect, going to the funeral of someone I'd never met and only spoke to twice. But, I figured, it would be a chance to meet other McCormicks, including my fifth cousin, the gay Philadelphia theater arts major named Cyrus Michael.

In July 1983, I drove from Bloomington up to an Episcopal Church in Elkhart, Indiana for the funeral.  The reception was held at the home of Justine's daughter and son-in-law: an English Tudor with sculpted grounds.

As I mingled among the McCormcks, Grossmans, Hawthornes, Dressers, Jacksons, and Bialis, I heard the same right-wing politics as among my working-class relatives.  Maybe worse.

Cousin Michael was tall, lithe, rather feminine, with glasses and a short beard. In 1983 you didn't come out to strangers (or anyone else, for that matter),  But how could he not be gay?

"I grew up on stories of your grandpa's dirty tricks," he told me.  "I always thought it was so cool to be able to do your own thing, without all the obligations that come with being a McCormick.  In fact, I think that's what gave me the motivation to become an actor."

The grass is always greener....

See also: Was My Grandfather Gay?

Dad Takes Me to See Naked Men

When I was growing up in Rock Island, the adults always asked "Is there any girl at school that you like?" but never "What do you want to be when you grow up?"  That was already decided.  I would go to work in the factory.

Rock Island was a factory town; almost every adult I knew, and the dad of almost every kid I knew, worked at J.I. Case, International Harvester, Caterpillar, or John Deere.  They all made tractors, harvesters, and other farm machines.

My factory was going to be J.I. Case Company, with its logo of an eagle digging its talons into the world.  Like my father and grandfather and three of my uncles and two of my older cousins.  Like everyone.

You started on the assembly line, then after a few years got promoted to lineman, and maybe, eventually, to foreman.

I could think of no fate more horrible than getting up at 5:00 am for a day of screwing things into things, then returning, dirty and dripping with sweat, to the small square house where my wife would have dinner on the table.

So, occasionally, in grade school or junior high, I said that I didn't want to work in the factory when I grew up.  Dad laughed.

"Of course no one wants to work.  You probably would rather spend the whole day playing football with your pals.  You have to, so you can make money to support your wife and kids."

"No, I mean, I want to do something else besides the assembly line at J.I. Case Company."

"Like what?  Sell shoes in the mall?  The factory pays better, and you don't have to work nights, so you can spend time with your wife and kids."

Tenth graders at Rocky High were put into "business" or "academic" tracks.  I had high grades, so they put me into the academic track, explaining that it was for kids who planned to go to college.


College?  The possibility had never crossed my mind before.  No one in my family had ever gone to college (actually, my grandmother went to art school, but I didn't know that at the time). Wasn't it just for rich people?

No, there were lot of scholarships.  I could probably get one.

"Don't be crazy!" Dad said when I told him about college.  "You don't need college to work in the factory!  Besides, what are you going to do in college but read books?," he added with a derisive sneer. Nazarenes thought of books other than the Bible as worthless at best, and most likely tools of Satan.

"Yeah, and play the violin," I said, to rub it in: classical music was also suspect, redolent of decadence and effeminacy.  "Maybe I'll major in art.  And grow my hair long, like a girl."

I expected Dad to yell, but instead he just stared at me, open mouthed.  Eventually he said "Why don't you come and take a look at the factory? Who knows, you might like it?"

So the next Saturday, we took a tour of J. I. Case Company in Rock Island.  There were three big buildings, all of featureless gray concrete.  The first building contained offices, with vast rows of desks where secretaries and stenographers worked.

"All ladies up here," Dad pointed out.  "But they never go out onto the floor.  That's 100% men."

The "floor" was a vast concrete hangar where the tractor parts moved on conveyor belts until they were assembled on a gigantic machine and then hauled out.  It was all noise and bright lights and grime, all wires and tubes and pipes and complicated sharp things.  I couldn't understand what anything was for, but I did notice that Dad was right: 100% men.

None with their shirts off, but still....

The third building was for painting, finishing, and licensing. There was also a small tv lounge that stank of paint, a lunchroom with vending machines, and because you got dirty and sweaty during the day, a locker room with showers, so you could be fresh and clean when you returned to your small square house, where your wife had dinner on the table.

Here they had their shirts off.  There were even some naked musclemen walking around, penises swinging -- much bigger than the ones I saw in the high school locker room!

Dad took me back to the car, and we drove up the hill again.  "That wasn't so bad, was it?  It's 100% men.  No girly influences at all.  Do you think you'd like to be down there on the floor every day?"

"No.  This was fun, but I still want to go to college."

Why did Dad bring me there?  I didn't understand at the time, but now I do:

He thought of college as a feminizing influence, a place where I would read books, study music and art, and "turn" gay.

So he was offering a masculine alternative: the factory floor, 100% men, sweat, grime, muscles, and swinging penises.

He hoped that looking at male bodies all day would "keep" me straight.

See also: Dad Explains the Facts of Life; Class Rings and Arabic

My Boyfriend's Secret Bookshelf

When I first met Fred the Ministerial Student during my sophomore year at Augustana College, I tried to determine if he was gay by examining his bookcases for books by gay authors -- I only knew about Tennessee Williams, Oscar Wilde, and Shakespeare.  I didn't find anything.

In the open, anyway.

One day a few months  after we began dating, Fred asked me to get something from his bedroom closet, and I found a secret bookshelf, facing away from view, so even if the door was ajar, you wouldn't know what was there.

Curious, I pulled a book out.  Familiar Faces: Hidden Lives: The Story of Homosexual Men in America Today, by Howard Brown.

I had never seen a nonfiction book about gay people.

"There are a few others," Fred told me.  "I have almost all of the nonfiction, I think.  Of course, it has to be hidden."

"I've never seen a gay book in a bookstore."

"Not likely.  They wouldn't stock any -- it's illegal to put them out on the shelves -- and besides, who would walk up to the counter and try to buy one?"   "It's all by mail.  You don't have to give them your name, just a money order and post office box."

With Fred's permission, I spent the afternoon going through the seven gay books in existence.
1. Familiar Faces, Hidden Lives.
2. Greek Homosexuality
3. The Homosexual Matrix
4. Is the Homosexual My Neighbor?: Another Christian View
5. Jonathan Loved David: Homosexuality in Biblical Times
6. Iolaus, An Anthology of Friendship, by early gay activist Edward Carpenter
7. A slim hardback, On Being Different: What it Means to be a Homosexual, by Merle Miller.

(Fred was actually mistaken; there were about 30 nonfiction books about gay people in print in the U.S. in 1980.)

The only author I recognized was Merle Miller.  My English and journalism teachers were always praising him:

Born right next door to Rock Island, in Marshalltown, Iowa,  a graduate of the University of Iowa, and now look at him!  A famous journalist, novelist, and historian, biographer of presidents!

Read his books for a model of good writing.

Novels like The Winter, Island 49, and The Sure Thing.

His book on the television industry, Only You, Dick Darling (1964).

And especially Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman (1973).

They didn't mention, or they didn't know, that in in January 1971, Merle Miller came out in an article in The New York Times  Magazine: "What It Means to Be a Homosexual."  

It was a response to Jacob Epstein, who wrote in the September 1970 issue of Harper's that "If I had the power to do so, I would wish homosexuality off the face of the Earth. I  would do so because I think it brings infinitely more pain than pleasure to those who are forced to live with it..and because, wholly selfishly, I find myself completely incapable of coming to terms with it."  

Merle Miller responded, “I am sick and tired of reading and hearing such goddamn demeaning, degrading bullshit about me and my friends."  Being homosexual" caused pain only because of bigots like Epstein.

His rebuttal received 2000 responses (back when you had to write physical letters), many positive, and was reprinted, with an afterward, in On Being Different,  the slim hardbound volume that I found on Fred's hidden bookshelf. It was republished again in 2012, with a foreward by conservative gay columnist Dan Savage.

In What it Means, a two-person play that premiered at Wilton's Music Hall in London in 2023, Miller (Richard Cant) speaks directly to the audience about "the importance of standing up for what you believe in andd taking a courageous step onto the platform that is offered to you." 

The Boy from Pittsburgh (Cayvan Coates) isn't so sure.  Coming out was not a major risk for the wealthy, famous Merle Miller.  He could just retreat to his summer home in upstate New York.  For the Boy, coming out could lead to rejection by his family, homelessness, assault, murder.  In London or Pocatello.  In 1971 or in 2022. 

Merle Miler stayed invisible.  When he died in 1986, the New York Times refused to mention his partner of 22 years, David W. Elliott (who, paradoxically, wrote a novel entitled Listen to the Silence).

LGBT people are still invisible.  How many times, in researching an actor profile, have I heard "he's every woman's fantasy" or "here's a shirtless picture for the ladies"?  Or in researching a movie, "It's about every boy's life: bullies, homework, girls."

When I was checking in at the doctor's office the other day