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.

Kissing a Boy at the Bell Tower

Rock Island, March 1981

When I was in college, Bruce and I and some other English-philosophy-modern language majors hung out at a little bookstore off the student union.  It sold mostly science fiction and fantasy novels, with a scattering of mainstream literature and philosophy, basically whatever the manager, Adam Horowitz (not his real name) liked.  Adam was older perhaps twenty-five, taut and muscular, surprisingly tanned, with an open, expressive movie-star face.  Not at all the sort of person you'd expect to spend his life selling science fiction novels.

Once an English major, he was expelled halfway through his junior year after a scandal that no one would talk about.  With no degree, no job, and nowhere to go, he got some faculty allies to help him open his little bookstore.

What scandal?  A same-sex affair, perhaps? 

It made sense: Adam never dated girls, or talked about girls.  Actually, he never said much about his personal life at all.  It sounded like the hesitations, dissimulations, and omissions that gay people made in the Midwest in the 1980s to avoid revealing their "secret."  

But there was only one way to find out for sure: get him alone, and then zoom in for a kiss!  It worked with Fred, my boyfriend last year.

On a cold, drizzling Friday afternoon in March 1981, the campus was nearly deserted.  I had been alone in the bookstore for nearly an hour, studying Paleontology on the green couch by the western window, while Adam sat on his stool reading the underground Zap Comix.  This was a perfect opportunity!

“I'm heading over to the Comics Cave," I said in a tentative voice.  "Why don't you come along?  I don't think you're going to get any more customers today."

Adam stared at me in shock, as if I had suggested skinny-dipping in the pond behind Old Main.  "Um...sure, why not?" he said finally.  He wrapped on his coat and locked up the store, and we walked out into the blustery gray afternoon.  He talked nonstop about R. Crumb and Steve Ditko, and then of Little Nemo who explored Dreamland in the newspaper comics of a century ago, as if he couldn’t bear a moment of silence.

He was really nervous!  That must mean he was gay!

To get to the parking lot, you had to walk past East Hall, left toward the Bell Tower, then right, up the heavily wooded ridge to 38th Street. Adam paused.

“Have you heard the secret of Bell Tower?” he asked.

“I don't know.  I’ve heard a lot of secrets since I came to Augie.”

“The Fratboys bring their dates there, because if you kiss a virgin under the bell, it rings. Thus notifying everybody up in Andreasson Hall that she is 99.99% pure.” He gestured toward the freshman girls’ dorm on the ridge.

"Cool!  Let's check it out -- I've never seen it up close before."

"Um..ok, I guess."  We turned away from the path, crossed the wet grass, and stood under the Bell Tower with its graffiti-blackened benches where Fratboys and their girlfriends kissed. It was very damp, and smelled of sawdust and brine.

“Did the bell ring for any of your....dates...when you were a student?”  I asked, deliberately avoiding the word "girl."

"Um..well, actually I never got a chance. It’s really sort of Fratboys’ turf. They have dibs on all Augie babes.  I was  a Head Case -- an English major."

"So you never heard the bell ring?  That's a pity."  I pressed my hand hard against his shoulder. I saw that he was beginning to blush.

But at that moment a professor appeared, trundling down from the ridge: short, balding, round as a goblin in a yellow slicker raincoat, with an umbrella shoved under his arm like a stage sword and a bulging briefcase at his side. I recognized him: Dr. Dahlquist, who taught American literature and journalism.

He flashed an odd, alarmed look at me, then at Adam. We said “H’lo” politely, but he brushed past us and walked on quickly, almost trotting, to East Hall.

Adam stopped and stared at his retreating form. The snub obviously bothered him.  I wondered if Dr. Dahlquist discovered Adam at the Bell Tower before, on another lazy Friday afternoon many years ago. I wondered who was kissing him then.

"Um...ok, you've seen the Bell Tower.  Do you mind if we take your car?"  He walked briskly toward the south, toward the student parking lot.  We drove to the Comics Cave and bought a few comic books, but he refused my offer of a milkshake at the Belgian Village.  He had a headache, he said.

I asked Adam for out for comic books several more times, but he was always "too busy."

A few years after graduation, I returned to Augustana for a visit and found the bookstore gone.  I heard that Adam had taken a job as a newspaper editor in Missouri, but b eforethe internet, could find no other information.

Today Adam has his own wikipedia page!  He actually ran a museum in Missouri before he retired.  He's published a lot of science fiction and comic book criticism, plus a book about a famous lynching incident.  

So, what about the Bell Tower kiss?  Was he gay, and scared?  Or straight, and scared?  I'm still not sure.