My Book of Cute Boys

This story has been moved to RG Beefcake and Boyfriends

Sausage Sighting of My Cousin Buster

Whenever we visited my parents' family in Indiana, I wanted to stay with my Cousin Buster, who lived in the Trailer in the Deep Woods. He was almost two years older than me, and much more adventurous, dragging me into adventures in the cornfields and patches of raw trees.  We made magic swords, dug for buried treasure, caught frogs that were really witches in disguise.

When I was little, I liked to stay overnight in the trailer, crammed beside him in his narrow bed,  giggling and talking and reading Casper comic books.  I always waited for him to fall asleep first, so I could watch his bare chest rise and fall, his eyebrows flutter, his lips purse together in a dream.

When I grow up, I thought, I'll sleep like this every night, with a boy next to me, warm and hard in the night, reading comic books.

Once we arrived late, and he was already asleep.  I slipped out of my clothes and slid into bed and put my arms around him.  He smiled.

But the last few visits, we stayed with my Aunt Nora in Rome City, who had "plenty of room," so there was no need for me to "bother" my cousin by spending the night in his bed. We just dropped in for brief visits.

I had just turned thirteen, and Cousin Buster was fifteen [all models in the illustrations are over 18].

He was built, with a hard chest and thick biceps visible under his brown t-shirt.  He a round face with thin blond hair and blue eyes.  Big hands.

We sat in his bedroom -- the comic books and G.I. Joes were gone -- and talked about classes and Adam-12 and the cute girls who hung out at the Blue Moon Drive In.

Cute girls?  What about spending the night with boys, reading comic books, cuddling, falling asleep in each other's arms? 

"I have a date tomorrow," Cousin Buster said.  "To go ice skating.  She could get a girl for you, and we could double."

I didn't want to date girls!  "Um...thanks, but we're staying in Rome City.  My parents wouldn't want to drive all the way back here to pick me up afterwards."

"You could spend the night.  Just like when we were kids."

Now I wanted to go!  I ran out to the living room to ask my parents if it was ok.

So on December 27th, I went ice skating on a frozen pond with Cousin Buster and two girls (I don't remember who drove, somebody's father or an older kid). Then we stopped for hot chocolate, the girls on one side of the booth and the boys on the other.

Eventually someone's father or an older kid dropped us off at the trailer.

 Finally the ordeal was over!  Now we could get back to our real life, the only life that made sense, two boys together, cuddling in the night.

Cousin Buster's Mom and Dad were already in bed, so we quietly raided the refrigerator for leftover Christmas pie.  Then he pulled some blankets and pillows out of a closet and made up the couch for me.

Wait -- we're supposed to sleep together! I thought frantically.  Two boys cuddling!  

But I didn't say anything.  I gamely slipped out of my clothes and climbed onto the couch.  Cousin Buster said "Goodnight" and vanished into his room.

It was a small trailer.  From my couch bed, I could see the light from under Cousin Buster's door.  I expected it to go off in a few minutes, but it didn't.

Was he reading?  Watching tv?

The light stayed on.

Maybe he was lonely.  Maybe he wanted two boys together, in spite of our evening with girls.  Maybe he wanted me to join him but wasn't sure how to ask.

I got up, walked gingerly across the bare floor, and pushed open his bedroom door.



The light inside was very bright, like a fluorescent lamp in a schoolroom, illuminating everything.  The first thing I noticed, oddly, was an open jar of Vaseline on the nightstand.

The second thing was Cousin Buster's chest, pale, smooth, with hard pecs and prominent nipples.

He was sitting up in bed, completely naked, with a magazine open in one hand and his penis in the other.

Fully aroused, straining as his hand stroked the thick shaft, easily a Kielbasa. The head was purple, glistening from the Vaseline.  His testicles bobbed up and down, round like two apples.

Our eyes locked.  He continued to work, his jaw set, beads of sweat on his forehead.

I was afraid to speak or to move.

Then he whispered "Shut the door."

Did he want me on the inside or the outside?

I took a step back, carefully closed the door, and returned to my bed.

Something that I've regretted ever since.

In the morning, neither of us spoke about what happened.

We continued to have brief, cordial chats, but during high school, my visits to Indiana became sporadic.  I was old enough to stay home alone, and often I had other things to do.

Eventually I stopped going to Indiana altogether.

I heard about Cousin Buster from my parents: working at the auto garage, moving into his own place, collecting vintage cars, going hunting and fishing with his buddies, getting girlfriends but never marrying.

He died in 1996, at the age of 38.

I didn't go to his funeral.  I couldn't afford to fly out from San Francisco on short notice, and besides, it was too late -- he was a stranger.

My Grandmother's Gay Artist Friends

Santa Fe, New Mexico, July 2004

My Grandma Davis was an ultra-devout fundamentalist Christian who always carried her worn study Bible, corresponded with a dozen missionaries, and got angry at the "hippies and radicals" she saw on tv.  Yet she seemed remarkably nonchalant about my junior high boyfriend Dan, and when we broke up, she found a new boy for me to "go around with."

When she died, during my sophomore year in high school, we had to sort through her  possessions.  I found an old trunk in the attic with surprising evidence that she had encountered gay people before.  It contained:

1. Jazz records: Hoagy Carmichael, Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, Bix Beiderbecke.

2. Some paintings: a young woman with long red hair, wearing a blue evening gown and pearls; a still life; an old-fashioned cottage with a huge back yard covered with flowers, labeled "Devon."  When was Grandma Davis in Devon?

3. Some photographs of men, hugging, holding each other. One in a swimsuit, with a smooth, hard chest, standing on a beach, his arm around a taller, blond guy in a U.S. navy uniform (top photo).

Another of two very muscular, shirtless guys, one in white chinos, the other in overalls, apparently holding hands. (I asked for and got to keep them both.)

Dad could explain the music: "When your Grandma was younger, she was big into jazz.  Always going to concerts."

And the paintings:  "Right after high school, must have been in 1921, she went down to Indianapolis to art school.  Then, for some reason, she suddenly dropped out and went back home to Rome City.  That summer, 1923, she got saved at a Nazarene camp meeting, and married your Grandpa. "

I wondered what compelled a young woman to abandon her studies, her art, and her friends, shut them all away in a trunk in the attic for 52 years?

Did it have something to do with the hugging men?

Dad didn't know who they were.

A couple of years later, when I was in college, her younger brother Harry came to Thanksgiving dinner at Aunt Nora's house.  He was only ten when Grandma went to Indianapolis, but he remembered that their parents disapproved:

"This was during Prohibition, and Gracie and her friends went wild, with hooch and jitterbugging -- two things Nazarenes hate most.  It makes sense that she would want to hide away memories of her old, sinful life after she converted."

"But...who were the hugging men?"  I showed him the pictures.

"This one looks like a fellow she knew from art school, Carl something or other.  She brought him up to Rome City a couple of times. The others are probably his friends.  Oscar, maybe. I remember one time they all went skinnydipping up at Indiana Dunes, and got arrested, and Pop told her not to associate with such 'vulgarians' again, but of course she didn't listen."

Vulgarians?  Code for "gay"?  I looked in a directory of Indiana artists, but didn't find any Carl or Oscar from Indianapolis who was the right age.

Wood Woolsey

Then in 2004, I was visiting Larry in New Mexico, and I stumbled upon the name of regional artist Wood Woolsey (1899-1970).  He lived in Indianapolis from 1921 to 1927, and he studied at the John Herron Art Institute at the same time as Gracie.

He had a younger brother, Carl, also an artist, who lived with him.  My grand-uncle must have mixed the names up.

Wood Woolsey never married.  Could he have been gay?

Grandma Davis at the start of her life, skinnydipping with some gay guys!

Did finding out cause her skittish retreat into fundamentalist Christianity?

Or did she have only warm memories of her gay friends?  There's also evidence that she may have married a gay man.  And that fifty years later, when her 13-year old grandson began talking about boys he liked, she understood, on some level, and advised "You should find a nice Christian boy."  And when he broke up, she found him another boy to "go around with."

See also: Beefcake and Boyfriends of the Jazz Age

Grandpa Prater's Banjo

This is the second erotic story about my Grandpa Prater.

It's the day after Christmas in seventh grade;  I just turned 12.  We're visiting my parents' relatives in Indiana.  Today we drive out to the farmhouse near Garrett to visit my Grandpa Prater, my mother's father, and bring him his Christmas presents.

Grandpa Prater is 70 years old, but still big and rugged, with thick arms and shoulders and huge hands. He wears overalls, sometimes with a white t-shirt underneath, sometimes without, so you could see his hard round pecs dusted with white hair.

He moved from Kentucky to Indiana with his family in 1942, to take advantage of factory jobs during World War II.  Now he is widowed, and all of his kids have moved out except Uncle Edd, who acts more like his brother than his son.

There's no car in the driveway, and no one answers when we knock, so we figure that they're out, at the store or visiting friends in town.  We drive down the road about half a mile to the Trailer in the Deep Woods, to visit my Cousin Buster and his parents and wait for them to return.

Cousin Buster shows me the guitar he got for Christmas, and tries to play "Your Mama Don't Dance," by Loggins and Messina.  He doesn't do well.  "I should have asked for a banjo," he says. "Man, I could really howl on that box." 

"Why don't you ask Grandpa if you can borrow his?"

Somehow we decide that it would be a good idea to sneak into the farmhouse while he's gone and "borrow" the banjo.  

We walk through the woods until we come to the side yard.  There's still no car in the driveway.

We climb onto the porch and go in through the parlor (country folk don't lock their doors).

I've been there a thousand times, but never when the house is deserted.  There's something eerie, even sinister, about the two overstuffed sofas, red with clawed legs, the old console radio with a black-and-white tv on top, the picture of Jesus on the Cross that changes to an Ascended Christ if you look at it right.  

The kitchen is familiar, too.  I've been there many times.  But there's something sinister about the plate of half-eaten toast and jar of Sue Bee Honey left on the kitchen table, as if someone suddenly rushed out.  Or was kidnapped.

I've never been inside Grandpa Prater's bedroom.  

First there's an anteroom, with some coats on hooks and shoes on the floor.  Then a big oak door.

More after the break

A Glimpse of Cousin Joe's Shame

Rome City, Indiana

When I was 7 1/2 years old, we moved from Racine, Wisconsin to Rock Island, Illinois.  My parents didn't want my brother and me  in the way during the move (yes, "me" is correct), so on July 18th, we left a fully-furnished house in Racine, and on July 28th, we returned to a fully-furnished house in Rock Island.

We spent the ten days in Rome City, Indiana, with my Aunt Nora.  She was a big, jolly woman who baked pies for a living -- we got pie every night for dessert! -- and who let us watch all the tv we wanted.  She and Uncle Henry (who died a long time ago) liked tv so much that they named her kids after popular tv stars:

1. Ed (left), 18 years old, after the star of The Ed Sullivan Show.
2. Eva Marie, 16 years old, after Eva Marie Saint, star of the The Phillco Television Showcase
3. Joe (top photo left), 14 years old, after the star of The Joey Bishop Show

Their house was only two blocks from the Limberlost Library, where kids could use the main room, not just the children’s room, and Cousin Joe let us check out books on his card. It was three blocks from Sylvan Lake, where we went swimming and fishing and rode pontoon boats.

Aunt Nora's house had a living room, dining room, kitchen, and three bedrooms downstairs (for Aunt Nora, Joe, and Eva Marie).  Upstairs there was one bedroom for Grandma Davis whenever she came for a visit (Kenny and I slept there), and an attic "pad" for Ed.

One night I woke up late and had to go to the bathroom, so I climbed out of bed and pieced my way gingerly downstairs and through the unfamiliar hallway. The bathroom door was ajar.  I shoved it open.

Cousin Joe was standing in front of the sink.

I saw him only dimly, in the silvery-black moonlight and the glow of a nightlight attached to a wall outlet, and only for an instant, but 40 years later, the image is still vivid:  a nude, muscular backside. A smooth chest visible in the mirror, and a belly -- thin, no abs.  A dark patch of pubic hair.  And what the grownups called his shame

I had only seen two shames before, my brother's and my Uncle Paul's.  I would see another two years later, at the Rock Island Pow Wow, but by that time I would know the correct term. This one was huge, a monster, a garden hose.  I wondered how he could fit it into a pair of pants.

Was he peeing in the sink?  No -- that was a trickle of water from the faucet.  He was washing it!

Why didn't he do that at bathtime?

Noticing me, Joe swung around, hands dripping, shame swaying from side to side. "What the hell are you doing!" he yelled.  "Get out of here!"

But I was transfixed.  I couldn't look away.

Suddenly the light came on in Aunt Nora's room, and I heard Cousin Ed's voice from upstairs -- Kenny woke up and started crying when I wasn't there.  Grunting, Joe brushed past me, and ran to his own room to put on a bathrobe.

Before long, everybody was gathered in the kitchen, talking furiously while Aunt Nora made hot chocolate.  Eventually it was decided that, though I had embarrassed Joe by seeing his shame, it was his own fault.  You should shut the bathroom door, even late at night when you think everyone is asleep.

I don't understand why they called it a shame.  It was certainly nothing to be ashamed of -- I'll bet it would win first prize at the Gay Horsemen's Club in Amsterdam, where I would find an A+++-sized boyfriend years later  -- and it provided me with a fond childhood memory.

Besides, I got hot chocolate.

A Sleepover, Sausage Sighting, and Fondling of My Cousin Phil

When I was growing up in Rock Island, we traveled to northern Indiana once or twice a year to visit my grandparents and uncles and aunts and cousins.  Mostly on my mother's side of the family and my Dad's sister Nora.  We evern stayed with her sometimes.  My earliest  sausage sighting was of her teenage son, Joe, when I was 7 1/2 years old.

But Dad didn't get along with his other sister, Aunt Edna, so we never visited her, and saw her only rarely, at an occasional Thanksgiving Dinner.  I knew only a little about her family: her husband, Uncle John, fat and blustering; a grown-up daughter, who moved to California; and Cousin Phil, about ten years older than me.

As far as I can remember, I've only met Cousin Phil five times in my life.  One of them resulted in a sausage fondle.

Thanksgiving 1966

I was six years old, and Cousin Phil was a slim teenager with long hippie-hair, wearing a white t-shirt that displayed two pinprick nipples (I wanted to squeeze them).  He sat at the table looking at his hands.  When Grandma Davis told him to "dress properly and show some respect," he ran into the bedroom and wouldn't come out to eat.

Christmas 1968

I was eight, and Cousin Phil was in high school, old enough to drive a car, still thin and pale and long hair.  He wore a plaid shirt and frayed jeans, and three strands of love beads.  He flashed the peace sign at me, but otherwise we didn't speak.


Thanksgiving 1971

I was eleven, and Cousin Phil was a college man, majoring in one of the sciences (I think physics) at Tiffin University.  A little thicker in the arms and the chest, cute but not "dreamy," with short brown hair and dark blue eyes.   He was wearing an orange leisure suit.

He brought a friend, an Ethiopian guy named Malcolm.  They nudged each other and giggled all during dinner.  I assumed that they were boyfriends, that they had escaped the trajectory of job-house-wife-kids that the adults were plotting for us and found joy in each other.

I kept in contact with Malcolm for a few years, even going swimming with him the following summer, always assuming that he was my cousin's boyfriend.

Thanksgiving 1974

I was fourteen, and Cousin Phil was an adult, a college graduate who had a job working for the city of Montpelier, Ohio (I think in the waste water management plant).   His hair was long again, a little scraggy, and his face was pale.  He was thicker still in the arms, almost muscular.  He had a smooth heavy chest and a little belly.

Malcolm was not in the picture; instead, Phil brought a girlfriend!

I was devastated to discover that they weren't "best men," a gay couple, after all.

After Thanksgiving Dinner, Aunt Edna and her family stayed in Rome City with Aunt Nora, and my family drove back to Grandma Davis's farmhouse, about twenty miles away, to spend the night.  My brother and I were sent up to bed at 9:00 pm, while the adults stayed downstairs, playing Yahtzee and watching tv.

Around 11:00 pm, Dad burst into our room and turned on the light.  "Get your clothes on!" he barked.  "We're going home!"

"To Rock Island?" I asked.  "But we're supposed to stay until Sunday."

"Shut up and get into the car!  Hurry up!"

We pulled on our clothes, dumped our pajamas into our suitcases, and rushed down the stairs.  I stopped to use the bathroom.  Grandma Davis wasn't around.  Mom and Tammy were already in the car.  I could tell that Mom had been crying.

Adults never told kids anything, but I surmised that there had been an argument, and Grandma Davis ordered Mom and Dad out, or they decided to leave.

Dad gunned the engine, and we roared down the dark country roads.

"We can't drive all the way back to Rock Island!" Mom exclaimed.  "We wouldn't get home until dawn!  Besides, I want to visit my Dad and sisters tomorrow!"

"Well, where are we supposed to go?" Dad asked.  "To a hotel?  They won't rent us a room in the middle of the night!"

"Let's go back to Nora's house.  I can't wait to tell her about this.  She'll take my side, I guarantee."

So we drove back to Rome City, where Aunt Nora was conciliatory.   There were eight people in the house already, but she put Dad on the couch, Mom and Tammy in her room, and Kenny and me with Cousin Phil in the attic.


"Don't wake him up," she cautioned.  "Just take off your clothes and climb in bed with him.  He won't mind."

We crept up the attic stairs, carefully closed the door behind us, and undressed, dropping our clothes to the floor.  In the orange glow of the space heater, I could see that Cousin Phil was lying on the bed on his back.  He had kicked off the quilt and the comforter.

He was naked!  I could see his thick, smooth chest, his little belly with an innie belly button.  And his penis lying against the dark mass of his pubic hair.   Very thick Bratwurst+.

"I'll give you a dime if you touch it," my brother whispered.

"No problemo!" I climbed onto the bed and slid next to Cousin Phil.  I brushed my hand over his chest, down his belly, and slowly approached his penis.

But I didn't get there.

"Hey...what..." Cousin Phil murmured.  He opened his eyes and stared at me.  "Boomer...what.."

"We have to sleep here tonight.  Aunt Nora said so."

"Mm......hang on a minute."  He jumped off the bed and pulled on his underwear.  "Ok, hop in.  But no kicking, ok?"

I stayed awake for most of the night,  but eventually I got Cousin Phil to hold me in his arms.  I touched his belly and his hand, fondled his chest and his pinprick nipples, and reached down to briefly caress his warm, thick penis through his underwear.  I don't know if he was awake or not.

That was enough for a lot of fantasies during the next few years.

After breakfast in the morning, Aunt Edna and her family left.  We didn't return to Indiana for Thanksgiving again until 1980, and Cousin Phil wasn't there.  One thing led to another, and I didn't see him again for 40 years.

September 2016

We're both back in Indianapolis for a funeral.

Cousin Phil is 65, gray and craggy, shorter than I remember, and quite round in the belly.

He's retired from his job at City of Montpelier, still living in the house he bought shortly after his wedding in 1975.  His wife died last year.  He has two daughters and six grandchildren.

Job, house, wife, kids, the entire heterosexist trajectory.  I escaped it.  Cousin Phil didn't.

"Do you remember the sleepover, at Thanksgiving when I was fourteen?" I ask.  "Up in the attic at Aunt Nora's house?"

He pauses for a moment.  "Sure, I remember that.  I can't believe we were ever that young.  It was a different world, wasn't it?"

I want to say "No.  It's still my world.  I sleep in a man's arms most nights."  But I just smile.

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?

The Naked Man in the Peat Bog

Garrett, June 1969

When I was a kid, we visited my parent's family in Indiana once or twice a year, for a week in the summer and sometimes at Christmastime.  We always stayed with my Grandma Davis or Aunt Nora, my father's family.  We visited my mother's family, too,  at my Grandpa Prater's farmhouse in Garrett, but it was sort of boring -- impenetrable Kentucky accents, smoking and drinking, endless discussions of things that happened 100 years ago back in the hills.

And no one to play with, except for my Cousin Buster.   Sometimes my Uncle Paul  would play -- until the summer after 3rd grade, when he got married and turned into an adult.  I have only a few solid memories: swimming in the pool down the road, catching frogs, fishing, having milkshakes with his friends, learning how to "pee in the wind" (with the wind blowing away from you, so the stream is carried a long way).

And the Naked Man in the Peat Bog

There was a peat bog beyond the cornfields, a swampy, mossy expanse that looked like a good place to catch alligators.  But Paul -- he never liked to be called "Uncle" -- told us never to go near it: "There's a Naked Man who lives in there, and he eats kids.  If you get too close, he'll pop out and grab you and cook you for his dinner!"

"Why doesn't Grandpa tell him to move out?" I asked, already aware of property rights.

Paul thought for a moment. "He's been living here a lot longer than we have, more than a hundred years."

"Well, if he's that old, he can't run very fast.  I can get away, I bet!"

Frankly, I didn't believe him.  Besides, I really wanted to catch an alligator, and the thought of seeing a Naked Man just sweetened the deal. Maybe I would even see his "shame"!

So one day in the summer of 1969, when we were visiting for the wedding, I decided to go exploring.  I brought my cousins Graydon and Dayton (Kentucky Kinfolk).

We walked quickly through the back yard, where Paul and three of his friends were playing horse shoes -- they didn't see us -- then past the barn and the vegetable garden.  We pieced our way through the high corn row for maybe a quarter mile, until it opened up into a little grove of trees, with the peat bog beyond.  It was mossy-gold, with little specks of shimmering water.  There was a musty, earthy smell.  I thought I heard splashing.

"Are you sure there are alligators in there?" Cousin Graydon  asked.

"I just heard one!"

We got some sticks and started poking around in the moss, swirling the muddy water that oozed up. I thought I saw a gold glinting shape -- maybe an alligator, or maybe lost pirate treasure, which would be just as good!

Then suddenly the Naked Man came lumbering out of the cornfield.  Pale, muscular, kind of hairy, his chest and belly smeared with mud. Gigantic penis.  An orange mask over his face.  He held his arms up like Frankenstein and lurched toward us, moaning "Ummmmm!"

Shrieking in terror, we ran as fast as we could back to the house, where Paul and friends were quietly playing horse shoes.

"Why...what's the matter, kids?"  he asked in surprise.  "Did you see a rattlesnake?"

I didn't notice at the time that he was grinning.  Or that one of his friends was missing.

For a long time, I thought I had a real paranormal experience.  But recently my boyfriend suggested that Uncle Paul might have set the whole thing up to scare us away from the dangerous peat bog.

It worked.  We never went back.

But why did he think a naked man would be especially frightening?  The gigantic penis became one of my favorite childhood memories.

See also: My Best Man

A Memory of Two Men Hugging

Northeastern Indiana, Spring 1964

In an old science fiction story by Robert Heinlein,  a man discovers that the world is a lie.  Every building in every city is a movie-set fake, constructed for his benefit and disassembled when he passes on.

His friends, family, and even passersby are actors, staging scenes for his benefit and then going home to memorize tomorrow’s script.

He uncovers the lie only after years of living in what he thinks is the real world.

One day he is scheduled to go away for the weekend.  It is raining outside, so he opens his umbrella.  Suddenly he realizes that he has forgotten something upstairs, and rushes up to get it.  But it is not raining upstairs!  “They” neglected to produce sufficient rain to cover the entire house, and in that small detail their entire deception was revealed.

I spent my childhood in the 1960s and 1970s  in a lie of my own, told over and over again that I, like every boy on Earth, would spend my life yearning for feminine curves and smiles, that same-sex desire did not exist.

But I kept noticing momentary lapses, tiny mistakes, unguarded moments that revealed that it was not raining upstairs.

Captain Kangaroo and Mr. Green Jeans living together in the Treasure House.
Rich and Sean smiling at each other in The Secret of Boyne Castle.
Robbie Douglas singing about boys holding hands among the candles.

The first unguarded moment came very early in my life, when I was still a toddler.  Probably in the summer of 1964, when I was 3 1/2 years old.  We were living in Garrett, Indiana.

I woke up late at night, but I thought it was morning because it was light out, so I walked into the living room, where my parents were watching our old black and white tv.  On the small, flickering screen, I saw two men.  They looked like a cowboy and Indian, but in modern clothes.  They were hugging.

My mother noticed a moment later and rushed me off to bed, but it was too late.  I had seen two men who weren't swooning over women.  They wanted men.

I never saw that "cowboy and Indian" again, and over the years I concluded that I had dreamed it.   But recently I did some detective work with wikipedia and a phone call to my mother:

It was an episode of of The Real McCoys (1957-63, but rerun through 1964): a hayseed comedy about a farm family in rural California. The hugging "cowboy and Indian" were eldest son Luke  (Richard Crenna) and farm hand Pepino (Tony Martinez).

Luke was married, and Pepino had girlfriends.  They weren't "really" gay in the series.

But it doesn't matter.  As I grew, and the what girl do you like interrogations began, and the you'll find the right girl someday pronouncements, the constant hysterical insistence that no boy has ever liked boys, not once in the history of the world, I thought of the hugging men.

A glimpse through the machinations and dissimulations and lies.

It wasn't raining upstairs. 

See also: My Book of Cute Boys

The Gay Painting in My Grandmother's Room

Garrett, Indiana

The cold, snowy day after Christmas.  Cousin Buster and I have already played with our toys, and we're tired of sitting around the living room of Grandpa Prater's farmhouse, listening to the adults complain about hippies and laugh about things that happened a thousand years ago.  So we go exploring, hoping to find a secret stash of comic books.

The kitchen
The furnace room
A little room used as as a pantry.
A room with a pump in it.
Some bedrooms.
Grandma Prater's Room.  Locked.  Off-Limits.

Grandma Prater died in 1966, when I was five years, old, so I have only a few random memories of her:  a short, fat, brown woman carrying bags of groceries, frying chicken, telling me a story about a mouse, giving me the nickname Boomer.  She had a thick Kentucky accent.

In a small farmhouse, they could use an extra bed, but after she died, no one ever slept in her bedroom again.  The adults went in to clean, or to look around, but kids weren't allowed: we might "break something."

The door was always locked, but when we played in the house, we always tried it anyway, just in case.

Today the knob turns, and the door stands ajar!  Cousin Buster and I glance at each other in surprise, then push the door open and look inside.

It is a very bright, airy room, not at all stuffy, with two windows and blue wallpaper.  A four-poster bed with a blue comforter,  the covers turned down, a Bible opened to the Psalms, as if Grandma Prater has just stepped out and would return at any moment.

A wooden dresser with photos of Kentucky kinfolk.  A bureau.  Clothes on hangers visible in the open closet door.  A rocking chair with knitting stuff on it.


And a painting: in a lush green forest, a boy is leaning against a tree, playing a flute.  He is wild, savage, naked except for an animal skin. A round red sack hangs from his side.

I stare in awe.  I am looking through a gateway into a "good place," where boys can hold hands and kiss without anyone asking "what girl do you like?"  The boy is a fairy, a mystical sprite, beckoning me, offering a way to the secret world.

After that, on most Christmas and summertime visits, I asked to see Grandma Prater's room.  I became familiar with the bed, dresser, bureau, and rocking chair.  I picked up her Bible, read the annotations, examined her sewing, turned the photos around to see who the subjects were.

But my favorite part of the tour was the painting.

Who was the boy?  Puck from A Midsummer Night's Dream?  A boy Hercules (was that a lion skin?).  I thought of the Piper at the Gates of Dawn in The Wind in the Willows, the painting that led to Narnia, the Road to Elfland in heroic fantasy.

And, as I learned more about my grandmother, the painting seemed more and more out of place.

She was born in 1900 in the desolate hills of Eastern Kentucky.  Although she graduated from high school, a rarity at the time, she lived in isolation and poverty.  During the Great Depression, they survived by making moonshine.  She lost four of her eleven children.  During World War II, she moved to Indiana, to another isolated farmhouse.

She believed in ghosts, haints, witches, and premonitions.  A few weeks before she died, she heard her mother calling her from beyond the grave.

She never read fantasy or mythology, or, as far as I could tell, any book but the Bible.  There was no other art in the house except for a picture of Christ on the Cross and a souvenir from Indiana Dunes.

I asked my mother where the painting came from, but she didn't know -- it had been there as long as she could remember, even back in Kentucky.

Were there art galleries in the Kentucky hills?

Et in Arcadia ego.

Grandpa Prater died in 1978, but Uncle Edd continued to live in the farmhouse until 1998, and, I assume, kept up the blue room and the painting.

 After I moved to West Hollywood, I visited my parents twice a year, first in Rock Island and then in Indianapolis, with little time leftover to visit my elderly aunts and uncles in northern Indiana.

Before I knew it, ten, twenty, thirty years had passed since I last went into Grandma Prater's room.

Indianapolis, December 2000

Yuri and I are spending Christmas with my parents.  We go into the room that they've turned into a home gym: two exercise bikes, some free weights...and hanging on the wall beside a towel rack, The Painting!

I stand speechless, staring, as memories rush back.

How did it get here?  Maybe when Uncle Edd moved out of the farmhouse, Mom claimed it.

Yuri touches my shoulder.  "Are you ok?"

"Sure...I mean...this is one of my favorite childhood memories, a picture from my grandmother's bedroom.  I thought it was a hint that gay people exist."

"Your grandmother had the Pastyr Devid?"

"You know it?"

Turns out that it was one of the illustrations in a book of Bible stories that Yuri's grandmother read to him.

"I ask for the story of David the Sheep Boy..." Yuri began.

"Shepherd?"

"Ok, David the Sheepherd.  I asked Baba to read me that story many times.  I thought he was beautiful.  Maybe this is where I know I am gay?"

A continent apart, both our grandmothers inadvertently showed us a sign of gay potential.


I looked up the painting on the internet:  it's Shepherd Boy Playing the Flute, by Polish painter Henryk Siemiradzski (1843-1902), who specialized in Biblical and classical scenes.

Leaving two questions:

1. Was Siemiradzski gay?  I don't find a lot of beefcake in his works.  There's a couple of cute guys on the curtain he painted for the Juliusz Slowacki Theater.

2. How did my grandmother get a print of a work by a minor Polish painter in the hills of Eastern Kentucky?

Notre Dame, a Catholic Boy, and a Warm Summer Night

Notre Dame, Indiana,

When I was 26 years old, in grad school at the University of Southern California, I had a paper on "Boccacio and the Jews" accepted at a Medieval Studies Conference at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.

I flew into Rock Island to visit my parents for a few days.  Then they dropped me off at Notre Dame on the way to visit their relatives in Garrett, Indiana, about an hour's drive away.

I loved Notre Dame!  It was like a Medieval university, with archways, pillars, Gothic buildings, crucifixes, small side chapels, and statues of saints everywhere.

I expected Duns Scotus to walk by at any moment, discussing De consolatione philosophiae with Thomas Aquinas, while St. Hildegard of Bingen sang "O nobilissima viriditas!"

And did I mention the beefcake? Hot Catholic boys walking around, their scapulars gleaming against their hard brown chests, talking about the Bangles and Robocop and last night's baseball game like any students at any secular college.

There were no conference activities scheduled for Saturday night.  Most of the participants went out to dinner with their husbands and wives and boyfriends and girlfriends.  My roommate went to the Linebacker Lounge, hoping for a heterosexual pickup.  My Gayellow Pages listed one gay bar in South Bend, but it was too far to walk.  I was stuck on campus.

Lonely, bored, I wandered into the library, like I used to at Augustana on Saturday nights, when I felt overwhelmed by my friends' chants of  "girls! girls! girls! let's get some girls!  let's look at some girls!" 

Nostalgic for Augustana, I walked into the stacks and browsed through the PD section (Scandinavian Literature).  Nathan was sitting at an isolated study carrell, surrounded by thick books.

No, he wasn't naked.  But he was cute -- 20 years old, short, slim, pale, with curly brown hair and a boyish face.

"Studying Norwegian?" I asked.

He looked up and smiled.  "Oh -- no, Spanish.  This was just a quiet place to study."

"Yo hablo Espanol tambien.  Podimos discutir cosas intimas, si?"

"Whoa, whoa, I'm just first year!"

"Sorry.  I'm in grad school in Spanish.  In Los Angeles."

"Wow, Los Angeles -- that must be great!  All the movie stars everywhere.  Who's the biggest star you've met?"

Every heterosexual guy who found out that I lived in Los Angeles inevitably asked me about "hot girls."  Nathan was gay!

"Met, or saw naked?" I asked with a leer. "I could tell you some things about Tom Cruise..."

Soon we were eating hamburgers in the Student Center, while Nathan told me about growing up in an all-Catholic neighborhood of Buffalo, New York, not knowing anyone who was black, Protestant, or gay.  He came out during his freshman year, but he only knew three gay guys on campus, two students and a professor, and he had never had a boyfriend.

"There's lots of sex at Notre Dame," Nathan said.  "I could get a dozen guys a night, if I wanted.  But just once, I'd like one of them to say hello to me the next day."  He reached under the table and took my hand.  "Is that the way it is in Los Angeles, too?  Lots of secret stuff with straight guys who are thinking about girls the whole time?"

"Oh, no.  Everybody in West Hollywood is gay, so we don't need to trick with straight guys.  We date.  We fall in love. We have permanent partners."

He quickly moved his hand for a brief grope.  "So, wanna make out?"

"Make out?  Um...where?  I have a roommate."

"Me, too.  Let's take a walk."

He led me across the dark, quiet campus to a footpath that led around St. Joseph Lake.  It was heavily wooded, but I could still see the Basilica of the Sacred Heart across the lake; St. Mary, who topped the Golden Dome, had her back turned to us.

Nathan pointed out the Moreau Seminary, a priests' residence.
And the Sacred Heart Parish Center.
And the Our Lady of Fatima shrine.
And the Solitude of St. Joseph, a retreat house for monks.

"This must be the most Catholic place on Earth!" I exclaimed.  "Except maybe the Vatican."

"Yeah.  And the woods are busy all the time.  Not a lot of college kids, but priests, monks, professors.  I swear I had a Cardinal one night."  He grinned in the darkness.  "Creepy old guy, but Italian, you know.  Gigantic."

We started kissing and groping.  Once we had to move aside as a fratboy and his girlfriend passed, giggling with erotic anticipation, but otherwise we were alone.  Soon my pants were down, and he was on his knees.

It felt weird, being semi-naked in the summer night.  It reminded me of when I was a kid, and Uncle Paul showed us how to pee against the side of the barn.

Nathan and I stayed in contact.  The moment he graduated from Notre Dame, he fled to the gay haven of San Francisco, where he went to work in a store on Union Square.  It wasn't exactly the career his parents intended for him, but at least he was home.

Grandpa Prater's Wrestling Moves

My Grandpa Prater, my mother's father, was a big man, towering over my father and uncles, and rugged even in his mid-60s, with thick arms and shoulders and huge hands.  He wore overalls, sometimes with a white t-shirt underneath, sometimes without, so you could see his hard round pecs dusted with white hair.

He was a man's man, always doing something with his sons and sons-in law and various friends: hunting, fishing, playing horseshoes, working on cars.

He had a thick Kentucky accent that was virtually incomprehensible, but he didn't say much anyway.  When the family gathered in the living room to play cards and exchange gossip, he kept silent unless someone asked him a question.  The indoors was uncomfortably stuffy; he'd rather be out with his friends and some dogs on a midnight hunt.

The only time he perked up was when someone asked him to play his banjo.  Then he'd play "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" or "Cotton Eyed Joe," as good, and as fast, as the Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs at the Grand Ole Opry.

There was a sadness about him that I didn't pick up on when I was a kid.  Something deep and dark, that the little joys of everyday life couldn't penetrate.  It wasn't just that he had lost his wife, three older brothers, and four of his eleven children.  It was a dream deferred, a hope from his childhood that he abandoned.

More about that later.

I have two good stories with Grandpa Prater.  The first is about judo.

The summer after fifth grade.  We're all at the farmhouse, but my brother and Cousin Buster are off somewhere, so I'm the only kid.  Dad and my uncles are up by the Old House, playing horseshoes.  I'm not allowed because I'm too little.  I don't necessarily like horseshoes, but I like hanging out with the men, especially when my only other option is sitting in the farmhouse with my Mom and aunts, gossipping about who did what with whom thirty years ago.

I'm wandering aimlessly through the side yard and the rhubarb patch when Grandpa Prater appears, wraps his huge paw around my shoulder, and says "I hear you're taking wrestling."

(I'm not going to try to transliterate his incomprehensible Kentucky accent.  Use your imagination.)

"Wrestling?  No, I'm studying judo.  It's a Japanese sport.  We wear white robes and throw each other."

"Judo?"  He repeats the unfamiliar word.  "Did you know I was a wrestler in high school?"

He takes my hand and leads me up the hill toward the Old House.  It's difficult to understand him, but by interrupting with many questions, I get the gist of his story:

In the Kentucky hills in the 1920s, it was unusual to go past the eighth grade, but the adolescent Tony (who I assume looked like this) was smart as a whip, so his parents allowed him to go on through twelfth grade at Salyersville High School. His best subject was music -- he sang and played the banjo, like on the Grand Ole Opry. That got the bullies riled, so to prove that he was a he-man, he went out for wrestling and basketball, too.

I have that problem!  At Denkmann, raising your hand too often or getting high grades on too many tests draws the ire of Mean Boys.

By now we are on top of the hill, in the men-only zone behind the Old House.  Dad asks, "Wanna join us, Tony?"

He doesn't ask me.

"Well, sure, but right now Boomer's going to show you all his wrestling moves.  Judo, I mean."

I'm what?   Try to throw someone who is twice as tall as me, and a solid mass of muscle?  And my grandpa?  I don't think so!

But Dad and my uncles are gathered around to watch the show.

"C'mon, you can't hurt me.  I'm strong as an ox.  I was wrestling guys before your Daddy was born."

Sighing, I grab Grandpa by the shoulder and hip and try the easiest throw, basically tripping your opponent.  To my surprise, he goes down easily and pulls me on top of him.

"Dagnabit, you did it!" he exclaims.  "That there judo is powerful stuff.  Now pin me.  Come on, pin me to the ground!"

I scamper on top of him, feeling his hard firm chest, smelling his Aqua Velva cologne and hint of whiskey, and press his arms over his head.

He pushes his arms down and slides me down his trunk, as easily as one might push off a pair of pants.  I feel his hard belly and the mass of his crotch.

"Well, your pinning needs some work, but other than that, you're a natural.  Hear that, Frank?  You sign this boy up for wrestling!"

Dad grins at me as if I've achieved a major goal.  And maybe I have.  "C'mon, Boomer," he says, "Play horseshoes with us.  You're old enough now."

I did go out for wrestling a year later, when I started junior high.

The next story about my grandpa involves sneaking into his bedroom to "borrow" his banjo.

See also: Grandpa Prater and his Banjo