Joseph and I Hook Up in a Haunted House

Terre Haute, Indiana

One day the July after my first year in grad school at Indiana University, my friend Joseph called: "You up for a road trip this Saturday?"

"Where to?"  I asked, hoping he wanted to go to one of the gay bars in Indianapolis. 

"I gotta go to Terre Haute to pick up some stuff, then drop it off at my parents' house in Broad Ripple [a suburb of Indianapolis]."

"How much stuff?" I asked suspiciously.  I didn't want to be conned into helping him move.

"Not a lot, just a few keepsakes.  My parents are selling my great-aunt Rose's house, and they want me to go get what I want before everything gets packed up and sold."

"Are other guys coming, too?"

"There aren't a lot of guys around Bloomington during the summer, so it will be just you and me."  He paused.  It's a pretty long trip, so we'll probably have to spend the night in Broad Ripple before heading back."

Spend the night!  I know what that meant!

 Joseph was  one of the first gay guys I met in Bloomington: an undergraduate history major, with black curly hair, a baby face, and a lean tan physique.  And short -- Definitely my type!  But he was also very popular, dating Rick the philosophy major, then Mark the optometrist, then a medical student named Manfred (really!), so I never managed to squeeze in.

Obviously I wasn't his first choice, but who cared?  This was my chance to get intimate!

Saturday after lunch we set out for Terre Haute, about 1 1/2 hours away.  Joseph said that he grew up in Broad Ripple, but they drove out to visit his mother's aunt Rose almost every weekend.  He had fond memories of fishing in the Wabash River, drive-in movies, dinner at the Pizza King, and drinking hot chocolate at Christmastime

"Aunt Rose is in a nursing home with dementia," he told me. "She fades in and out.  Some days she's almost normal, and others she thinks it's 1961, and I'm her brother Oscar.  But she can still name all of the U.S. presidents, in order, up to Richard Nixon."

"Did she know about you [being gay] before her dementia?"

"No.  I'm not out anyone in my family, and I sure wasn't going to come out to a hard-core Methodist lady.   She was always worried that I wasn't dating enough.  One of the last things she said to me before her dementia began was 'You shouldn't be so picky, or you'll never find a girl."

Aunt Rose used to be a professor of American history at Indiana State University.  She lived in a big, two-story house in West Terre Haute, just across the Wabash.  It was painted a depressing shade of grey, but it had a wide porch and a big, carefully mown front lawn.

As we walked up to the house, I saw what looked like a face in the attic window.

 "Who's that?"  I asked. 

"Who's who?"

But it was gone.

I didn't want to turn him off by being leery of an old house, so I said "Does anyone else live here?"

He shrugged.  "No, but about a dozen members of the family have keys.  We drop by to do housework, pay Aunt Rose's bills, and such.  Why?"

"Oh, um...it's just well kept up." 

The living room was mostly packed up and ready to go, all of the pictures taken from the walls and the furniture all carefully marked with the name of whoever had claimed it.  Joseph took a candy dish and a ceramic figure of a dog.

The kitchen was cluttered with pots, pans, dishes, and various obscure implements in piles on the counters and tabletops.  Joseph took a fondue set, a long-ago Christmas present that had never been used, and the cup his Aunt Rose used to serve his juice in.

It was very warm.  He turned on the air conditioner, but we still had to take our shirts off.

Next came the study, heavy laden with books from a career as a college professor: a three-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill's History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Bruce Caxton's Civil War trilogy, plus mystery novels, literature, folklore, music, and about a hundred books on gardening.  Joseph and I filled five boxes with books to argue over later.

He left Aunt Rose's bedroom alone.

Upstairs was a storage room that was pack rat heaven.  50 years of Christmas and birthday cards. Stacks of report cards and school papers. Old magazines, carefully bundled.   Old wrapping paper.  Slide carousels.  Souvenirs of long-ago trips.  Joseph took a nativity set, some Christmas tree ornaments, and a painting of the house.

He left the first bedroom alone and zeroed in on the second, where he stayed whenever he slept over.  There were two twin beds with flowered comforters, a night stand between them, an old-fashioned dresser, and a little card table with framed pictures of Aunt Rose's family.

"Help me get this comforter.  And I think I want the lamp, too.  I used to fall asleep with the light on, and Aunt Rose would come in and turn it off.  Sometimes I just pretended to be asleep, so I would know when she came in..."  he stopped short.  He was trembling.

"Are you ok?"

"She joked that I liked this room so much, I should spend my honeymoon here.  I just... wish Aunt Rose could know about who I really am.  I'm sure she'd be ok with it...I'm so much happier now then when I was trying to be straight, with all the friends I've made...and .."  He started to cry.  I rushed to put my arms around him.  Then somehow we were kissing.

More after the break. Caution: Explicit

The Halloween Homophobe

Bloomington, October 1983

When I was growing up, my church deemed alcohol the worst possible sin, worse than murder or reading the Sunday newspaper or talking to a Catholic.  We couldn't eat food that once contained alcohol, like "beer batter shrimp."  We couldn't set foot in a bar, a restaurant that sold alcohol, or a grocery store with a beer section.  Some Nazarenes wouldn't let the doctor swab their arms with alcohol before giving them a shot.

 I've overcome many of the strictures of my childhood, but to this day I can't bring myself to drink anything alcoholic.  I've never had wine.  I've had only one and a half cans of beer in my life.

Why one and a half?

It was 1983, my second year at Indiana University, and my friend Viju and I had just moved into an apartment together.  On the Saturday before Halloween, we invited several of our gay friends and their dates to a party. We provided homoerotic snacks like penis-shaped cookies, plus Cokes and Sprites (and some of the guys brought beer).  We planned some double-entendre laden party games, an erotic Chamber of Horrors in Viju's bedroom, and finally the Halloween costume contest at Bullwinkle's.

I was going as Pan, the Greek god, with shaggy leggings and horns, Viju was a cop, and Jimmy the Bodybuilder on Crutches said he was coming as a vampire,  Joseph from the Gay Student Alliance was a shirtless Zorro, Terry from Eigenmann Hall was a drag queen witch, Mark the optometry major was Superman, and his date, a shy but extremely cute undergrad named Scott, was a gymnast.

Jimmy took a long time to get up the stairs, so I heard him coming, and opened the door to say hello.

My jaw dropped.  His  "date" was his friend Tony, who was straight,  and didn't know that Jimmy was gay.

Apparently Jimmy hadn't realized that it was a gay party.

In the 1980s, you simply did not come out, to anyone, except maybe your family and closest childhood friends, and then only after extensive preparation.  But in a moment a straight guy would be in our tiny living room with six gay men who weren't closeting their behavior.

Thinking fast, I yelled at Tony, "Where's your girlfriend?"

Straight guy! Closet time! Mark and his date, Scott, immediately slid apart.   Joseph grabbed the tray of penis-shaped cookies and rushed them into the kitchen, Terry took off his wig and earrings to transform his costume from witch to Uncle Fester, and Viju ran to slam the door to the erotic Chamber of Horrors. Someone turned on It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.  



Tony helped Jimmy through the door.  "I don't have a girlfriend," he said, glancing around the room, probably thinking "whoa, sausage fest."  "I was hoping to meet some girls here."

Glaring at Jimmy for being such a dope, I said,  "Sure, sure.  We're going trick-or-treating in the girls' dorm later."

You're probably thinking: why bother to closet ourselves?  It was seven against one.  What could he possibly do?

We soon found out.

Tony asked to use the bathroom.  I pointed the way.

A moment later, I heard his shrill voice: "Boomer, get in here!"

Apparently he had opened the wrong door.  He was standing in my bedroom, where there was a replica of Michelangelo's David on my desk, and the wall by the bed plastered with pictures of naked men torn out of In Touch and Mandate. 

"Where are the girls?" he asked.

"What girls?"

For a moment he just stared, speechless.  Then the tirade began.  "Are you trying to tell me that you're queer?  Don't you know that this lifestyle spreads diseases?  Don't you know that God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah because they were homos?"

"Um...."

Suddenly he became more conciliatory.  "Look, it's probably not too late.  You could rethink your decision."

Rethink your decision!  I was already angry with him for forcing my party into the closet, and this was the last straw. "Oh, gee," I yelled, "I had no idea.  Thanks for the heads-up!  I'll turn back to straight right away!"  I tore down some of the pictures from my wall, wadded them up, and threw them at his feet.

Then I ran back into the living room.  "Boobs!" I grunted.  "Boobs and football and...um, beer!"  I grabbed a can of beer, popped the top, and guzzled some.  It tasted horrible.

Tony followed, no longer conciliatory. "Did you guys know that Boomer is a homo?  He probably wants to take you back into his little chamber of horrors and do nasty, perverted things to you."

Um...yes, I was counting on it," Joseph said.

"You're queer?" Tony asked.  "Maybe you're all queer! Did you invite me and Jimmy up here to try to turn us that way, too?"

Of course, we should have shown him the door.  But we were not "out and proud."  We were coming from the dull despair of the 1970s Midwest, where gay people, when mentioned at all, were portrayed as utterly despicable.  Some of us were still working through feelings of guilt and shame, the nagging doubts: What if we really are sick?  What if God really does hate us?

"Count me out,  I just turned straight," I said, roiling with rage. "Boobs!  Football!  Beer!  Hey, turn the game on! This show sucks -- Charlie Brown is a fag!"  I drained my beer -- it still tasted terrible -- and started another.

Viju glared at Jimmy, "Hey, psychology major, maybe you should tell your buddy something?"

Jimmy hung his head.

"Oh, no, not Jimmy, too!" Tony exclaimed.  "He's handicapped!  Couldn't you perverts leave him alone?  Stick to the schoolyards!"

"Hey, I've never done it in a schoolyard!  Schoolbus, maybe!"  The room was starting to spin.  Was this what it felt like to be drunk?  "When I was six I married the boy next door."

Tony ignored me.  "How can you do those...those disgusting things?" he continued, this time addressing Mark and Scott.  "Do you hate yourself that much, or are you trying to get back at your parents, or do you just hate God?"

Scott the shy undergrad looked like he was about to cry.

Enough was enough!  I walked over to Tony and calmly poured the rest of my beer on his head.

That's why I've had only 1 1/2 cans of beer in my life.

Surprisingly, Jimmy and Tony stayed friends.  It wasn't Jimmy's fault, after all, that he had been "brainwashed" by a pack of "perverts."

And as my reward, I got to spend 7 minutes in the Chamber of Horrors with Scott the shy undergrad.

See also: Sharing the Optometrist's Boyfriend; Joseph and I Get Intimate in a Haunted House.

Halloween Horror: Cruising in the Scariest Place on Earth

We're only 30 miles from Hell.

I'm spending fall break in Charlottesville with Jonathan Peng Lee, my hustler/engineer/paranormal enthusiast/gym rat friend who I met at Alan's funeral.  It's two days before Halloween, and he has promised to bring me to the scariest place on Earth.

I expected a haunted house, but no: we're spending two nights in Lynchburg, Virginia!

How did I let Jon talk me into this foolhardy trip?  Over an hour driving through the Shenandoah Valley that General Sherman burned, through towns named Arkham...I mean Amherst...Stonewall -- no connection to the birthplace of the modern Gay Rights Movement -- Greif (grief misspelled by rednecks).

Now it's only 20 miles to Lynchburg.

The site of Thomas Road Baptist Church, where Jerry Falwell, the biggest homophobe in the world, spewed his venom.  The site of Homophobia University, where the top homophobes in the country send 15,000 of their kids to learn how to hate us more.

We're going undercover as fundamentalists, but still, I doubt we'll make it out alive.

""Why would anyone name a city after the mob murders of thousands of African-Americans in the years after the Civil War?" I wonder.

"It was named before that, after its founder, who ran a ferry in the 1780s," Jon reads off wikipedia. "Hey, guess what?  He was an abolitionist.  Progressive, huh?"

"Oh, very.  I'll bet he was pro-gay, too."

We cross nameless suburbs, then the River Styx (I mean James).

My first view: Eerie yellow lights, a dark stormy sky, the dark tower like something out of Mordor.

We have a reservation at Craddock Terry Hotel on Commerce Street, "steeped in history."  There's a giant woman's shoe over the lobby.

"Fabulous, isn't it?"  Jon says sarcastically.

"Don't use that word.  Remember, undercover -- one room, two beds, and call me 'Brother.'"

"Whatever you say, darling."


We have dinner at a place called Bootleggers, a couple of blocks away.  You enter from the basement: "like you're entering a speakeasy."  There's a gigantic mural of old-time rednecks.  I order a turkey burger and truffle-laced french fries.

Rather elegant for Homophobia Central, I have to admit.

Afterwards we return to our hotel room and go on Grindr to look for a hookup.  I expect a lot of married closet-case-angst types, but we end up inviting over a student from one of the local colleges -- not Homophobia University.  Tall, slim, thick black hair, about 7", into oral.  He's a Humanities major, and on the swim team.

"You must be closeted among your teammates," I say.

"Oh, no, not at all.  The team camptain is queer, majoring in Human Services with a concentration in LGBTQ Advocacy."

LGBTQ Advocacy?  WTF?

"Not everybody in town is as backwards as that other university," he says.  "Too bad you won't be here next spring.  They're doing The Laramie Project at the Renaissance Theater."

He spends the night, but doesn't go out for breakfast with us: waffles at the White Hart Cafe, which is also a used bookstore. No gay books per se, but I do find a biography of Truman Capote.

"What do you want to do today?" Jon asks.  He reads the possibilities from Trip Advisor: "A children's museum, the city museum, a historic mansion, the old cemetery with a Confederate Monument, the Pest House Medical Museum..."

"Have a lot of pestilence in Lynchburg, do they?"

After breakfast we visit the old mansion, the Point of Honor, and go hiking at Blackwater Creek, where I could swear I am being cruised by a cute twink  AND I see what looks suspiciously like a couple of gay dads with their kid.  

Lunch is Szechuan Shrimp (surprisingly not terrible) and Collector's Lair to look at new comics and graphics novels.

Then we hit Randolph College, a fine old brick college where the news magazine has an article about an alumnus who has returned to teach mathematics.  He's "involved with LGBTQ Advocacy Programs like the Change Project."

Change?  Uh-oh.  Sounds ex-gay.

Turns out the organization is meant to "elevate the voices of LGBTQ people throughout the Deep South."

The campus bookstore has a calendar of shirtless firemen.  WTF??

"Twelve local firefighters posed shirtless for this calendar, to raise money for cancer research." {Photo by Allison Creasy]

"Hmph!  For ladies only, I suppose. Heterosexist tripe!"

We just have time for a tour of the campus gym, to gawk at the muscular, bulge-worthy college students lifting weights and playing basketball.  

Then it's "Mindfulness in Practice" at the Maier Museum of Art, led by a practitioner in Buddhist meditation.

Several of the regulars look like they could be Friends of Dorothy, including a tall, ripped guy in his 30s.  He introduces himself as Zeke, an IT director for a health care service in town.

"My...um...friend from the Midwest and I are visiting for the day," Jon says. "Maybe you could recommend someplace that's active on a Wednesday night?"

He grins.  "There aren't any bars in Virginia, really, but a lot of the restaurants draw an eclectic clientele.  Have you heard of the Kegney Brothers?  I'll be happy to show you..."

It's another brew pub in yet another historic building downtown (established 1879).  Practically deserted, and the few patrons are all male-female couples.  Our waiter is wearing a rainbow flag lapel, though.

I order the shepherd's pie.  Zeke, who is vegetarian, surprisingly, orders the curried vegetables.

"Sorry," Zeke says.  "I thought it would be more active.  Maybe later."

We decide that it's safe to out ourselves.  "Any gay activities in town?"

"They have a LGBT queer-e-oke at the Unitarian Church on Friday nights," Zeke says, "And I don't know if you're into it, but there's a sex party at a guy I know's house every other Saturday."

"We're leaving tomorrow, unfortunately," Jon says.  "But if you want to call the guy you know, we can have a mini-party."

So we visit the guy Zeke knows, an organist at the Holy Cross Catholic Church -- there are Catholics in Lynchburg?  In his 40s, rather portly, collects spoons, of all things.  With a rather hot twink boyfriend.

After a five-person mini-party, we stumble back to our hotel room and go to bed.

In the morning, we have breakfast in the hotel and a brief workout in the hotel gym before it's time to head back to Charlottesville and a gay Halloween party.

"Boy, am I glad to be out of Lynchburg!" I say.  "I couldn't have stood it for another minute!"