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."

William Faulkner and his Boyfriend Paint Robert's Penis Green

Call me Artie.  Your story about visiting Lynchburg, Virginia, the "scariest place on Earth," made me laugh.  I grew up in Marion, Virginia, about a hundred miles away, and Lynchburg was our beacon of culture and enlightenment!

This was long before Stonewall.  I graduated from high school in 1951  (don't do the math: I know how old that makes me!).   But we knew all about gay people; every town had its resident "queer," and there were private men-only parties where guys from 100 miles around would gather.

In Marion, the parties were held at the home of the high school drama teacher.  One of the regular guests was Robert Anderson: about 40, with a slim, slight build, a little moustache, a hairy chest, and a rather big cock, but a complete bottom.  In those days, young guys were always the "trade," going down on older, so it was quite a kick watching Mr. Anderson reverse the roles, going down on the twinks and Cute Young Things.

Mr. Anderson was the mayor and the editor of the local newspaper, plus he had a wife and daughter at home.  You may wonder, wasn't it dangerous, in Virginia in the late 1940s, with gay sex being a crime?  You see, if anyone told on Mr. Anderson, he would report on them, so we were all safe.

It wasn't just about sex.  We were a circle of brothers, a bulwark against the homophobia of the outside world.  We joked, gossipped, and told stories about gigantic penises and celebrity hookups, just like you did in West Hollywood parties years later.  Mr. Anderson liked to tell the one about his first three-way:

New Orleans, June 1925

New Orleans in the Jazz Age!  What could be more exciting for a teenager with an adventurous spirit, a famous father, and a stepmother who was trying to buy his love with endless gifts of clothes and cash?

Robert (never Bob) was fascinated by the new social and sexual freedom of the 1920s.  Women had the right to vote, and could drive autos, smoke, and wear pants, with barely an eyebrow raised.  Men wore perfume and marcelled their hair, and called it the latest style.  Black, white, Creole, Italian, Jew: all races mixed with equality and passion.  There were proponents of free love, birth control, anarchy, Bolshevism, vegetarianism, and Buddhism.


Robert's father was Sherwood Anderson, the literary flaneur whose Winesburg, Ohio (1919) is still required reading in schools.  Their apartment in the Pontalba Building, off Jackson Square, was a bona fide literary salon, a gathering-place for writers and artists of all sorts, from Carl Sandburg to F. Scott Fitzgerald.  But the writer who most fascinated him was Bill Faulkner.

William Faulkner is famous today for Southern Gothic classics like The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom!, but in the spring of 1925 he had only published poetry, and only in college magazines.  He was working on his first novel under Sherwood Anderson's tutelage.

He was 28 years old, a short, small man, not a Charles Atlas "physical culture" type, soft-spoken, rather fey; yet his dark eyes and intense energy were immensely attractive.  Robert assumed that he was queer.  He wondered what queers did in the bedroom, and resolved to find out.

When Faulkner first moved to New Orleans in November 1924, he stayed with the Andersons, but by March 1925 he had fallen in love with Bill Spratling, a 23-year old instructor of architecture at Tulane University.  He moved into Spratling's apartment in Pirate's Alley, about a block away [now it's the home of Faulkner House Books], where they held court with a large group of artists, writers, bon vivants, and intellectuals, most of them queer men or women.

Robert barged his way into some of their soirees, and was disappointed to find no sex going on, just a lot of drinking, piano-playing, and discussions of Valentino, Kandinsky, Thomas Mann, and "Rhapsody in Blue."

Maybe if he caught them alone, they would be in the middle of an act, and he would be invited to watch -- or join in.  He had heard about the "French vice: that the New Woman liked to practice on her lovers -- what we call oral sex now -- there was no reason why a queer couldn't do that, too!

Robert was definitely interested in going down on Bill Faulkner, and maybe Spratling, too.  Maybe both together?  He started practicing on bananas, so he wouldn't gag on their enormous penises.

He began knocking on their door with various excuses at odd hours -- 8:00 am; 10:00 pm; noon.  But they were never "in media res."  They were sitting down to breakfast, or working in the garden, or one of them was out.

In June they announced an upcoming trip to Europe.  Robert knew that he had to act fast.  One evening around 10:00 pm, he knocked on their door, as usual, but when Spratling answered, he screwed up his courage and kissed him on the mouth.

"Hey, now!" Spratling exclaimed, startled.  And then he called back into the house "Bill, did you order a boy to be sent over?"

Faulkner appeared wearing only pajama bottoms.  "Him again?  After all this time, you'd think the agency would send us a new one."

"I just...I mean..." Robert began.  He expected them to be all over him, kissing and touching his body.  Instead, they were joking, distant.  "I wanted..."

"It's been quite obvious what you want for some time," Faulkner said.  "The question is, why would I be disrespectful to my dear friend Sherwood Anderson by corrupting his first-born son?"

"It's not corrupting.  Not if I'm willing."

Spratling laughed.  "I think we can accommodate the pest...I mean, the young queer in training.  Shall we all adjourn to the boudoir?""

"No, your studio would be much more exciting than a boring old bedroom," Faulkner said.  "Don't you agree?"

They both put their arms around Robert and escorted him into the next room -- to Spratling's studio (he was an aspiring artist as well as an architect). 

Robert nodded mutely.  The Bills both stripped out of their clothes -- Faulkner was average sized, uncut, and Spratling very big.  Neither were aroused.  Following their lead, Robert took his clothes off -- he was most definitely aroused -- and approached Faulkner and groped him, and leaned in for a kiss.

Faulkner swung him around and pinned his arms behind his back.

"Wait...what...."

Spradling grabbed a brush and pallet and began painting his cock!

"Wait...this isn't..."  Robert said, straining against Faulkner's arms.

"Calm down, my dear.  Soon you'll be a work of art." Spradling pushed up Robert's still-aroused cock to paint the underside.  The brush felt like a tongue licking at his shaft, not at all unpleasant.  "You'll be in all the museums.  Your dick will be famous world-wide -- and much more impressive than Michelangelo's David, I might add."

"Do the balls, too," Faulkner suggested.

"Oh, no, the penis alone will be my masterpiece.  Besides, it's such a monstrous specimen, I'm sure I'll run out of paint."  He dabbed Robert's cock head with green.  "All done.  Now, shall we introduce young Master Robert to his adoring public?"

Before he knew what was happening, Robert was pushed, naked and dripping green paint, through the kitchen door into Cabildo Alley.  He banged on the door, but they didn't answerr.  The only thing to do was walk home, ignoring the stares and jeers of the evening crowd, without being arrested for indecent exposure.  At home, he told his parents that he had been the victim of a fraternity initiation.

Robert never visited the Two Bills again -- he sent a friend to retrieve his clothes.  But he did hook up with Spradley alone one night, after Faulkner moved away, and the next summer, in France, he and his brother "shared" Paul Robeson.  But those are stories for another time.

My Brief Modeling Career

Chicago, April 1979

One of the highlights of my freshman year at Augustana was my brief -- very brief -- modeling career.

I had my own radio program, the "International Pop Hour," where I played pop songs from Europe.  In between, I interviewed anyone who might have the slightest international connection, from the political science professor from China to the Italian-American manager of Langomarcino's Chocolates.

 One day in April, shortly after I got back from determining that my friend Mary's brother was "straight," I interviewed Lars Lundquist (not his real name), who came to Augustana as a foreign student in 1968 and now had his own photography studio in Chicago.

"I do everything -- kids, dogs, weddings, even passport photos," he said, "But I'm specializing in fashion.  I want to get some clients and go into talent management."  He paused.  "You know, you've got a nice fresh-scrubbed all-American look.  Did you play football in high school?"

"No, I was an athletic trainer.  But I saw more moldy towels and stinky athletic supporters than any football player."  I cued the laugh track.

"Can you come out to Chicago next week?  We'll do a shoot, and see what happens."

It's a scam!  My inner skeptic told me.  But then..."He's got a studio in Chicago, on Michigan Avenue!"  Besides, my listeners -- all 5 of them -- wanted to know what happened.

So the next weekend I drove out, and he took some shots of me wearing an orange leisure suit, a polo shirt and jeans, and a yellow turtleneck sweater with green pants (bright colors were "in" that year).

I quit my job at the Carousel Snack Bar, and through the spring and summer of 1979, except for my 10 days in Colombia,  I drove out to Chicago every few weeks and let Lars photograph me.  I got some work: see if you can find the Christmas 1979 catalog for the Marshall Fields department store, or Chicago Magazine in the spring of 1981.  I didn't keep any copies -- the photos were too embarrassing.

The money wasn't very good, and I was too busy with classes, clubs, and my job to drive out to Chicago every five minutes, so I was getting tired of it by the fall of 1979, when Lars asked, "Would you consider working for the gay market?"

"What?" I asked, stunned.  "What kind of market is there for gays?"

"All you have to do is pose nude -- there's no sex involved.  And the pay is good."

Was it legal?  And where could you go to buy nude pictures of men?

Apparently there were several gay porn magazines available in the adult bookstores of big cities.  Plus a mail order industry of nude male photos, marketed to gay men who couldn't get to big cities, and didn't want a porn magazine delivered to their home.

I could be a beacon of light to gay men in small towns!

But I would be out to millions of people.  Ok, hundreds.  They wouldn't be seeing my real name, but still...what if my mother saw the photos...or my friends at school....

A few days later, I met Fred, my ministerial student boyfriend.  I was sure that he would disapprove, so the nude photo shoot never happened, and my modeling career fizzled out (except for the adult movie I made, sort of, a few years later).