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?

Tracking Down My Jewish Cousins

When I was growing up in Rock Island, almost every kid in my class had grandparents or great-grandparents from the Old Country,  so"where you came from" was a constant classroom assignment.

"Bring some food from your country"
"Tell about how your country celebrates Christmas."
"Teach us a few words in your country's language."

In junior high the assignments became more complex: the political structure, history, and economy of your country.

By high school, we were writing histories of immigration from our country, writing reports on its literary classics, and charting its GDP.

Except for me.  My grandparents and great-grandparents, both biological and adopted, were born here, and no one remembered any farther back (except for Grandma Davis's great-grandmother coming from Quebec.). 

 I was forced to "just pick a country" to do the assignments: Spain, Finland, the Philippines, Japan, and India spring to mind.

Being American-born-American, with no particular ethnic heritage, I've always been eager to embrace any hints of anything non-WASP-y in my family tree.  Like my Native American relatives, who turned out to be Aunt Nora's husband's family.

And...Jewish?

I have two odd memories that suggest a Jewish connection:

1. It's around 1968, when I'm seven years old, but before we move to Rock Island.  My parents decide to drive out to see "Otto."  I don't know if he's a friend or relative or what: these things are never explained to kids.

Otto was the old man in the story The Muscles of Morris Street, but I don't make the connection.

He is way old, way older than my grandparents, bald with wrinkles and glasses that make his eyes look big.  

His living room is heavy with thick furniture, a dark-oak piano, black-and-white pictures of dour-looking relatives, and a very nervous, trembling poodle.

One of his photos shows some guys in old-timey swim uniforms.  Otto catches me looking at it.

"That's my son, back when he was not much bigger than you," he says.  "Do you like to swim?"

"No.  I like to watch tv."

"I don't have a television, but I can give you some paper to draw on."  He goes to his desk and pulls out a black-bound day calendar for the year 1963. Blank, never used. It starts in September, not January, and has dates for "Yom Kippur," "Rosh Hashanah," "Purim," "Pesach."  I don't know what any of those words mean at the time, but later I figure out that they're Jewish holidays.  So Otto is Jewish.

2. It's couple of years later,  maybe 1971, when I'm 10 years old. Grandma Davis has taken us to Fort Wayne, the big city about 30 miles from her farm.  In the midst of doing fun grandma-and-kids things, she drives us to a ritzy neighborhood far from downtown, and says "I have to stop at this house for a minute.  You can come in, but don't make fun because they're Jewish."

I'm offended.  Does she think I'm a hick?  There are lots of Jewish kids in our neighborhood in Rock Island.

We climb up a thick, heavy porch with granite pillars, and knock on the door.  A middle-aged man with wavy hair and a little paunch answers.

The only other thing I remember are two teenagers, a girl and a boy, sitting at the kitchen table, watching tv -- the first portable black and white tv set I had ever seen!

The boy doesn't have his shirt off, sorry.  But he is still cute, with dark crewcut hair and very pale skin.  And he looks very, very grown up.

"Have you been to see Otto?" Grandma Davis asks the boy.

He looks up sheepishly.  "We're.. .um... planning to go later today."  No doubt he wasn't.

"You should visit him," she insists.

So the cute boy with a tv in his kitchen was friends or relatives with the elderly Otto, who had no tv at all.  Weird!

When Grandma Davis died, I was bequeathed her Bible, with family records in it, and everything became clear:

Otto (1890-1971) married Blanche, Grandpa Davis' sister, in 1923.   Apparently he was never accepted by the family because he was 15 years older than Blanche, because this was his second marriage (the first ended in divorce), because he was Jewish, .,and because their son Wilbur was born five month after the wedding.

Scandal upon scandal in 1923!

Maybe Grandma Davis also rejected Otto and Blanche  -- or maybe she saw them during the 350 days a year that we weren't in town.  Blanche had already died by the time of Memory #1.  Memory #2 must have been an errand that brought us to see  Otto's son Wilbur.  

Wilbur was married in 1945, apparently just after he served in World War II, and had two Baby Boomer children, David (born 1948) and Kama (1950). The cute boy must have been David. Which makes him my...fourth cousin once removed?

What's important is: I have a Jewish connection.  Rather a distant connection, but I'll take it.  L'chaim!

And maybe I have even more contemporary Jewish relatives.

Grandma's Bible record ends there, but internet searches have yielded more.

David became some kind of business person in Chicago. He has one son, Jared David, who has never married.

According to Facebook, Jared lives in Louisville, Kentucky, where he's into crossfit.

Maybe gay?

He  "liked" St. Andrew's Episcopal Church.  The Episcopalians are pro-gay.










Wilbur's daughter Kama married Roger S___.  They have a daughter, Nikki, who is married to someone named Trusty in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Nikki has a son named Mason (my fifth cousin, once removed, by adoption).  On the swim team at St. Xavier High School.

St. Xavier High School?  

It seems that over the generations, my Jewish relatives assimilated and lost their Jewishness.

I'm still taking it as evidence of Jewish ancestry.

Sorry, I forgot to put in nude photos, but here's a nice Jewish boy with his penis out to tide you over.

The Boy Who Ran Away to Manitowoc

My father was adopted by the Davis family when he was five years old.  He remembered almost nothing about his biological mother, and even less about his grandparents, only that they lived in Howe, Indiana, and his grandfather was named Nils.

Like The Wonderful Adventure of Nils, the Swedish children's book that everybody in Rock Island had to read?  Was my biological great-grandfather Swedish?

I always felt left out with a generic American heritage, among the Belgians, Greeks, Swedes, Germans, Jews, and Estonians in my class.  Maybe I had a heritage after all!

 A few more, conflicting details from my father's older sisters, and from a elderly woman at Christmas dinner one year who said she was Aunt Nora's aunt.

1. My great-grandfather was Nilsson, not Nils.  He was only 16, a cadet at the Howe Military Academy, when he met my great-grandmother Ida.  She was 17 years old, living on the Potawatomi Reservation.   Her parents disapproved of the match, and told them to break it off.  But they refused, and on day in 1897 Ida left the reservation forever.

2. Or his name was Stephens, he was 27, and Ida was 23 years old, a "spinster."  When she became pregnant in 1897, he ran away, but sent her money from Manitoba.  Ida returned to the reservation to raise her daughter.

3. Or his name was Nels. When Ida became pregnant, her father thought that she had been dishonored, and paid some thugs to get revenge.  Nels was never seen again.  Maybe he left town.  Maybe he was murdered: every year on March 3rd, the day Nel disappeared, Ida took a bouquet of flowers out into the woods.

Whatever his name was, everyone agreed that he was as as beautiful as the day, with dark wavy hair like Valentino, a voice like Caruso, and the physique of a Charles Atlas.  Most of the girls in town were in love with him, and he was in love with most of them.

I didn't see much of a gay connection in this story, but the "forbidden romance" angle is always queer -- white-Indian relations were a criminal offense in some states in the 1890s.  And I was interested in the "beautiful as the day" Nilson/Stephen.

Besides, he was my biological great-grandfather.

But when I started researching family genealogy, I came to a dead end.

First, there is no Potawatomie reservation near Howe, Indiana (it turns out that my Indian "grandmother" was one of Aunt Nora's relatives by marriage.) 

Second, I found great-grandmother Ida and her parents on census rolls and gedcoms, but no combination of Nils, Nilson, Nelson, Neal, or Stephen first and last names.

Which makes sense, I suppose.  If he was a student at the military academy, his home would have been somewhere else, maybe out of state.

And I couldn't search his final destination, the entire province of Manitoba.  Dead end.

A few days ago, I decided to try again, and keyed in various combinations of Nilson, Nelson, Stephenson, and so on into Google Books, along with Manitoba.

I found  someone named Nels Stephenson building an opera house in Manitiwoc, Wisconsin in 1899, two years after my great-grandfather left town or was murdered.  The right time period, and the names are close enough to match. His business partner was William Brandt.

Could that be a gay connection?

William Brandt doesn't appear in Manitiwoc census records, or in the newspaper before 1899.  Not a Wisconsin native.

But when I checked the records of Howe, Indiana, there he was!  William Brandt, born in Lagrange County, about ten miles away, in 1870.

 William Brandt and great-grandfather Nels left town together.  Nels may not even have known that Ida was pregnant.

Imagine what happened that night in 1897:

"They're coming for you, Nels."

"Why, Billy, what do you mean?"

"Ida's father found out about your romance, and he paid some thugs to kill you.  I have a carriage waiting-- we have to run away, tonight."

"We?"

"Well, of course.  You don't think I'd let you go out to the Wild West by yourself?  And miss out on all that fun?"

"But your job at the opera house?"

"There will be other opera houses.  Now get packed -- we have to go!"

There's a guide to LaGrange County on A Gay Guide to Small-Town America

Was My Grandfather Gay?

My father was adopted!

I didn't find out until grad school in Bloomington, when I became interested in family history, and began reading old newspapers to see if there was any mention of my grandparents.  And then I saw an obituary about a woman who died in Lagrange, Indiana, near my parents' home town of Garret, leaving four children, with the exact names and ages of my father and his brothers and sisters!

That was too big a coincidence!

My father didn't want to talk about it, so I called my Aunt Nora.

"Yes, we were adopted," she said.  "Your father never forgave the old man for giving us up. When he came around to visit, Frank would always hide in his room.  He wouldn't even go to the funeral.  But Frank Sr. was 59 years old, near retirement age, when his wife died, and he didn't think he could raise four kids alone.  So his friend Lloyd offered to help out, and ended up adopting us -- that's your Grandpa Davis."

That would explain the book I found in Aunt Nora's attic -- Skeezix Goes to War, published when my Dad was a kid, with his name signed in ink: "Frank J[...]."  He made a mistake, and started to write his old name.

I didn't think much about it for many years, but recently, I began to wonder -- my biological grandfather, Frank Jackson, didn't marry until he was in his late 40s.  Why wait so long?  And why did his friend Lloyd offer to raise his children?

Was there a Depression-era gay romance going on between my biological grandfather and my Grandpa Davis?

Thanks to the internet and my Cousin Eva's gedcoms, I have some promising details:

William Henry Jackson, my great-grandfather, was a prosperous businessman in Lagrange County, Indiana. His son William became a prominent lawyer, and his four daughters married into some of the wealthiest families in the country, including the McCormicks, who owned half of Chicago. But Frank, the youngest, born in 1878, was a ne-er-do-well.

In 1895, at age 17, he is arrested for "loitering," code for any number of activities, but often for cruising, searching for same-sex partners.

In 1903, he is working in his brother-in-law Charles Hinkley's confectioner's shop on 219 S. Main Street, Muncie, Indiana (today it's a bar).

In 1908 we find him in Cleveland, working in a music hall. Music hall entertainers were often gay.

Sometime after 1910, when his father dies, Frank returns to LaGrange, probably to help take care of his elderly mother. His acting or musical ambitions are put on hold.

Around 1918, he meets the 20-year old Lloyd Davis.

Lloyd lives in Fort Wayne, a two-hour drive from LaGrange in those days.  How do they meet?  What business does Frank have in Fort Wayne?

Maybe it's the nearest big city with a cruising area.

In 1923, Lloyd marries Grace (my Grandma Davis, who befriended gay men in art school.  Was this another one?).  They move to a farm near Garrett, about thirty miles from LaGrange.  To be close to Frank?

Lloyd goes to work as an engineer on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, a job that takes him to all of the big cities of the East Coast with 1920s gay subcultures.

In 1926, shortly after his mother dies, Frank marries her nurse, Orpha Maye Young (who comes from an Amish family).  He is 48, and she is 28, the same age as Lloyd. They have four children.

Hee and Lloyd remain friends.   There is no record of what Grace thinks of the friendship.

In the mid-1930s, Lloyd contracts a venereal disease, and must go to Hot Springs, Arkansas, for a cure.  Was he consorting with female prostitutes, or with rent boys?

Frank's wife dies in 1937, when he is 59 years old.  Lloyd and Grace offer to adopt his children.  They have none of their own.

Frank visits the children -- and Lloyd -- regularly until his death in 1955.  Lloyd dies two years later.

Were Lloyd and Frank gay?  Were they involved? There is no way to know for sure: no diaries, letters, photographs, or reminscences.  Everyone who knew Lloyd and Frank passed away long ago.

It remains a possibility, part of our hidden gay heritage.

See also:  Do Levis Show Bulges Better than Armani Wool Slacks?; and My Grandpa and the Witch in the Lake of the Woods.