Tracking Down the Greek Boy of Mykonos

June, 2016

My friend Doc just returned from a holiday on Mykonos, the Greek island five hours from Athens by boat (or a direct flight from London, Paris, Brussels, and Vienna).   He invited me but I refused.  I've already done enough traveling this year, and besides, I don't like gay resorts.

1. They're beaches, with no museums or art galleries for miles around, and nothing to do but get sunburned and incredibly bored.
2. There's an awful lot of booze and drugs floating by.
3. They're packed with white upper-class elitists.  I can get those at home.

But it did give me the idea of tracking down the Greek boy of Mykonos.

When I was a kid, I loved the "My Village" books by Sonia and Tim Gidal, photo-stories about real 10-12 year old boys living in traditional villages in Japan, Israel, Denmark, Morocco, Finland, and so on.  Although they were published during the 1950s and 1960s, the modern world had very little impact on the villages: the house might have electricity, but automobiles were rare, and there were certainly no tv sets, fast-food restaurants, or tourists.

The stories were told in the first person, present tense ("I get up and..."), with very minimal plots, mostly involving going to school, learning a little of the country's history, meeting colorful villagers, and taking a trip to a nearby big city.  But since the boys were all extraordinarily cute and not the least interested in girls, I found them kindred spirits, hints of gay potential amid the incessant "what girl do you like?" interrogations of my childhood.

My Village in Greece, published in 1960, starred a boy named Yannis, who lives on the island of Mykonos, in the Aegean Sea.  His story involves going to school, catching octopuses on the beach, buddy bonding with his friend Markos, learning about Odysseus and Theseus, picking figs, and visiting the Island of Delos.

Yannis and Markos are inseparable, and neither mentions having a girlfriend!  A gay paradise!  There's even a statue of Hercules in the museum by the harbor.

When I read the book as a kid, I didn't realize that the Gidals were manipulating us into thinking that Mykonos was tiny, isolated, and untouched by the modern world.

Yannis mentions that there are nine coffee houses in town, an archaeological museum, and 350 families.  That's a total population of 2,000, a small town, not a village.  But even a town of 2,000 doesn't need nine coffee houses, unless there are a lot of visitors.

It turns out that in the late 1950s, Mykonos was already a thriving tourist destination, a playground of the rich and famous.  During the 1960s and 1970s, tourism boomed; annual arrivals increased by 800%.  Mykonos became more famous for its trendy nightclubs than for its whitewashed houses and narrow cobbled streets.

In the early 1970s, Italian artist Piero Aversa settled there and opened the island's first gay bar. By the late 1970s, it was a gay mecca.

Yannis and Markos, iconic figures of my childhood, emblems of gay potential, grew up in a gay mecca.

Could I track them down, find out if they were gay?

There are actually 10 villages on Mykonos, but the only one with 2000 people, an archaeological museum, and views of the islands of Tinos and Siros from the harbor, is the main city, called Mykonos City or Chora.

And the Gidals give the full names: Yannis Nikou and Markos Constantinou, as well as names of other people in the village.

Surely they were pseudonyms?

No -- an internet search revealed five entries for Yannis Nikou from Mykonos, under various spellings.  In 1973, the society page of the San Mateo, California Times announces the engagement of one Jill Carson to Yannis, described as a "merchant and exporter."  He would be about 24 years old.

Other newspaper articles describe their wedding and their move back to Mykonos.

There's also a reference to his export business.  It specialized in women's clothing.

Jill lives alone in San Mateo now.  I don't know if she's widowed or divorced.

Ok, Yannis was probably heterosexual, but what about Markos?

Several of those -- it's a common name in Greece.

One Markos from Mykonos currently lives in Luxembourg.  He was in the Greek Air Force from 1970 to 1973, got certified in aircraft maintenance, and now works for an aircraft company.

I'm going to guess heterosexual.

But another is probably gay.  At least he works at the Elysium Hotel -- expensive ($400 per night), predominantly gay but "straight-friendly."

And it's a 10-minute walk from "Marco's house" on the map on the flyleaf of My Village in Greece.

I'm not sure that he's the Markos from the book.  He might be a son or grandson or some other relative, or someone not related at all.

But it's nice to imagine that one of the iconic books of my childhood features a straight boy and his gay best friend.

See also: The Gay Villages of Sonia and Tim Gidal

We Look for a Gay Comic Book

Rock Island, December 1976

At Christmastime in my junior year in high school, shortly after I caught Cousin Joe in the act, I caught the flu.  I lay in bed for a week, missing the District Jump Quiz Tournament, unable to concentrate on books or comic books, unwilling to make the arduous trek across the room to turn on the portable tv atop the dresser, I mostly listened to KSTT on my clock radio. Boston sang "More Than a Feeling" about a thousand times; their only competition seemed to be "You Make Me Feel Like Dancing," by Leo Sayer.  I know what he made me feel like doing.

Once I heard a song called “Walk on the Wild Side,” about a man’s  descent from Acting like a Girl to Fairy to Swish: “he shaved his legs and then he was a she.” But I was puzzled by the line in which the Swish “goes to see Apollo" (I had never heard of the Apollo Theater in Harlem).  What did the Greek god, the epitome of muscular manliness, have to do with a sinister, soul-destroying walk on the wild side?







On December 29th, I was feeling a little better, so I asked Darry to bring Robert Graves' massive two-volume Greek Myths, and read up on Apollo.  In one story, he and his friend Hyacinth were playing with a discus.  The wind Zephyr became so jealous of their love that he blew the discus off course, and it hit Hyacinth in the head, killing him. The distraught god created a flower from the bloodstained grass, the hyacinth, with petals that spell out ai, alas!

“Zephr was jealous of their love,” I read. “How can you be jealous of a guy? You can have hundreds of buddies. You’re only jealous of girls.”

“Maybe Apollo and Hyacinth were girls, sort of,” Darry said. “You know. . . .” he flashed a loose wrist.

“Don’t be ridiculous! They couldn’t be gay.  There weren't any swishes in ancient times, and besides, they were like, built!”  Everybody knew that gays were thin, wispy things who hated muscles.

“How do you know how built they were? There aren’t any pictures in the book.”

Slightly embarrassed, I told him about the comic book that my boyfriend Bill gave me long ago, with Casper the Friendly Ghost making a mystical ascent to the Island in the Sky. Darry wanted to see it, so I asked him to find my box of old Casper comics in the closet. The Island in the Sky comic was missing!

Thinking it was misfiled, we sorted through my boxes of Disney, Tarzan, Archie, and superhero comics. Nothing. We even crawled into the attic  crawlspace to look through a box labeled “Boomer," leftover from our move two years ago.  It contained old toys, puzzles, coloring books, cartoon kits, Viewmaster slides, birthday party photos. No comic books.

Exhausted by the effort, I clomped back to bed and collapsed. Darry pulled the covers over me and went downstairs to fetch some orange juice. When he returned, he said, “Don’t get all obsessed. Your fever-addled brain probably invented it. A bad acid trip about Casper the Friendly Ghost, imagine that!”

“No, I’ve read the comic book – lot of times.” I remembered every detail. I remembered when I first read it -- a hot summer night, my boyfriend Bill asleep beside me, breathing softly, and Casper flying to the Elysian Fields to meet Greek gods.

 It was an essential part of my childhood, like Chekhov and Sulu smiling at each other or Robbie Douglas singing about boys holding hands.

“So, tell me all about the story you dreamed up. . .I mean, that you read in that mysterious vanishing comic book.  Casper goes to an island in the sky."

“And he meets Apollo, Pan, Bacchus, and some others. All men, no women. Muscular physiques. They live together. It was like heaven.”

Darry laughed. “Sounds like the Hawaiian Lounge to me! Nothing but fruits, on double dates with each other!  Except for the muscles, of course.”

“Waste your time doing something else!” I exclaimed, scandalized. “Nobody was gay! It was a kid’s comic!”

When Darry left, I huddled beside the space heater, trembling.  First the secret message "Brian gives free LBJs," and now the Island in the Sky.  Why did all of my most cherished childhood memories involve swishes?

It would take me another year to figure out why..

The Greek Orthodox Priest with the Pushy Mom

Davenport, Iowa, September 1981

I began my senior year at Augustana (1981-82) with a single burning question: grad school or a job?

My professors claimed that I could use an English and Modern Languages major to launch a career in journalism, public relations, advertising, translating, or publishing. Surprise -- you needed specialized training for all of those jobs.  300 resumes, and not a single bite.

So I applied to grad school:
1. Russian, University of Iowa (I know, I was just in first year, but I really liked my Russian major friend in Iowa City)
2. Law, Indiana University
3. English, Indiana University
4. Linguistics, University of Chicago
5. Byzantine Studies, University of Chicago

Why Byzantine Studies?

With my new Russian obsession, I wanted to try out Russian Orthodox Church, but the nearest was in Chicago, so I picked the next best thing: St. George's Greek Orthodox Church in Rock Island.

I was disappointed: the liturgy was in English, not Greek, there were pews (I heard that the Orthodox stood), and the sermon was on heterosexual marriage.  But I did meet Peter, formerly a Greek Orthodox priest, now a private investigator for an insurance company.

Being a clergy groupie, I eagerly accepted his invitation to dinner, even though he was substantially older than me, in his 40s.

He lived in a big house in Davenport with his elderly parents, a bedridden Dad and a frail, tiny Mom who talked incessantly of the old country (she left Greece at the age of five, but still remembered it as a "good place").

The dinner was awful -- lamb in some kind of disgusting white sauce, undercooked potatoes -- what happened to the moussaka, spanikopita, and stuffed grape leaves?  No desert -- not even baklava.  And Peter and his Mom drank incessantly.

Afterwards, Peter invited me into his study to see his books on Orthodox theology, Byzantine history, and modern Greek.  He told me about the Russian Orthodox Saints Boris and George, who were gay, and suggested that the Byzantine world was a "good place."

At least it was bright and colorful.

We went downstairs to the basement rec room, where his Mom was watching Fantasy Island. When it was over, she said goodnight and went to bed, and we watched a late movie on tv, something with Bette Davis in it.  Then Peter asked if I wanted to spend the night.

We went into his bedroom and began to get intimate.

I didn't realize at the time, but his Mortadella+ was one of the biggest on my Sausage List, #11.

Suddenly, when I was in the middle of going down on him, the door swung open, and Mom walked in.  No knocking, no words, no nothing.  She saw us, shrieked, and ran out.

"What was...why..."  I stammered.

"Oh, don't worry," Peter said.  "Mom knows that I'm gay."

"Why did she rush in like that?"

"She didn't realize that you were spending the night."

That wasn't a satisfactory answer.

In the morning Mom was perfectly gracious.  There was no breakfast except coffee and juice -- the Greek Orthodox fast before Communion.

Peter invited me over for dinner several more times in the fall of 1981, and afterwards Mom always asked "Boomer, will you be spending the night?"

I loved hearing about the Byzantine World, but he never wanted to go out in public, not even to the Greek Festival.  We would have dinner -- the food was terrible -- and watch tv -- it was always Love Boat and Fantasy Island.  Besides, Mom was a little creepy.  After about two months, I called it quits.

But not before I applied to the Byzantine Studies Program at the University of Chicago.

I ended up going to Indiana University to study English.

See also: Yuri Hooks Up at a Russian Orthodox Seminary