16 Texas Toughs, Houston Hunks, and Hell-fer-Sartain Sausages

I endured Hell-fer-Sartain, Texas  for a year after getting my M.A. in English.

It was actually Aldine, Texas, a far, far, far northern suburb of Houston, 20 miles from the beauty and excitement of the Montrose.

And, if you don't count two trips back to Rock Island and spring break in New Orleans, it was actually only seven and a half months, or 210 days.

209 days too long.

 I had a dreary two-room apartment on a dead end street, with an illiterate redneck landlord downstairs and a headbanger neighbor.

Everyone in the rust belt moved to Texas in the early 1980s, which meant that everything was grotesquely crowded, it took an hour to get anywhere in grotesque traffic, and everyone was new at their jobs, so they took forever and made lots of mistakes, which made every chore from banking to going to the gym a daunting enterprise.

Plus, everything was under construction, resulting in constant delays, and more flat tires in nine months than I've had in the 30 years since.

The campus was all ugly concrete slabs and treeless scrub grass.

Everyone was illiterate, surly, and very, very homophobic.  Consequently, all gay men were very, very closeted, giving you fake names and fake phone numbers.

There are a few things I remember fondly:
My Italian class.
A visit from Bruce.
Spring break in New Orleans.
Driving away.

And sausages.  They grow them BIG in Texas, and the guys were readily available.  For hookups, anyway.

Here are 16 Texas toughs, horrors, hookups, and sausages from my 210 days in Hell-fer-Sartain.

September:

1. The Student Who Got Naked in My Class, stripped down to his underwear right in the middle of a lecture on Moby Dick.  No one has ever done that in any class since.  The most beefcake you see is when they take off their sweater, and their shirt pulls up off their chest.

2. Raymond, a black guy with an interest in astrology (he was a Taurus) and an enormous Mortadella who kept saying "if you relax, it won't hurt." It did.

3. Sayid, his friend.  Raymond fixed us up, apparently believing that if I wasn't an anal bottom, I must be an anal top.  At the end of the date, Sayid ran into the bedroom, stripped, turned over on his stomach, and squealed "Take me! Take me!  Do whatever you want with me!"


4. Hank, a recent graduate of the college, now working in a department store, who claimed to want a relationship, but gave a fake telephone number.  He didn't realize that as a faculty member, I had access to all student records.  So I looked him up and called.

"Um...um...I don't...I mean," he stammered, trying to figure out how he managed to accidentally write down his real number.

"You said you wanted a relationship.  So -- dinner tomorrow night?"

He didn't want dinner.



October:

5. Dan, a Vietnamese immigrant who worked at the mall and chain smoked.  During our date, he poured water on a napkin to use as a makeshift ash tray.  After the date, I came down with a case of...well, let's just say it wasn't pleasant.

November:

6. Two Brothers and their Dad. I had a date with the 19-year old, but I made out with the 17-year old, and got a sausage sighting of the aroused Dad in bed.

December:

7. Dick, My Old Bully.  We reconnected at Christmas, back in Rock Island. Who knew that he was gay?  And so buffed?  And so well hung?




January:

8. My Most Embarrassing Hookup, when a middle-aged Mormon guy mistook me for a hustler.

9.The Redneck Boy from the trailer court next door worked out with weights, shirtless, in his yard.  I never made contact, but it was a pleasant sight.

February:

10. The Professor Who Got Away.  I pushed a little too hard, going into detail about the things we had in common.  I may have used the term "soul mate."  He rain.

11. The Russian Major.  I wooed him with my knowledge of Slavic languages, but after the make-out session on his couch, he said "I hate to burst your bubble, but I'm not in the mood to be raped tonight."  Raped?

March:

12. The Footballer.  This guy goes into ecstasies over me being from the Midwest, asked about farms, milking cows, etc., etc.  He asks me to wear a football jersey on our date.  He asks me to stand in front of the window and "Feel myself up."

No!

He arrives and says "Are ya hungry?"

Which is almost as annoying.

13. The Teenage Hustler of Bourbon Street.  The fuzz-headed Cute Young Thing kept following me around, trying to get me to buy him hot dogs, a pizza slice, beer, and Curaçao.  I finally agreed to bring him back to my hotel room, where he was too big to go down on adequately, and at the end of the evening he asked for $5.00.

April:

14. The Most Skittish Guy on Earth.  He arrives, says "There are too many people around.  You didn't tell me you lived so close to other people.  What if they saw me coming in?  What if they hear us?"

I get annoyed and say "Are we going to do it or what?"

He grabs a chair, puts it on the floor in the bedroom, and says "Go ahead and do it, then."

But then he hears a noise and vanishes before I have a chance to "do it," whatever "it" is.


15.Carl the Cowboy Cop  with a Kovbasa+, one of the biggest I've ever seen.  But he was immensely tall, which was a turnoff, and extremely anti-religious.

May:

16. The New Age Devotee who kept talking about the Universe, energy, chakras, crystals, and stuff: "The Universe wants you to find the one you're destined to be with."  He didn't want to do anything in bed except kiss and cuddle, although he stayed aroused all night.

In the morning, I prepared a New Age breakfast of granola and fresh plums.  I tried to hand him the bowl of plums, but he didn't take it, and it shattered all over the floor.

 A fitting end to my 210 days in Hell-fer-Sartain, Texas.

See also: Researching an Ugly Guy Takes Me to the Worst Place in the World

8 Taboos of West Hollywood

After growing up in the repressive wilderness of Middle America, you finally manage to escape to West Hollywood.  You expect perfect freedom, the freedom to be open about who you are and what you feel, the freedom to fulfill your dreams and desires.   Instead, you find dozens of social rules, conventions, norms, and flat-out taboos that can get you ostracized. 

Here are the top ten taboos of West Hollywood in the 1980s and 1990s:

1. Never mention any woman's physical traits.  This is understandable: after hearing "You like girls!  You like girls!  You like girls!" over and over throughout your childhood and adolescences, having a friend say "That woman is attractive" will pull up old traumas. So you never mention women at all if you can help it, and if you must, you use neutral terms like "The woman with the black hair."

2. No friendships with women. You have to overcome the myth that gay men are really women, so they hang out with women.  So you never speak to a woman if you can help it, not even lesbians.

3. Never ask anyone what they do for a living.   It is standard small talk among straight people, of course, but you came to West Hollywood for spiritual and social fulfillment, not for anything as mundane as money. Conversations should be about art, music, literature, and sex, the things that mattered in life.

4. Never go home with someone on the first meeting.  This was a response to the AIDS epidemic, where sex with strangers was risky.  Only sleazoids hooked up; you got his phone number, called two to three days later, and made a date for two to three days after that.  At the end of the date, sex was obligatory.

5. After the date, you must spend the night.  And have breakfast with him the next morning. To leave after sex, or before at least toast and coffee, was an unforgiveable offense.

6. Never refuse to share a friend's boyfriend. One of the permitted ways to have sex with strangers was the custom of "sharing": a friend's partners. No matter if they were not your type, or even repulsive, it was a major affront to refuse.  Just close your eyes and go down on him.

7. Never have sex with a friend, except when sharing or at a sex party.  The boundary between friend and lover was very loose: we often lived with friends and did not live with lovers, went to social events with friends and left lovers at home.But one-on-one sex was going too far.  You can still go down on him, but only at a party where everyone is doing it.

8. Do not have a small penis.  Every penis must be described as "big" or "huge." If you happen to have a small one, lie.  If you happen to date someone with a small one, pretend that you don't notice, and when your friends ask later, say "it was huge."

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