My Husband and My Wives: A Gay Man's Odyssey by Charles Rowan Beye

hometowns. For the first time in my life I did not need to proposition anyone. I was in demand, and, as an object of so much lust, was able to demand as much satisfaction as I gave. At first I was in ecstasy. I thought that at last I would find the means to do the queer equivalent of sitting in the drugstore like Mickey and Judy drinking a soda using our two straws. But after a month or so I was not making any progress in that direction. These men did not want a relationship, they did not even seem to want straightforward sexual satisfaction. They wanted games, poses, positions, erotic logistics, sex as a work of art, perhaps. I found it boring, even though I was only eighteen and hormonally alive; it left me with a barren feeling that made me feel so lonely. I guess I just wanted sex without having to be clever.
    I missed the simple virility of my high school friends pumping their orgasms into me while we huddled in the backseat of my car. One night I was walking disconsolately away from MacDougal Street when I caught the eye of a man glancing my way while he was in conversation with another fellow. He quickly came over to my side to introduce himself and ask if I needed a ride anywhere. He was a curly-haired man, short, stocky, and swarthy, and his companion was a taller, muscular black man. With the recklessness of the young I accepted a ride to my rooming house with both of them. As we pulled up before my address, he asked if he could come in, telling the other fellow to explain to his wife that he was “hung up at the gym.” It turned out he was a boxing manager, a “deeze and doze” James Cagney tough guy such as I knew only from the movies. He never explained himself but clearly enough he went for wrestling around naked in bed with a young guy, getting blown, jerking the other fellow off. I liked his smell, liked his muscles, his roughness, directness, humor. Of course, it was a moment in the night, but I could not stop to think of the difference with the sex I had been having all that fall. I know it is perverse, but there is a certain kind of “guy-guy” who turns me on; I leave it to the shrinks.
    By chance, during roughly the same time, I took to spending Friday evenings in a midtown bar featuring a Dixieland jazz band with a beautiful woman friend of mine from work. The money I spent on beers guaranteed that I would go hungry after Thursday noon, but I reckoned the music and camaraderie were worth it. Shortly thereafter the bar became our place for a pickup routine that with an essential variation was a staple of a host of comic films of the time, the ones in which some beautiful woman is out on the town with her plain-Jane girlfriend and they bump into a handsome guy, more often than not a sailor, and his ordinary friend searching for fun and romance. The narrative arc has the two lookers falling for each other, with their sidekick friends turning to each other as consolation prizes. We played that film routine one Friday night after another. The bar was frequented by the military and by college students. My woman friend was a real beauty who easily attracted first-class sailors or university students to her side, which left their buddies to talk with me. As the night wore on and libidos raged, the good-looking guy would confess that he and his friend had not thought to get themselves a room for the night, whereupon my friend would invite the guy home, which left his friend out of luck until he reluctantly accepted an invitation from me. On the surface of it the invitation produced no particular hesitation. Strange men sleeping in the same bed was not the aberration then that it would be now; the Depression and the war had made doubling up a commonplace. Two men lying side by side in their underwear, however, can go just about anywhere they want to take it. Most nights I lucked out; otherwise I practiced discretion. Mostly it was lopsided sex, me giving, them taking, but I liked the companionship in it.
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