Stonewall by Martin Duberman Page B

the burgeoning humanist movement, but by then Foster felt too rooted in Hartford to leave. Besides, he may have been experiencing, on a level too deep to be fully conscious, a rejection that Kurtz had never intended; he may have been feeling that the surrogate father had turned out, after all, to be much like the original: willing to enlist Foster in his own projects, while controlling the terms of the relationship from a safe distance.
    In 1961, the same year Kurtz left Trinity, Foster’s own father died, succumbing at age sixty-five after a decade’s struggle with heart trouble and diabetes. Foster’s ever more difficult mother never remarried; a lifelong health fanatic, she concentrated her energies on a daily routine of walking and dieting. She announced her determination to live to be ninety—and did, by seven days. On Foster’s infrequent visits to her at Gypsy Trail, she continued to subject him, between dollops of brewer’s yeast and vitamin supplements, to her unpredictable, explosive mood swings.
    In a farewell letter to Foster, Kurtz offered him some partingadvice: He would be “much better off,” Kurtz wrote, if he “resituated” himself. “You have too much to offer, and you should have every opportunity to make the most of it.” But for now this was not a message Foster could hear. After a brief spell of academic success, he lapsed back into his long-settled self-image as someone marginally gifted whose existence didn’t much matter. He reverted to lessons he had learned as a youngster: not to call attention to himself, not to attempt distinction that was “clearly” beyond his grasp. As a child Foster had survived life with his demanding, domineering parents by becoming, on the surface, unobjectionably “nice.” But beneath that accommodating surface lay dormant discontent that had not yet found an expressive channel. For a while longer, Foster would settle for working semi-anonymously in a non-profit environment free from demanding responsibilities. But by the mid-sixties, when in his forties, he would finally find a “cause” able to call out to the full his uncommon talent for nurturance and his tenacious dedication.

JIM
    J im could never bring himself to sleep with people in order to get parts. He thought of himself as a romantic: sex was “a big deal,” a way to get to know someone with whom he planned to spend the rest of his life. Not that he didn’t pick people up in bars for casual sex on occasion, or go to Everard, the gay Turkish baths; but even in those places he was searching for a boyfriend, for tenderness and connection. He didn’t “do” a lot of sex, though not—as an eighteen-year-old, stereotypically pretty blond—for want of opportunities.
    He was, in fact, constantly fending off passes—and not always in a way that (at least in retrospect) pleased him. He thinks he may have been too arrogant and haughty when rejecting a proposition—“How dare you!” indignantly written all over his face. It was not simply a matter of priggishness, though; Jim was also angry at being approached as merely another pretty boy (at eighteen he looked twelve), at his pursuers’ consistently ignoring what he knew was his complexity and intelligence.
    He blames himself most for having sometimes led people on. He was, he can now admit, “a fabulous cock-tease.” Once he accepted a director’s invitation to vacation in Puerto Rico, with the stipulationthat he would have his own bedroom; when Jim discovered, on arriving, that the two of them were sharing a bed, he made a huge stink about it, withdrawing into huffy chastity. “I shouldn’t have gone in the first place,” Jim now says. “I knew perfectly well what would happen if I did.”
    Paula Strasberg, the wife of Lee (head of the Actors Studio), and herself a respected coach, once said to Jim, “I