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

reunion banquet speaker had trouble when introducing the spouses because she could not get beyond “friend” to designate him, and I insisted out loud on “lover” or “boyfriend.” (I don’t know what she would have done with “husband.”) The whole room had a laugh over that, and one woman said later, “You know, when all this business about ‘gay’ came about, gee, it was nothing to us kids from City High. We all knew about that starting in the forties, maybe not the name, but what it was all about. All due to you, Charlie.” Coincidentally, not long ago I was introduced to a young fellow in New York City who remarked that his father had grown up in Iowa City. Further conversation revealed that the young man was gay, the son of someone I dimly remembered as a jock classmate. He told me that when he nervously confessed to his father that he was gay, the older man took it in stride, simply observing that he had known about such things since his high school acquaintance with a gay boy.
    Suddenly now it was summer again, and I was free of having to hold the psychic carapace in place throughout the school day. Bob and I were back working on the school maintenance crew, he pleasant but distant, which I realized was how it had to be. He was a true friend, however, because he had done me the favor of neutralizing his friend Billy, who ceased to be a menace. They were off to their summer athletics programs, so Bob’s complete absence from my life was not so hurtful as it might have been. He lived for baseball in the summer and basketball in the winter. I can only imagine how the boys in the locker rooms must have talked about me, although I am sure that none of those who had been intimate with me ever acknowledged that fact. Some evenings I would be part of a group of boys and girls who set off in two or three cars for the public swimming pool in the town fifteen miles to the east of us. There we would be a bit later, we boys, naked in the changing room, laughing and talking together with the inevitable snapping of towels, and among them would be one or two or three naked bodies or parts I had seen on other occasions and in other settings.
    The odd feature of that summer was the new gang of boys that I picked up with, a crowd that was alien to everything I had ever known before. These were the boys or really in many instances young men of my high school who could be called the “bad boys” or “rough kids” or “losers,” depending on the degree of the speaker’s contempt. From shooting hoops in impromptu neighborhood games they often had a tenuous friendship with some of the “good boys,” but never, never with any of the “good girls.” These boys did not do athletics, they all had jobs, many worked as mechanics or filling station attendants; their hands were often greasy, their fingernails were a mess, their hair needed serious trimming. They drove older-model four-door sedans that they kept in perfect repair, some restructured after their own designs, usually with powerful noises coming from the exhaust pipes. They lived in the “wrong” parts of town, some of them lived in trailers, often alone with their mothers; fathers were often absent, off on a job, in the military, or simply drunk. Some of them had been in the reformatory for juveniles, some of them had been kept back several grades. Joey, my first local fuck when I returned from Andover, had graduated into membership in this gang, and some time or another when he and I were making out in the school parking lot, one of his buddies came by for a little action. Before long I knew them all.
    I remember afternoons of great fun with this gang. We would get into a flock of cars and race off to one of the little towns that stood out in the majestic desolation of big sky and endless cornfields, towns with names like Lone Tree or What Cheer. There was always a speakeasy in such a town. Iowa had remained a “dry” state when Prohibition ended; you had