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

to get your wine and spirits in state liquor stores, and other than beer there was no drinking in bars or restaurants. Little towns with no-account populations fell off the radar of the Liquor Commission police or the bars bribed them. The places we went to were always dark. There were folks sitting at the bar, others clustered around the two or three pool tables, while the tables set up in the gloom of the cavernous space accommodated men who sometimes sat alone. The talk in the bar was frugal, bitter, and harsh; they were minimalists, those people, the bartender, the men and women getting a drink in the middle of the afternoon. It had the mood and ambience of The Last Picture Show or Paper Moon. In 1946–47 the condition or at least the mood of the Great Depression had not left pockets of the rural Midwest. My translation into this world was no less than Dorothy’s experience of Oz in reverse. The adults, with their pinched faces and thin-lipped mouths and their sparse fatal talk, were dramatically unlike the teachers in my high school, with their constant good cheer, their obsessive uplifting effacement of the bitterness of life. Odd folks they were, too. Farmhands on an afternoon off, women looking for some fun, or wanting to earn a little money giving someone else a little fun, people who had strayed from a traveling circus, salesmen, hitchhikers who had been dropped off somewhere in the vicinity, often demobilized soldiers trying to get back to the big transcontinental highways and on to their homes.
    My “bad boy” friends were equally refreshing. With no standing in the school, often ashamed of their homes or their family situations, determined to fail in class so they could drop out at the first opportunity, they were cynical, funny, harsh, and abrupt, talking of things I had never considered. They took me on as a mascot. They were highly amused at my jokes and anecdotes, they loved my accent, my large vocabulary, my sissy, dainty, pretentious manner. They taught me pool, they taught me how to drive a truck, they taught me how to take a crap in a field when nowhere else was available, how to wipe myself with leaves. They explained to me as best they could the innards of a car, showed me how to change a tire, gave me new and unusual illustrations of life, what to do when the police are after you, for instance, or what to do with your dick if you are facing a wide-open pussy in front of you. They didn’t exactly ruffle my hair and give me a smile whenever I rode along in one of their cars, but they were enormously protective of me, and so friendly, happy to know, I suppose, that if they suddenly felt horny there was someone at hand to give them a blow job. From time to time when they offered lifts to the hitchhiking servicemen they urged them to take advantage of me in the car for some relaxing fun. In the bars where we became—what shall I say?—occasional regulars they presented me as their friend who liked to suck cock, and there was never anyone who seemed to find this remarkable or reprehensible. They all liked my style as well. I felt the welcoming wide embrace and learned to take a certain amount of teasing from my guys and their bar friends, teasing that was based on my sexual interests, but it always seemed affectionate. Afternoons with these boys made me feel “special” rather than “queer,” as the one who had a difference that could be useful and pleasing to my friends, a difference that could be amusing as all differences are, but not to be disparaged.
    My other great talent highly valued in that long hot Iowa summer was dancing. Iowa City maintained a recreation center for the teenagers and young adults, where we could congregate on Friday and Saturday nights for dancing or Ping-Pong, where the beverage of choice was Coca-Cola. All so innocent and dear, and all so long ago! And all so sweaty, I might add, when dancing in a room with temperatures at least in the high eighties and humidity to