What Kind of Animal By Michael A. Kroll
I "came out" as a gay man to my parents in a letter sent from Japan where I was teaching English. I was close to thirty years old. Although that "admission" relieved me of a terrible burden, it was only the beginning of a process that continues even now, approaching my eighth decade. It is not an insignificant fact that, despite my writing career, I have never again addressed the topic of my sexuality on paper. I know you will find this difficult to understand, because I find it difficult to understand, but as I contemplate writing this, I feel vulnerable again, as if a high school classmate will read what I have written and discover my "secret" after all these years. What I'm trying to say is that putting this on paper... Well, it feels like I'm still "closeted" - or, if not entirely in the closet, then, after all these years, still not entirely out of it. It's a stupid metaphor, anyway, because it suggests darkness and fetid air. Better is the analogy used by memoirist Paul Monette in Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story. He likened the effort to put on a straight face not to a person hunkering down in the dark behind a closet door, but to an animated puppet, dancing on a string, a metaphor with its own limitations, since I am both puppet and puppeteer. I pull my own strings.
As far back as I can remember, I have always gotten comfort from food and sex. Maybe everybody does, but that's something I cannot know. I'm not sure which I discovered first. For little boys, even infant little boys, simple curiosity makes it so easy to touch! That means that sex has probably comforted me long before the limitations and distortions of memory can recall. It may have even preceded the comfort I seek and find in food. But with sex, very early we begin to perceive a society around us, a collective with rules and expectations and consequences, which make it much more acceptable, and therefore that much easier, to indulge the impulse - the compulse? - to eat, and even to overeat, than to satisfy that primal sexual hunger. But satisfied or not, it is there. Always.
Writing about it from the comfort of 2012, when the topic of gay marriage (an inconceivable concept in my youth) elicits more support than opposition, cannot truly convey what it was like before "queer" became a word re-invented by homosexuals to disarm it, much as young black men had reclaimed the epithet "Nigger" (in all its offensive pronunciations) in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement. Young people of all sexual persuasions are likely to greet homosexual confessionals with a bored "ho hum" and "what's the big deal?" In other words, one growing up in the early years of the 21st Century - now - can only understand the prevailing prejudices of the mid-20th Century as those of us born after the Great Depression but who grew up in its shadow understand it. Even young gay people very likely look back on those less enlightened days as historically interesting, but in some ways incomprehensible. Without fully understanding those times, while being fully part of these times, they might insist that they would never have been cowed into silence, never have been less than proud of who they were, never have been anything other than "out," as younger black people might look back on those Jim Crow-era signs: "White" and "Colored" and insist that they would never have abided by the limitations placed on their parents. Whether we like it or not, we are all at least partly products of our time. I have never referred to myself as "queer" and, despite spending considerable time with young African-American teenagers, I can never hear the "N" word without cringing.
While I (finally) celebrate my sexuality ("I sing the body electric"), I cannot forget how desperately I wished it were different - I were different -and how lonely it felt not to be like everyone else. I cannot forget that history and, in some ways, still find myself a prisoner to its legacy.
We stood overlooking the green fields that spread like living carpets over the idyllic hills of East Tennessee, at the legendary Highlander Center. Martin Luther King, Jr. had trained hundreds of young people there in non-violent civil resistance - while the Center's neighbors just beyond the split wood fences, threatened to greet anyone who trespassed on their land with a blast from a shotgun...
Motivated by religious conviction or non-religious moral passion for the issue, we were the tiny vanguard of what would later be called the anti-death penalty movement. At that time, in 1974 - two years after I had opened up to my parents and during a short-lived historic period in which all executions were on hold by a decision of the Supreme Court - the "movement" consisted only of the dozen or so of us who, for a variety of reasons, had made the abolition of capital punishment our primary political objective. I remember how warm the sun felt on my face that morning, though the air was still crisp enough for jackets. I had just come from breakfast to join the small group of friends already assembled. We were a self-selected group of outsiders, which gave us a certain esprit de corps, a tight sense of camaraderie. I stood next to the Reverend Joe Ingle, famous still among abolitionists for his work in Tennessee. He had just said something I did not hear to Harmon Wray, another of the young men led there by his religious passion, and they both laughed. Then Joe turned to me, as if continuing the joke, and in that delicious Tennessee drawl, asked: "What's the matter with you, Michael? You never even talk about getting puntang."
And there it was, that cold feeling in my hands, the tightening in the pit of my stomach, the fear of discovery, of saying the wrong thing. Then the quick recovery to mask real thoughts, real emotions, real fears - a practiced response, laughing, protesting that I had more profound things on my mind this gorgeous morning than sex, thus both evading the question and giving myself a high moral purpose at the same time. The revulsion I had always felt since first listening to boys on the playground talk not even of girls, but of girls' parts (as named by boys) easily justified the moral high ground I bestowed on myself.
How comfortable it would have been - and how I had wished for that comfort - to have been able to say, "Are you kidding? Scharlette and I fuck like rabbits" except, of course, that they knew Scharlette, and they knew that we had not been together for a long time. The truth that I was unable to utter is that sex is always on my mind, or, if not "on" my mind, then at least never far from it - which was, of course, the heart of why I was no longer with Scharlette, though I loved her still. What prevented me from joining the morning banter with the boys, what had always prevented me, was that the "puntang" variety of sex that men talked about in the company of other men was not the stuff of my fantasies.
After some repeated practice, the lie becomes almost a part of you, not a lie at all, really, but that other life you have, the two of you.
If I were writing in a gay website, I would tell stories of sweet but brief encounters (ah, how memorable my first night in Tokyo en route to Kuala Lumpur), as well as stories of deep, enduring love, such as I felt for my Chinese lover, AK and feel today for JC, whom I have put up with, and more surprisingly, who has put up with me, for more than thirty years. And yet, even here I cannot bring myself to name them - though I had no similar reluctance to name Scharlette. Am I protecting them or myself, and if so, from what?
When I look back, there are things in my life that I am ashamed of, mostly having to do with cruel things I have said or done to hurt someone close to me. But I am not ashamed of any sexual encounter I have ever had, from fleeting to long-term - except for one. It happened in my senior year, after a particularly euphoric celebration of a Free Speech Movement victory when hundreds of us held hands and danced the hora around a bonfire in Sproul Plaza. Sex was in the air. Suzanne and I, still holding hands, drifted off to my small apartment on Telegraph Avenue where we continued to dance. Whether I consciously thought about the possibility of losing my heterosexual virginity, I cannot now remember. But whether I did or not, I did not know how to say no to her obvious overtures without exposing who I was. And so we, two virgins, danced ourselves into my bed. I struggled to penetrate her, believing that was what "It" was all about. Afterwards, she cried, while all I could think about was how to avoid seeing her again - and how to get her to leave. It is not the fumbling, hasty coupling I regret after all these years, but the failure to own up, to tell the truth. I regret the coward I was and, to a far lesser extent, still am.
In my freshman year at Berkeley, I started the semester by sharing an apartment on Oxford Street with my older brother. The relationship only lasted until October, so I can pinpoint this experience to either September or October, 1961. I rode my bicycle to the Northside Theater on Euclid Avenue to see Bergman's "The Seventh Seal." It was a warm evening, and I wore shorts. On the screen, death was playing chess, while the man sitting next to me very gingerly insinuated his hand onto my bare leg, and began slowly pushing toward what lay underneath my shorts. Even as I first felt his fingers on my leg - I never saw his face - I knew that I should get up and leave. But his touch was the most sexually exciting thing that had ever happened to me. I wanted to flee; my heart was pounding. But I could not leave. Not only would my now very prominent erection be visible to all through my shorts, but I did not want this feeling to end. It did end, though, ounce his fingers found their way under my shorts, and he kept his fingers there even as I came into my underwear and into his hand. Only then did I jump up, race out of the theater, and race home on my bike home without ever looking back for fear he was following. When I got home, my brother asked what the matter was, and I told him - leaving out the part about how I had let it happen, had wanted it to happen.
"What kind of animal would do that?" he asked, feigning horror. (It would not be for many years that I learned he, too, is gay.) Even though my diary entry that night is as full of dishonest omissions as the story I told my brother, it ends with his question, except self-directed: "What kind of animal am I?"
In the clandestine consummation of the actual couplings that I sought out, often in dark places, there was always fear mingled with a level of self-loathing that had to be repressed, even as it seeped into consciousness - cold fear that was sweetly, mercifully overpowered by the passion, and then the shuddering satisfaction, of the sexual act itself. It was one of the paradoxes of my adult life - a deep anxiety about who and what I was, which I was able to assuage, comforting myself by indulging the very thing I feared about myself.
In college and beyond, I asked more than one young woman to marry me, thinking that if I were married, all this would go away, that I would be like everyone else - but knowing somewhere deep that I was chasing a mirage, like the shimmering appearance of water in the desert. Since Suzanne, I have had sex with two other women (including the multi-year relationship with Scharlette), and none of those sexual encounters was satisfying, either to me or to them. It was part of the pretense. But even as I pretended to seek "normalcy" - even as the puppeteer pulled the puppet's strings - I found acceptance and even love in the warm embrace of many gentle men.
Although it is painful to remember how long I had to deal with the emotions that prompted me to ask myself what kind of animal I am, at least now, more than fifty years later, I know the answer to that question: I am a human animal,
What Kind of Animal 7 Michael A. Kroll