A Gay Boy in Waiting Marries a Woman
By: Laurence Best
Tags: Coming Of Age, Gay, Marriage, LGBTQ, Creative Non Fiction

A Gay Boy in Waiting Marries a Woman

Andrew Neel/Unsplash.com

It was all so inevitable, even at twenty.

It was what we did in those days. It was happening to everyone. Now we know the divorce rate exceeds fifty percent, so people are more cautious about marrying, but then we were fearless and eager to take the next step into adulthood. Girls wanted to marry and boys wanted sex, whatever that required.

The magical draft lottery number 356 had freed me to plan my life instead of perhaps sacrificing it in Vietnam. Everything lay ahead of me. Except the freedom to be different.

My high school love Julie and I had rebuilt our relationship long distance, between New Orleans and Milwaukee. She’d left college to work and lived in a stylish apartment with her sister Maureen. Julie flew down for a long weekend late in my junior year and stayed at Le Richelieu Hotel in the French Quarter where we enjoyed a romantic visit. I began once again to think she might be the one I should marry.

Her strong-willed independence intrigued me. So did her high cheekbones, unconventional looks, patchouli muskiness, and dark-stockinged long legs under short swinging skirts. I still remember her walking away from me, throwing a provocative glance over her shoulder through floating golden hair.

After more than two years of dating around, her seductiveness, intelligence, and charm placed her far ahead of other girls. Her French Quarter visit was a test passed by both of us, because it turned out we were sexually compatible too. We enjoyed one another’s company and felt genuinely comfortable.

The following summer of 1970 landed me in Detroit with Bruce. He got a job with a moving company as brute labor, while I sold shoes in a nearby mall. Julie and I made plans for her to fly over for a long Fourth of July weekend while Bruce’s family would be out of town.

I soon found myself dating two girls who worked at the shoe store, but I didn’t tell Julie. They turned out to be more serious than I was, and before long I was meeting their families. One of them even graced me with my first blow job.

Julie’s visit went well and we had fun both in and out of Bruce’s parents’ king-size bed, much to his mother’s chagrin when she later discovered mascara on her pillowcase.

I promised Julie I would fly to Milwaukee during semester break. Summer over, Bruce and I drove back to New Orleans straight through. We held out on pulling the first pop-top tabs on the cans of beer in our ice chest until were in Mississippi.

Life was good.

My trip to Milwaukee became another step toward marriage. We were not discussing it yet, but we were both thinking about it. Julie met me at the airport with her sister. Her sister’s boyfriend drove us in a raggedy Camaro, and we all lit up and cracked a window. Subzero winds prompted Julie and me to huddle for warmth in the back seat.

We spent our time together meeting Julie’s friends and touring snow blanketed Whitefish Bay under bright blue skies. We had the apartment to ourselves because Maureen was staying with her boyfriend. We declared our love and snuggled under scratchy wool blankets, our skin itching in the dry forced-air heat.

On my way back to the airport, our song, Peter Paul and Mary’s Leaving on a Jet Plane played on the radio as Julie silently tucked a twenty dollar bill in my shirt pocket so I would have some cash for my trip..

Once apart, we talked regularly on expensive long-distance calls on her dime. During one of those, I announced I’d been accepted by Tulane Law School for the fall 1971 semester. I floated the idea of her moving to New Orleans so we could live together as a trial before marriage. When she politely but firmly refused, I began to talk about marriage seriously.

We soon set the date for August in Madison. Julie would find work in New Orleans and I would find an apartment. She would support us while I was in school. The inevitable was all but done. We were confident and excited. The future promised love, companionship, and maybe even financial security one day.

I was anxious, though. My attraction to men had not suddenly vanished. had not released me into the Promised Land of hetero normalcy. But my relationship with Julie felt uncommonly deep, so I didn’t even bother making one of my lists of pros and cons.

I could give in to my physical attraction to men and destroy my life. Or not. Queers were criminals and could not be lawyers. Queers were miserable unattached men without family or friends. Queers were sordid and disgusting. Everyone knew this. As a prominent writer put it in Harper’s Bazaar Magazine in 1970:

“Private acceptance of homosexuality, in my experience, is not to be found, even among the most liberal minded, sophisticated and liberated people. Homosexuality may be the one subject left in America about which there is no official hypocrisy… Cursed without clear cause, afflicted without apparent cure, they are an affront to our rationality, living evidence of our despair of ever finding a sensible, an explainable design to the world.”

If those were the public thoughts of an intellectual, you can only imagine the actual opinions of the masses… and it was among those, and in the deep south, that I had to find a place for myself.

I had seen Midnight Cowboy the year before. It carried an X rating because of the subject matter alone. The two explicitly queer characters were a young boy and an old man, both irredeemable creatures punished for evil impulses they failed to control. The movie’s subtler message about the bond they developed escaped me entirely. My world remained devoid of any positive message about gay life.

Julie and I went to see The Boys in The Band, which depicted a gay metropolitan life I had not known existed. For the most part, I saw the characters as self-hating, vicious, and miserable. I could not want such a life even I’d had the artistic talent that appeared to be a prerequisite.

The weightiest factor, however, was love. I was in love with Julie and also with the life I saw ahead. I had experienced romantic love only with women and could not conceive of being in love with a man. If I could have love and a satisfactory sex life with a woman but could have only unlawful unconnected lust with a succession of faceless men, there was no choice at all. I did not want to be alone and outcast.

Still, I had to face the awful necessity of withholding disclosure of my interest in men. I recognized I was lying by omission, but I was confident I could overcome my attraction. I chose not to say anything because I was so ashamed. I did not think I could utter the words, and I was afraid to doom our relationship.

I had no intention of ever acting on my secret desires; I was certain if I was honest, I could never overcome her inevitable suspicion. I calculated that because I was swearing faithfulness, disclosure did not matter. Staying faithful mattered.

Thus was conceived an ill-fated marriage founded on deception, an act of selfishness rooted in survival in a culture that insisted the cure for homosexuality was marriage to a woman. Today, some refer to it as a time of compulsory heterosexuality. It felt like that to me.



The months passed quickly with college graduation and wedding plans. I lost twenty pounds as I grew frightened and anxious; not about whether Julie was the right girl, but about whether I had made the right decision.

Even my mother told me I did not have to go through with it. She claimed to be concerned that I was too young, but mothers almost always recognize their gay sons in waiting and I suspect she did too. Twenty years later when I came out and asserted she had always known, she offered no denial.

The fateful day approaching, I needed to talk to someone, but Alan was still in a submarine somewhere in the Pacific. I could trust no one else.

Then one summer night, I thought of Brad Kernion, a younger fraternity brother whose company I had enjoyed during my senior year. Brad was nearly my height and of similar build and general disposition. He struck me as so expressive and polite — dare I say nice and sweet — that I suspected he might share my attractions.

I found him attractive, not least because of his heavy shadow of a beard. His closest friend from high school was still his best friend and wherever one of them was, the other was nearby. The friend had a similar disposition. More telling was how Brad’s tight jeans highlighted his genitals against his thigh. Gay men of the time commonly adopted this look. So on this slim evidence, I sought him out.

It crossed my mind that if I was correct, talk could lead to something else. I began to imagine I should give it a try to be sure I was not making a mistake. It would have been easier to go down to Lafitte’s in the French Quarter to pick up someone, but I wouldn’t have known how to go about it even if I had thought to do so.

This was so even though just a few weeks earlier two guys in a Mustang pulled up next to me at a red light and struck up a conversation. One asked me to follow them to the lakefront. It was odd but did not make me nervous until something about the way they looked at me suggested they were trying to pick me up. I fled in terror.

With all this in mind, I called Brad and asked if we could talk. He lived nearby and suggested I come down the service alley behind his house where he would let me in the back door. It was already nine o’clock when I tapped on the door. Brad opened it with his broad toothy grin wearing nothing but a white tee shirt and boxers.

“Hey! Come on in. How are you?”

“Okay, I guess with all that’s going on. Thanks for letting me drop in.”

“Sure, no problem. Have seat on the couch? Can I get you a beer?”

“Thanks, I could use one.”

He had just disappeared into the kitchen when I heard an elderly irritated female voice. “Brad! Who’s that? What’s going on so late?”

“Nothing, Ma. Just a friend droppin’ in.”

Brad returned carrying two bottles and sat down facing me with his left leg cocked sideways. It was all I could do to avoid staring at his gaping fly. I succeeded but found myself instead noticing his heavy beard shadow and thick chest hair curling up out of his tee shirt.

“So what’s up? What’d you wanna to talk about?”

I gulped and urged out hesitant words. “It’s hard to know where to start. The wedding’s coming up and I’ve been so nervous I’m not sleeping. I’m losing weight. I’ve been all tied up in knots wondering if it’s the right thing to do.”

“What’s the problem? You two have a fight or something?”

“It’s not that. Julie’s great. She’s real special and she’s not the problem. I think it’s me. Like maybe marriage is just not for me. Know what I mean?”

“Why not? Why would you think that? I mean I know it’s a scary change, but if you love her, it’ll all work out.”

“But what if it doesn’t? What if I’m not the marrying kind?”

I had by this time mirrored Brad’s position so I was facing him directly with my right leg bent across the sofa cushion nearly touching his. “Maybe some of us are better off single, especially if I don’t know what I want. What if I just shouldn’t marry?”

I was trying to find a way to communicate without being explicit, but was getting nowhere. So I casually let my gesturing right hand drop to his knee. “I was hoping maybe you might understand.”

He looked down at my hand on his knee in sudden recognition, terror writ large on his confused face. He pulled back, stuttering. “I … I don’t know what you mean, but I don’t think I can help. “

With which his mother shouted angrily, almost as if on cue. “Brad, it’s late and it’s time for your little friend to go home!”

“Okay, mom. He’s just leaving. Uh, sorry Larry, time to go.” Brad stood and backed fearfully away from me as if I might pounce on him.

“Thanks, anyway,” I said as I turned defeated to the door, humiliated but resigned. I didn’t worry about him telling anyone. I had graduated, was getting married, and was going to law school. Let them talk.

I was disappointed I had been wrong about Brad, though I wondered if maybe he had been just as terrified as I was. In any case, I had made my best effort and if it had not worked out, it was not meant to and I had made the right decision about marriage.