Middle School Misery: Gay Boys Connect
By: Laurence Best
Tags: Coming Of Age, Youth, Coming Out, LGBTQ, Creative Non Fiction

Middle School Misery: Gay Boys Connect

In November of 1963, as I sat bored and after-lunch-sleepy in fourth period Latin class, our gray-haired, bow-tied, distinguished teacher Mr. Henry walked slowly into our classroom looking dazed and solemn. He softly announced that President Kennedy had been shot. He said newsmen were trying to gather more information on his health and how and why this had happened. He had a black and white television wheeled into our classroom so we could watch the news coverage until the final bell rang at three fifteen.

We all struggled to take in the fact that something so unimaginable could be a reality in America. Mr. Henry said we would not have to study under the circumstances, but we were not dismissed, so he decided to share his large collection of vintage Life Magazines for us to look at to pass the time. I was so fascinated by them that I began collecting special issues myself, most of which I would eventually discard because I would learn there is only so much baggage you can carry with you.

As for the loss of President Kennedy, I candidly admit that no one I knew in Louisiana at that time considered it a loss. As far as I could tell, no one liked him because he was both Yankee and what was then derisively and routinely described as “a n______ lover.”

I was raised to be a racist as was everyone I knew, just as in a similar way we were all raised to be heterosexist long before the term even came into existence. I would have been flabbergasted to know that one-day, fifty-seven years later, Ancestory.com would inform me I was 1% North African and 1% Ivory Coast African, the latter being the epicenter of the American slave trade.

My grandmother Verda prided herself on her memberships in the Daughters of the American Revolution and the United Daughters of the Confederacy. She never had much money or prosperity, but she had this.

She worried about two things in that connection. First, her genealogical research revealed a Confederate deserter in our family tree which might disqualify her if ever discovered. Second, she occasionally said, “They say there may be a n_____ in the woodpile somewhere.” She knew the discovery of racially tainted blood would be a far worse disqualifier. Decades later Ancestory.com, using my DNA, would prove the reality of our African ancestors.

In 1963, most white people in New Orleans vigorously opposed integration and wanted Justice Earl Warren impeached. We had a long way to go to learn to think differently, me no less than anyone else. I began my long and halting journey toward racial acceptance and understanding in the late sixties. The journey to self-acceptance would wait a good deal longer to begin.

By New Year’s Eve 1964, there were just a few months of junior high left. Robbie invited Barry and me to sleep over at his uptown house. Barry and I took the Lakeview bus, transferred to the Cemeteries streetcar, and rode past Beauregard all the way downtown where we transferred to the St. Charles Ave. streetcar to First Street where we got off for the four-block walk to Robbie’s house. It was cloudy and cold so that the windows of the trolleys were fogged over and dripping condensation. By the time we got off, it was so dark the street lights had already come on. We walked four windy blocks over old cobblestone sidewalks randomly broken apart by ancient oak roots.

Robbie’s parents warmly welcomed us, made dinner, and served us all in the Danish modern dining room of their camel-backed shotgun home. Then we three disappeared into Robbie’s room for the evening. It was upstairs at the rear of the house and had a wall of windows looking south through the tall leafless trees in his backyard. There, Robbie entertained us with his reel-to-reel tape player and stereo system with music by Bob Dylan, including the album Highway 61 Revisited which was not exactly top 40 at the time.

It felt wildly bohemian and somehow way ahead of the popular tunes of the Beatles and everyone else. The idea that Dylan would one day win The Nobel Prize for his writing would have been inconceivable. He was instead intimately associated with the birth of the soon-to-come counter culture.

Later on we watched TV since Robbie had his own black and white set in his room, an unheard-of indulgence when most households had only one. We watched our favorite shows all piled together on Robbie’s full-size bed. We eventually sorted ourselves into three rows laid out one behind the other across the bed and staggered a bit so we could all see the screen to watch The Outer Limits and then Gilligan’s Island.

At some point, Robbie, who was the smallest and in the front, turned his smiling face toward us and asked “Okay! Who has a hard-on?” to which I guilelessly responded “I do!” because I did, which was not at all uncommon. These were my closest male friends, so I felt safe in my candor.

Barry predictably said nothing, while Robbie howled “You fruit!” We all laughed and horsed around. We had an especially good time together because for some reason we all seemed to be like-minded in so many ways. It never dawned on me that for Robbie to ask that question, he too must have had an erection; otherwise, how would it have occurred to him? Of course erections and fourteen-year-old boys are nearly synonymous, so it did not matter.

The next day, after breakfast, all three of us headed back the way Barry and I had come. It had snowed nearly four inches overnight as we slept, an exceptionally rare occurrence in New Orleans, and we were all excited to get out and see the city as we had never seen it before. Robbie decided to join us and go to my house for a while before returning to his grandmother’s house near City Park, which was how he was able to attend Beauregard despite living uptown.

It was still cloudy and dark when we boarded the streetcar with its single headlight illuminating the still falling flakes of snow. The streets were nearly empty, likely because most folks were afraid to try driving even though the roads were clear because the ground would never freeze. Our long streetcar ride through downtown and out Canal St. to Lakeview with everything covered in snow was nothing short of sparkling magic shared by the closet of friends.

Barry got off in lower Lakeview near his house and Robbie and I went on to mine where we had a fine time throwing snowballs and playing outside until he left. After he was gone my mom, grim and serious, ruined everything by saying “ You know,….I don’t like your little friend Robbie. You need to find another friend.”

“Why don’t you like him? He’s a great guy. Interesting and smart too. I’d have thought he was just exactly the kind of friend you would like me to have.”

“Well … I think he’s queer and I don’t want you around him.”

“But that’s ridiculous! How you could think that?”

“I just know, and I know better than you.”

Of course, what did I know about queer after all? All I knew was I liked him and we were best friends. The thought that anyone I knew could be queer had never entered my mind. There was nothing at all feminine about Robbie that I could see. He played basketball competently in PE and recess, as did Barry, which is a lot more than I could say. And while he did not date girls and make out with them like Barry and me, that did not seem indicative of anything at our age.

The fact was I had yet to have an erection with a girl, and I wasn’t queer, so what did that matter anyway?

I had my usual hurt, disappointed, humiliated reaction to mom’s remarks. Everything I did was wrong; now even my friends. But at least she liked Barry. He was one of the smartest boys in my class and would soon be our yearbook Class Favorite. He never got into any trouble and was liked and respected by everyone from jocks to greasers. So she had no objections at the end of that school year when Barry invited me to go with his family to their place in the country at Pumpkin Center past Hammond, Louisiana, and way out of the city.

In those days, before the interstate opened, the sixty to seventy mile trip on two-lane country roads took quite some time, even in Barry’s dad’s mammoth, gloriously tail finned Plymouth station wagon. They were serious LSU fans and so the car was purple and white with a long streak of gold-colored metal trim down the side, all in tribute to LSU.

Once at his grandparents’ farm, Barry showed me around and we poked about in the barn and the woods while his parents busied themselves with chores the grandparents needed assistance with. So we were on our own. Even his little sister Sharon was somehow out of our way. Sitting around in the empty living room, we got bored and I had my inevitable erection. What was new was that Barry noticed, and remarked

“Well something’s come up I see,” he dryly observed as he pointed to my crotch where my erection had crept up to my belt.

Reddening, I said, “Crap! This happens all the time.”

“Well, it seems to be nice sized. Let’s have a closer look.”

So I used my hands to press the fabric around down it to enhance its visibility. “There, now you can see it better.”

“It's nice and I think your balls look bigger than mine.”

With this, I felt pretty good about the way I looked. Banter about my erect penis and our respective experiences with puberty went on until eventually, we exhausted the subject matter.

That night we slept on twin beds in a spare room. I awoke lazily the next morning to the sun blazing in through old threadbare white-turned-yellow curtains. I heard Barry up and about so I rolled over in his direction only to see Mr. Goodie Two Shoes (which was how I thought of him because he was so well-behaved) walking by completely naked. More surprising than his nakedness and his obvious immodesty, neither of which I had experienced in all our years as friends, was the size of his massive and still partially erect endowment. Apparently, after complimenting me the day before, he now wanted to show off, but do so without bragging. He was always such a gentleman.

“My god, you’re huge!”

“Yeah, it is pretty big, but maybe looks bigger than it really is because the rest of me is not so big.”

“Well, mine is hard too and still not nearly as big,” I said as I pulled back my sheet so he could see my erection tenting my pajamas. “And gosh, it’s tingling so bad this morning I know it won’t go down. I swear I think I will have to beat off.” The pressure seemed to be enormous and I was so excited I felt on the verge of coming almost without touching myself. Just a very few strokes would have done it.

Of course, I woke this way most mornings and made no conscious connection at all between my excitement and what I had been staring at since I had awakened.

“No, you don’t! You can’t do that. It’s wrong. You just can’t.”

“But why? I do it all the time, and then my hard-on goes away. Besides it just feels so good, I have to.”

“No, you don’t. Just ignore it and it will go away.”

“But, I don’t think I can stand it. I really, really have to come.”

“You can’t. It is not allowed and it’s evil. Just get up and get dressed. Please! ” pled good catholic Barry.

And so I did as he asked, and eventually, and to my surprise, it did go away. Another life lesson had been learned; not coming won’t kill you, even if it feels like it surely will.