He pressed that same finger to his own backside and made a sizzling sound while winking. We giggled. “Rich-ard!” Mom, as usual, flirted by pretending to overcare.

I’d never seen Dad so worked up. It made me straighten the ascot I wore atop my blue pajamas.

I would later judge that New York City made my dad feel very (almost cruelly) sexual.

—Like father like son.

The folks soon noticed a strange expression claiming their young Hartley’s face. My frown became more set each day, and Mom at last stooped before me. She brushed at the brown velvet collar of my little chesterfield. “What is it, darling? Are you scared in New York? Hmmnh? Yes?—Scared?”

I nodded.

“Scared, what of?”

“Leaving.”

I had the shaming secret knack for happiness. Even as a boy, my image of perfect contentment always centered not on toys but the toys’ workshop, chockablock with paint, hammers, table space. Now, full grown, arriving here at last, I imagined myself one skilled elf about to go on payroll at the North Pole’s action central; I would soon meet all the other top toy-making young elves … or is it “elfs”? (Kinds of people in the world? Those who want to own the toys, and those who long to make them.)

First six months in town, I would climb to the roof of my tenement and watch the city’s beady lights come on and remember Mom’s real pearls. (She wore them “out” despite expecting robbers, even at the Rainbow Room.) I would sip my cheap Chilean champagne from the last of Granny Halsey’s flutes (long since stepped on). And I would toast the skyline like some hick, to your health, chin-chin, for simple gladness. I was a hick. Whose life had finally begun …

Newly-off-the-train, I sensed I was not the only gay one. All of us were still very much guy-guys, the more so for youth’s stubborn cockiness. Butch and jawed and proud and hung, our mothers’ favorites. In Falls, North Carolina, my sexual outlook had been Hush-Hush. But here, on glossy streets—one glance at any other slim tailored dude was returned with interest, a brazen unharmed “Yes?” Safety in numbers. Who the hell cares? Strong, we were here now.

We had come this far to be ourselves. We would not hold back. There were hundreds of thousands of us.

And we were mostly so friggin’ cute.

Why are so many writers, painters, (and hairdressers) gay—that’s another story, anybody’s guess. Maybe self-defense by those most longing to redesign an unfair split-end world? Camouflage got invented just after the airplane. During both world wars, the gay-friendliest of army divisions? Always the camouflagers. Born experts.