He’s One, Too

For Edmund White,
and for Patrick Merla

In Falls, North Carolina, in 1957, we had just one way of “coming out.”

It was called getting caught.

Every few years, cops nabbed another unlikely guy, someone admired and married—a civic fellow, not bad-looking. He often coached a Pee Wee League swim team. Again we learned that the Local Man Least Likely to Like Boys did! In our town of twenty-two hundred, this resulted in confusion unto nausea.

Our Herald Traveler was usually sedate (“Recent Church Goings-On of Fun and Note”). It now encrusted the front page with months of gory innuendo. Circulation beefed right up.

And into jail they chucked the hearty, beautiful Dan R——, my boyhood idol.

It took me weeks to learn why they’d removed him as completely as a carpet stain. I was nine and prone to hero worship. I suffered a slight stammer. I lunged at outdoor activities; accidents happened—often to bystanders. Archery from my tree house discouraged neighbors’ backyard cookouts. I felt that 1957 required its boys to enjoy a major sport.

Soon as Dan got grabbed, my parents halted newspaper home delivery. I pedaled my Schwinn uphill to the public library. I spotted a stack of local papers set—unusual—on a shelf above kiddies’ reach. I dragged over three Who’s Whos, one stool from Circulation. Then I hid in shadows, safe among 1921’s unasked-for National Geographics. I read about the public fall of my secret friend.

(I once hooked Dan R——. Showing off my fly-casting, I snagged his furry forearm. Even bleeding, the guy never blamed me. He joked: I should think of him as my first “big one,” the lead “rainbow” in a long, good, lifetime’s catch.—I did.)

My index finger now traced the nine weeks and sixty column inches of Dan’s descent. I read of his capture, for deeds I’d considered doing, with him. I felt exactly as sick as excited.

This would become a familiar flashpoint for me and my kind—everything we want is everything most others find the most disgusting.

What’s daylight to us? that’s sewage to them.

Your hope, their shame. I was, at nine, confused. I am now forty-eight.

•  •  •

Authorities never arrested our town’s obvious ones. Maybe in being flagrant, those boys knew best how to hide. The vice squad failed to book Falls’s supple florist; comically self-informed—he defined everything as “buttery,” “heavenly,” “icky,” or “Velveeta.” Cops spared our insinuating, gifted organist; didn’t Melvin play for the Baptists at ten, the Methodists at eleven? Also left unjailed, Falls’s admired if overweight mama’s-boy librarian.

These ones, born “out,” went genially overlooked thanks to good behavior. They hailed from decent families; they told welcome if unrepeatable jokes to generations of mayors’ wives. They were clever from surviving. And—if their humor was weekend-excessive—their lives stayed weekday-useful to Falls, North Carolina. The Boys accepted who they’d been assigned to be.