GAYBOY is a semi-fictional novella of my experiences with gay friends and family. The central character is my baby brother Michael Charles Smith, a gay radio personage in Boston. He like so many of others succumbed to AIDS and GAYBOY is an attempt to reincarnate my younger brother and the good times that exist in the Here-Before.
Here’s an excerpt from GAYBOY;
In the Spring of 1966 I won a math scholarship to Our Lord’s High School. Its enrollment was all-boys. The football team was State Champs and the coach tried to recruit me onto the freshman squad. At 5-10 I weighed 180.
“You’re built for running. Short powerful legs and a strong torso.” He assessed my strengths with a slaver’s eye.
“I’m here for math.”
“Brute force timing impact.” Coach Amado understood the poetry of geometry.
“I’ll think about it.”
I ran cross-country instead.
I had short legs and finished fourth and fifth.
After practice and meets I hitchhiked home on 128. Men picked me up and after a mile asked, “Do you have a girlfriend?”
At first I answered yes, but these men exploited this opening as an invitation to discuss sex.
“You look like an athlete. Do you shower with other naked boys?”
They all glanced at my crotch.
Getting a ride from the rush hour traffic on 128, so I endured the come-ons.
Sometimes they gave me a ride home. On the long stretch through the Blue Hills I fended off their
gropes. A slap on the hand scared them. I told no one about these rides.
Exactly what they wanted from me was solved by Chuckie’s discovery of dirty book stash in the woods.
The moldy photographs depicted depraved intercourse without anything left to the imagination and the crumbling pages of written words described unspeakable acts never to be confess to priests.
Chuckie let me pick three. My favorite was THE ITCH by Steven Hammer, who opened my body and soul to the broad spectrum of sexuality with an erudition bespeaking experience. I must have read Chapter 3 a thousand times. I started letting men do things to me. Not all of them were bad.
One day I came home to find Michael crying on his bed. “What’s wrong?”
“Someone saw me playing with Barbie dolls.”
“And?”
“He called me a queer.”
“And you know what that means?”
“Yes.”
“Who was it?”
“I don’t want to say.” The label of a snitch was almost as bad as being a queer.
“Who?” I wasn’t in the mood to hear no.
“Bobbie.”
“Bobbie with the fat brother?”
“Yes.”
“You stay here.”
I ran down the street to a white ranch house. My brother’s persecutor was a thirteen year-old.
Bobbie refused to come outside.
“No one calls my brother a queer. Do it again and I’ll burn down your house.”
I wasn’t kidding either.
Back home Michael was singing OVER THE RAINBOW to a Ken doll.
“Maybe you shouldn’t be playing with Barbie Dolls.”
“Every boy in this neighborhood plays with his sisters’ dolls. Anyone who says that they don’t is a liar.”
Michael had me dead to rights.
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