“They arrived when I was already back in the States. You never got to pin them on me, sir. It’s not official until your officer pins them on you.”
I knew where this was heading, but I couldn’t find the words. The sound of “sir” was what had floored me, a gesture of respect that took me back thirty years, before I had found my calling as a writer and an LGBT activist, before I had finally stopped believing in God and country and war itself. America had yet to make things right with gay people who had served in the military—the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was still a decade away—but here stood Oly, calling me sir, honoring me unilaterally.
My eyes were damp when I stood up from the book-signing table to pin the medals on my old friend. I struggled far too long with the latches, while Oly stood patiently at attention, but there was nothing not to cherish about that awkward moment: the rush of recovered memories, the salutes we exchanged at the end, the utter confusion on the faces of the customers waiting in line for my autograph.
NINE
HARLAN GREENE, A LIBRARIAN AT THE College of Charleston, recently created an interactive map called “The Real Rainbow Row: Charleston’s Queer History.” I remember and admire Greene for a landmark gay novel he wrote in the early eighties called Why We Never Danced the Charleston, so I was tickled to find my old apartment at 38½ Tradd Street depicted on his map in the Number Two position. Number One, understandably, was the Battery, that cruising ground on the waterfront where so many of us found one another. My own digs were merely where I lived for a while, hardly the site of a social revolution, unless you count—and I suppose I must—the moment when I learned how it felt to fall in love.
I moved into Tradd Street when I returned from Vietnam and started work as a reporter for the Charleston morning newspaper, the News and Courier. As the address makes clear, it was smaller than small, a furnished nook in the attic of an eighteenth-century brick townhouse. It was easy for me to call it a garret because an artist displayed her work downstairs. Elizabeth O’Neill Verner—Miss Beth to her friends—was a stately old white woman whose etchings and pastels of African-American women—flower sellers mostly—reflected her respect for her subjects.
My little aerie (sometimes I called it that, too) overlooked the gardens and rooftops of Cabbage Row, a street that was celebrated as Catfish Row in DuBose Heyward’s novel Porgy, the source material for Gershwin’s opera. Miss Beth did the etchings for that book. (It occurred to me, of course, that Sportin’ Life, the fictional inspiration for my radio call sign in Chau Doc, had somehow led me to the neighborhood where he had peddled cocaine.) Since I’ve always chosen theme music for moments in my life, I would lie in bed in a big four-poster and sing myself to sleep with “Summertime.” There was a thick manila rope tied around one leg of that bed that Miss Beth said I was to throw out the window in case of fire.
I covered the military and academic beats for the newspaper. What I loved, though, were the oddball Southern Gothic feature pieces that sashayed my way. I reported on the Spanish moss blight that threatened to wipe out one of the Low Country’s most beloved features. (It never did.) I covered the Chitlin Strut in Salley, South Carolina (pop. 415), where politicians and proletarians alike gathered to affirm their allegiance to fried hog intestines. I was told not to arrive early, since the chitlins were cleaned in hot water, and the odor of parboiled pig shit could linger in the humid air like Woolworth’s perfume. Senator Strom Thurmond came to that event and posed offering a forkful of deep-fried guts to his ex–beauty queen wife, the latter of the two Miss South Carolinas he married over the course of his lifetime.
My favorite story was an exposé I did of Boone Hall, a plantation house ten miles out of town, where tour guides were telling gullible Yankee tourists that this was where Gone With the Wind had been filmed. They got quite specific with the lie on the day that I took the tour. This was the room where Scarlett threw the vase and almost hit Rhett. And out back is where poor little Bonnie Blue fell off her horse and died. It took no more than a phone call to Hollywood—oh, how I loved having a reason to do that—to establish the fact that nothing in Gone With the Wind, with the exception of a long shot of the Mississippi River, had been filmed outside of Culver City, California. (Boone Hall still attracts tourists with its slave quarters and its avenue of oaks, but there is no more loose talk of Gone With the Wind.)
Another assignment that lingers in memory, since it let me creep even closer to Hollywood, was an interview with Victoria Vetri, a Playboy Playmate whose most notable film role had been that of the satanically doomed woman that Mia Farrow meets in her basement laundry room in Rosemary’s Baby. Ms. Vetri was on a press junket promoting a film called When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, in which she was clad in skimpy animal hides like Raquel Welch in her much more famous prehistoric movie. I don’t remember what I wrote, but the photo that accompanied the story showed Miss Vetri dog-paddling in a lake, holding a fish in her mouth.
My stories were playful and oddball, so they began to get noticed by the sort of people who paid attention to bylines. Even my former boss, Jesse Helms, who was already preparing for his first Senate campaign, wrote me a generous fan letter from Raleigh: “I’ve been seeing your fine hand at work in the pages of the News and Courier, so obviously my wish for your success has come true.”
That, as it happened, was the last time I ever heard from him.
ONE STORY UNFOLDING in Charleston at the time affected my career profoundly, though I never got to write about it in the News and Courier. A slim, bow-tied English writer named Gordon Langley Hall renovated an antebellum house on Society Street and soon became the darling of, well, society. Hall, after all, had some stories to tell. He had grown up at Sissinghurst, the family seat of the Bloomsbury set, the illegitimate son of two of Vita Sackville-West’s servants. He had known a Whitney in New York, an old lady who left him her house and her fortune. He’d written a few novels, too, as well as paperback biographies of such women as Princess Margaret and Lady Bird Johnson. The people he regaled at SOB (South of Broad Street) parties were intrigued to learn that he had been adopted by Dame Margaret Rutherford, the dewlappy old detective in the “Miss Marple” films. Folks realized, of course, that Gordon was a little eccentric, maybe even “that way,” since his dogs were sometimes seen wearing pearls on their afternoon walks, but that sort of thing was largely ignored until the day he returned from the Gender Identity Clinic at Johns Hopkins and, in an effort to inaugurate his new life, began wearing angora sweaters around town.
The genteel whispers grew into an indignant uproar when the Englishman fully transitioned to female, renamed herself Dawn Pepita Langley Hall, and married a young African-American garage mechanic named John-Paul Simmons in her drawing room on Society Street while the groom’s father played “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” on the Victrola. According to Dawn, wedding gifts delivered to the home were firebombed in the garden. Though this was South Carolina’s first legal interracial marriage, only a bare-bones notice of the nuptials appeared in the News and Courier—and on the obituary page, at that. Dawn Simmons became a local outcast and an international tabloid celebrity, one of America’s first open transsexuals. When a reporter had the temerity to ask Dame Margaret what she thought of her son becoming a woman and marrying a Negro, she was said to have remarked, “I do wish Gordon hadn’t picked a Baptist.”
I saw Dawn only once, buying popcorn in the lobby of a movie theater. Her frumpy clothes and sharp features and penetrating brown eyes made her a little off-putting, like a spiky bird of prey to be approached with caution. I’ll always be sorry I didn’t say hello, given the difference she eventually made in my life by her mere example, her brave singularity. It was a singularity far greater than anyone had imagined. Dawn became visibly pregnant, left town for a few months, and returned to push a beautiful light-brown daughter around the Battery in a baby carriage. This was written off as delusional at the time, or a “publicity stunt,” or an elaborate hoax designed to torm
ent her tormentors.
Can he do that? they asked.
Is that even possible?
It is, if you’ve been a woman all along. Dawn insisted she had been born intersexual, so the procedure at the hospital had merely corrected the condition that had kept her from having children. She had always been female, she said. Her husband, to whom she remained devoted despite his bouts of schizophrenia and spousal abuse, later confessed that the baby had been his by another relationship. Dawn died in 2000, with her loving daughter, Nastasha, by her side. The story slipped into the realm of fable in Charleston, as so many stories do in that place, changing a little with each new retelling of it.
Readers of Tales of the City will wonder if Dawn Simmons had in some way served as inspiration for Anna Madrigal, the transgender landlady at 28 Barbary Lane. Yes and no. Dawn had certainly opened my writer’s imagination to the possibility of gender fluidity, an idea that still bordered on the fantastic back then. But Anna’s generous, expansive, mystical spirit—her voice, if you will—would eventually come from somewhere else entirely. Somewhere much closer to home.
THERE WAS A legend in Charleston at the time—and still is, I presume—that Edgar Allan Poe’s last completed poem, “Annabel Lee,” was inspired by a beautiful Sullivan’s Island girl named Annabel Lee Ravenel who had stolen Poe’s heart when he was an enlisted man stationed at Fort Moultrie in the 1820s. “I was a child and she was a child, / In this kingdom by the sea.” Annabel Lee, however, had a serious case of consumption and a disapproving father, so it ended badly. “Her highborn kinsmen came / And bore her away from me, / To shut her up in a sepulcher / In this kingdom by the sea.” That was all it took for me to head out to Sullivan’s Island, a community of aristocratic beach cottages, to poke around in the palmettos in search of Annabel’s final resting place. I don’t know why I thought I’d find a “sepulcher” that no one else had noticed in the past 150 years, but that’s the kind of romantic I was.
And that’s the kind of romantic who spotted his dream man from the staircase at Miss Beth’s studio one balmy spring day in 1971. The shop was full of browsing tourists. He was flipping through etchings in a box, when his eyes swept upward and pinned me on the staircase like the clean blue beam of a spotlight. I don’t remember where I was heading that afternoon, but I stopped heading there immediately. I went down to the shop and made brazen small talk about Miss Beth’s pastels with him. He was one of those leonine blonds with five-o’clock shadow and furred forearms, but I realized, with a rapidly deflating heart, that he was there with a beautiful woman. She was roughly his age—thirtyish I guessed—with sleek dark hair and a bourbon-and-honey voice. She touched his arm as she spoke to me.
“Do you live in this marvelous place?”
I told her, somewhat proudly, that I did. Just upstairs.
She exchanged a look with the man. Lucky boy.
They struck me as the most sophisticated people I had ever met. They may well have been at that point. They were New Yorkers, actors who had driven up from Atlanta where they were rehearsing a Chekhov play at the Alliance Theatre. Even their names evoked glamor: Curt Dawson and Barbara Caruso, the cowboy and the heiress. We chattered away at length about things I don’t remember now, but the end result was an invitation to join them on a tour of Middleton Plantation.
Middleton is on the upper reaches of the Ashley River and boasts the oldest landscaped gardens in America. Its stately brick manor house and rolling terraced lawns lent a distinctly theatrical air to our outing. We were a jolly threesome for most of the afternoon, except for a moment when we entered a boxwood maze and Barbara was briefly separated from us. It was then that Curt turned and gave me a private smile, leaving me with the distinct impression that I was about to be kissed. (I just did a search and found there is no such maze at Middleton Plantation today. Maybe it was removed in the last forty years, or maybe my memory, a theatrical beast in itself, had constructed the perfect set for my first love story. That happens a fair amount. I can say for sure that Curt and I were alone amid some greenery and that his faded-denim eyes seemed, ever so briefly, to be asking me something.)
I was still unkissed when they headed back to Atlanta. Curt and Barbara seemed intimate in the way that only a couple would be, so I doused my hopes and said goodbye to them. Anyway, wasn’t it supposed to be hard to tell the sexuality of actors? You could make the wrong assumption based on their openness, their dramatic demeanor. I might have been downhearted if Barbara hadn’t said something in a (seemingly) offhanded way just before they drove off down Tradd Street.
“Did Curt tell you he played Donald in Boys in the Band?”
THREE DAYS LATER a letter arrived from Curt. It was easily the most exciting letter I had ever received. His stationery was the color and texture of a brown paper bag, and his name—that studly cowboy name—was boldly printed at the top in black military stenciling. It was masculinity itself. He said that he and Barbara had enjoyed their time with me in Charleston and would like to invite me to the opening night of Three Sisters in Atlanta. I could stay with him at his apartment, he said.
His apartment. Not our apartment.
I asked the city desk editor for a long weekend and drove down to Atlanta in a state of giddy anticipation. Curt’s place was in an apartment house on the edge of Piedmont Park, standard-issue digs for itinerant actors. The building was the color of dried blood, a charmless brick hulk from the forties, but spring was exploding across the street in a riot of pale-green buds and pink dogwoods. (Were they actually pink? I don’t remember for sure. They felt pink.) The moment needed theme music, so I found some on the radio: “If” by Bread, a love song so bubbly it might have been carbonated.
Curt gave me those blue eyes and a hug as soon as I arrived, then hustled me down the hallway to Barbara’s apartment. Look who’s here, darling. There was another hug and some laughter and a few cups of tea before they left together for last-minute business at the theater. The next time I saw them they were onstage, looking supernaturally gorgeous in costume. She wore a dark tailored satin gown that gleamed as she moved. He was in a brown flannel uniform with two rows of brass buttons that rose along the V of his torso—or, at least, helped to create it. I remember how it felt to watch Curt striding across the stage in shiny black boots that reached almost to his knees.
There was a cast party in Curt’s apartment after the play. I remember that party with more clarity than the lovemaking that finally took place when the last of the revelers had said good night. There was everything in that room: young and old, male and female, gay and straight and who-knows-what, and they all seemed to adore one another as they slouched on sofas and passed the warm wine and made rueful jokes about their romantic disasters. And every one of them, the beautiful Barbara included, seemed to accept, without a scrap of discernible judgment, that I belonged in that room with Curt. It was then that I saw how life could be if you let it happen. It was a revelation to me, though I was hardly the first queerling to find his heart in the midst of a theater troupe. My fellow San Franciscan Harvey Milk, who, like me, had served as an officer in the Navy and voted for Barry Goldwater for president, was said to have thrown off his uptight shackles when he toured as a producer with the cast of Hair. That would certainly do the job nicely.
When Curt and I were alone after the party, I asked him about the page he had torn from a glossy magazine and taped to the wall of his bathroom. It was an advertisement that featured a man shaving.
“Why do you have it there?” I asked.
He held my chin in his hand and gave me a don’t-be-silly look. “Because he’s beautiful.”
Then he took my hand and led me into the bedroom.
THE HARDEST THING to grasp about this new adventure was that a woman could approve of it. Most of the women I had known in the South were prone to referring to homosexuality as “such a waste.” Barbara not only knew what was happening between me and Curt but gave it her wholehearted blessing. The three of us drove to the mou
ntains of North Georgia and rented a little cabin in the woods. Barbara had her own bedroom, of course, but the rest of the time we were a jolly threesome, and it was glorious to have a witness to our bliss. Sometimes she and Curt would exchange brief, knowing glances that I took to be rooted in old jokes and shared memories. Once, when gathering fallen branches for our fireplace, Barbara skipped ahead of us chanting merrily, “Gather ye faggots while ye may.” She was teasing him about me, but it wasn’t at all malicious. She wanted her old friend to find love.
At least that’s how I read it, because I wanted that, too, so badly. I had decided that Curt was perfect for me, the ideal companion I had always needed. I’m pretty sure he had not decided that about me, but he was gentle and funny and made me feel like the only other person in the world. That Bread song had now become our song whenever I wanted to summon that weekend in the woods.
Before spring was over he wrote me from New York on that sexy stationery and told me about the new play he was doing, the new soap. I combed his words for some tiny clue that he couldn’t live without me, but I sensed a de-escalation of ardor, the breezy banter of one friend writing another. Which is terrifying when you’re determined to be in love. I had no choice but to call him in New York and feel him out on the subject. “Oh darling,” he said. “I promise you’ll get over this. You’re just a young queer and I’m an old one.” That made no sense to me whatsoever, since I was twenty-seven and he was just thirty-two. “We’re going to be chums forever,” he added.
Ouch.
We were chums forever, or as close as we could get. I visited him in New York, and he visited me later in my new home in San Francisco. I remember how proud I felt when I discovered him in a copy of After Dark magazine in my Russian Hill laundromat and showed off his steely gaze and cupid’s-bow lips to all my friends. Once, on a visit to his hometown of Russell, Kansas, he sent me a comically dreary black-and-white postcard of a grain silo and a couple of pickup trucks. On the back he had written: Drove the Chevy to the levee, but the levee was dry. Love, Curt.