“You’re better off here. They don’t let you sass your teachers there. They make you drop and do push-ups.”
Mr. Geer was smiling at me with wry affection. I realized that he actually liked me, and, even more amazingly, that I liked him. This man thrived on open combat, the vigorous clash of ideas. That’s what he believed a university was all about. He loved the fact that we could challenge each other and still be friends.
There was something more to it than that, but I would not figure that out until fifteen years later, when Mr. Geer looked me up in San Francisco. His wife of thirty years had died two years earlier, and he had since made a practice of flying to California for occasional fortnights at Esalen, the loosey-goosy New Age spa retreat above the cliffs at Big Sur. “I can finally be myself there,” he told me. “It’s a great relief.”
We were drinking wine on the deck of my rooftop studio on Russian Hill. Below us, in the amber light of evening, there were cargo ships gliding out to sea through the Golden Gate. I was proud of my little home—a place so miniscule that I called it a “pentshack”—and I was thrilled when I realized why Mr. Geer had sought me out again. He was in his early sixties, I in my early thirties. I had been an openly gay writer long enough for the gossip to circulate widely in North Carolina.
“I’m proud of you,” he said, lifting his glass.
I thanked him with a smile. “Took me long enough, didn’t it?”
“You and me both,” he said.
And, just like that, he came out to me. It occurred to me then that we had both found it easier to camouflage our queerness on the fringes of academia—he on the left, I on the right. Our constant political grandstanding had been a distraction from a deeper, more difficult truth, the one that had to be hidden at any cost.
SOMEWHERE IN THE middle of my freshman year, I launched a column in The Daily Tar Heel called “A View from the Hill.” It was meant to be funny, but, like most comedic efforts created by conservatives, it wasn’t. I didn’t know that at the time. I thought I had created a side-splitting hybrid of Art Buchwald and William F. Buckley. Of course I didn’t jump into serious right-wingery right away. I needed to feel out my audience first, test the waters. The early columns were mostly satiric parables about campus life. In the very first one I lampooned the dean of men, calling him Batdean in homage to the new TV show that was all the rage in the dorms.
Later, I expanded my impertinence to the dean of women, Kitty Carmichael (whom I dubbed Kitty Galore in a naughty nod to James Bond), because of her rigid enforcement of the university’s Carolina Code. The Carolina Code required students to be “Carolina ladies and gentlemen at all times.” For the boys, that meant blue jeans were never worn on campus. The girls, poor things, could never be seen in shorts, even when leaving gym class; so they had to wear their London Fogs (they all had London Fogs) when crossing the quads. With their pale calves winking below their pale raincoats (yes, they all had pale calves), they looked like a flock of flashers. In that heyday of panty raids, hordes of slobbering men could descend on the women’s dorms, demanding that panties be thrown out the window, and the administration would look the other way. That was just boys being boys. But gym shorts? No way.
I found this absurd, and said so in “A View from the Hill,” where I invented a coed who had been charged, posthumously, with unCarolinaladylike behavior when she fell to her death from her third-floor dorm window . . . in a pair of gym shorts! She had been attending to a plant in her window box—“mulching her nandina”—when she lost her balance. You would think that such a fearless defender of women’s rights would be progressive in other regards, but you would be so wrong.
My conservatism found its most strident voice in Student Legislature, where I railed against Socialists and peaceniks in the Students for a Democratic Society and the National Student Association. When the Student Legislature called for a boycott of local segregated restaurants and motels, I sponsored a counterresolution defending such establishments on the grounds that the concept of free enterprise entitled them to run their businesses as they saw fit. It was very much the same argument you hear today from bakers who refuse to bake cakes for same-sex weddings. I didn’t stoop so low as to quote the Bible, but plenty of people did in those days, citing religious reasons for the races to remain apart. My “brave stance” against these “radical social agitators” even won the praise of a television commentator in Raleigh, an outspoken archconservative who was fond of saying, on his nightly broadcast, that nowadays UNC stood for the University of Negroes and Communists.
So who was this Armistead Maupin, Jr.? It’s easy enough to say that he was still angling for the love of his father, because, obviously, he was. But he was twenty years old and out in the world, and he should have known better. I have a hard time liking him now, though I do remember as senior-class vice president, he worked to have a bronze statue erected on campus to his hero Thomas Wolfe, another restless underclassman who had grown up to write novels, and who, incidentally, had lived in Asheville when my mother lived there as a girl. And I still relate to a sentimental young Armistead who greeted the arrival of spring on campus with a sappy song called “Today” by The New Christy Minstrels, or that song from The Fantasticks about being “a tender and callow fellow.” He was callow all right, but his heart was still closed to the possibility of real tenderness. The lid was locked down for fear of what might escape.
Or so it seemed, until someone named Roger Davis came along in my senior year.
Roger was a fellow student legislator who lived in one of the big new high-rise dormitories on the edge of campus. He had discovered that such places were dehumanizing, so he had renamed his dorm “Maverick House” and ordered Carolina-blue cowboy hats for the residents to wear at ball games and pep rallies, turning them into a fraternity of sorts, and becoming, in the process, a charismatic leader. His smooth Frankie Avalon hair and soulful, deep-set eyes enchanted everyone, male or female, who ever spent time in his presence. He seemed to like me, too. Sometimes, after legislative sessions, we would deliberately walk together across campus, talking about everything and nothing, until I headed off to my apartment and he returned to his brothers at Maverick House. I was in love with him, I suppose, in my own crippled way, but I never dared tell him how I felt.
News traveled slowly in those days, so I didn’t hear about the accident until the morning after it happened. The Daily Tar Heel posted photos of the charred carcass of the “death car” on the front page. The car had leapt the median strip near the Glen-Lennox Shopping Center, rolled over several times, torn through a four-by-four signpost, and, finally, struck a massive concrete abutment. Roger was still alive when they got him out, but not for long. This had been a “one-car accident,” the paper said tellingly, and the speedometer had been stuck at ninety miles per hour. That made no sense at all, since, despite his affection for cowboy hats, Roger wasn’t some car-crazy country boy. He was from Fort Lauderdale, the cosmopolitan beach town from Where the Boys Are.
The whole campus was rocked by the news. I attended a memorial service during which a toothy coed with a histrionic streak recited the famous lines from Romeo and Juliet: “and, when he shall die, / Take him and cut him out in little stars, / And he will make the face of heaven so fine / That all the world will be in love with night . . .” It was a beautiful sentiment, and a lot of people cried, but I resented the way she milked it so shamelessly. She sounded like a Miss America contestant performing in the Talent Competition, and I was sure she had come nowhere close to being Roger’s Juliet.
Afterward, I wandered aimlessly through the crunching brown leaves of late October as I tried to sort it out. The whole episode might have remained cloaked in official discretion had I not run across Chief Arthur J. Beaumont, the campus security officer, in my grief-addled ramble. Chief Beaumont was a stubby fire hydrant of a man who spewed blunt talk as freely as a hydrant spews water. He had been one of the first responders at the scene of the accident, he said, and it wa
sn’t an accident at all—it was suicide. “The kid was queer,” he added, as if that naturally explained it.
The awful part is: I wanted it to be true. I wanted Roger to have been like me. There were too many questions I could have asked but didn’t. Had Roger been caught in the act with someone? Had he left a note? Had he been tormented by an unspoken love for another man? I wasn’t deluded enough to think that I might be that man, but I wondered if someone out there was mourning him as intensely as I was, or at least in the same secret way. And what if I had told Roger how I felt about him? Could I have saved his life with my love? Could that moment have been the start of something unimaginably wonderful? Our own place in Fort Lauderdale after college, a life of manly tenderness in the ocean air?
In a daze, I left Chief Beaumont and went back to my apartment on Gimghoul Road, where I escaped into the welcome amnesia of an afternoon nap. The place was in the basement of an old townie couple’s bungalow, so there was plumbing that crisscrossed the ceiling, gurgling away whenever it pleased. I had embraced this design challenge by making a rustic wooden sign that said PIPE DREAM that I hung on the ivied wall outside the door. I never really called it that, though. The place had a typical apartment address—the house number paired with the letter “A”—so I dubbed it the A-Hole early on, and it stuck with all my friends.
It must have been a toilet flushing that stirred me. I lay there in bed, staring at the ceiling, until I heard footsteps on the path outside my little high-up window. Then the footsteps stopped for a moment as my visitor perused the PIPE DREAM sign. He issued a boyish chuckle before he rapped on the door.
I recognized that chuckle, so I hurried to the living room to open the door.
“Nice place,” said Roger, grinning at me as he gazed into the room. “Gee. See what you mean about those pipes.”
It took me a while to state the obvious. “I thought you were dead.”
“Stupid Tar Heel,” he said with a shrug. “They mixed me up with another Roger Davis. Guy over in Old East. I figured you’d want to know right away.”
He opened his arms to give me the hug I needed so badly. We stayed there for a long time, breathing in unison, chest to chest. I even dared to stroke the back of his head as I told him how glad I was to see him again, how I thought for sure I’d lost him forever, how I wanted to tell him, right now, what his friendship meant to me, because life could be short and cruel and love should never be left unspoken.
I held on to him until the sheer perfection of the moment compelled me, as it almost always does, to wake up.
I RECOUNTED THE story of this dream later that year, in an empty classroom where a panel of three professors sat solemnly behind a long desk. I came unprepared with notes of any kind. I just stood at a podium and spilled it all out as candidly as possible. I named Roger, of course, since everyone knew about his death, but I left out the part about Chief Beaumont and Roger’s possible suicide, and the part about me loving Roger and hoping against hope that he loved me back. I made it a story about unexpressed friendship and cruel fate and the redemptive power of dreams when all else fails. Without telling them the whole truth, I tapped into my wounded heart and let them see it for a full ten minutes, exactly.
That’s how I won the Mangum Medal for Oratory, the university’s oldest student award and the one of which I remain most proud to this day. It was my first real lesson in storytelling, in connecting intimately with an audience.
Let them see enough of the truth to make them believe you.
SIX
MY FATHER NEVER LIKED ME TO say I had flunked out of law school. He preferred to say dropped out, and, technically, both things were true. My grades had been mediocre at best during my first law term at Chapel Hill, where I had been president of my class, but the lone question on my Equity final exam struck me as too boring to examine for the next two hours, not to mention for the rest of my life. I had really been enjoying Fellini matinees at the Carolina Theatre for the past nine months and realized, in a flash of insight, that I wanted to keep on doing that. I wrote a now very quaint-sounding sentence in my bluebook—“My mind just blew”—then walked out of the classroom and thumbed home to Raleigh on the old two-lane blacktop. When I told Daddy I wouldn’t be coming to work in the law firm, he took it better than I had expected. “Oh, hell, son, you’re right. I don’t blame you. It is boring. I just thought you might liven up the office.” It was the nicest lie he ever told me, since I knew how much he loved his practice and how much his heart was breaking.
If one of Daddy’s dreams for me had just been dashed, at least I knew what the other one was. It was time to put on a uniform. The Vietnam War was at full tilt, so I could have been drafted at any time, but no one, myself included, liked the idea of me as an enlisted man at war, so I applied for Naval Officer Candidate School in Newport, Rhode Island. Actually, it was Mummie who applied, filling out the forms the way she had done for Camp Hemlock and Boy’s State. She worked quickly to save me from imminent death in a foreign jungle, assembling my undergraduate honors and most respectable references. When she gave me the finished forms to sign, I noticed they had asked me to check the diseases in my medical history. My mother had checked only one: Tonsillitis. All the other boxes were empty, including Cancer, Epilepsy, Vertigo, and Homosexual Tendencies. If that phrase had given her the slightest pause, she didn’t show it. Or maybe she figured that a question left unasked of me wasn’t really a lie in the grand scheme of things. Either that or she believed it wasn’t pertinent to the present. No different, really, from the tiny scar at the top my butt crack where there had once been a gland for preening my feathers.
I WAS ACCEPTED to officers’ school in Newport, beginning in the fall. That meant I had a summer to kill and the chance to make pocket money. It made perfect sense to apply for a writing job at WRAL, the television station whose commentator (and executive vice president) had praised my conservative activism at Chapel Hill.
The station was red brick and low slung, surrounded by landscaped grounds. Out back, behind the parking lot, there was an enormous public azalea garden amid a stand of tall pine trees. The garden was the pride and joy of old Mr. Fletcher, the station owner, whose grandson, Freddy, had once starred with me in my backyard productions. On the day I reported for work, the parking lot was oppressively hot, but I lingered for a moment in the VW to let Jim Morrison finish singing “Light My Fire.” Looking back, it’s comical to think that the Doors were my soundtrack for that moment, considering the politics of my new boss. Hell, considering my own politics, not to mention my tenacious virginity. My fire had yet to be lit by anyone. I may have traveled through the sixties loving Dylan and Baez, the Beatles and the Mamas & the Papas, but I had somehow detached myself completely from the humanistic message at the core of their art. I was not making my own kind of music, as Mama Cass had so strongly advised; I was making someone else’s.
Inside the building I headed down an air-conditioned hallway past oversized color posters of the station’s newscasters, all of them, male and female, wearing wide smiles and carefully lacquered hair. At one point, through an open doorway, I caught a glimpse of the studio itself, an exotic jungle of cables and booms that led to a backdrop that said VIEWPOINT. I recognized it immediately, since my new boss performed against it every night. I was in showbiz now—or a form of it, at least—and this would be the first time anyone would pay me for being a writer.
I didn’t go directly to the newsroom. I wanted to thank the commentator for giving me the job, so I went to his office and stood in the door until he looked up from his typewriter. He wrote his own editorials, well-crafted little essays, really, that were designed to delight his fans and enrage his enemies. He had been a sportswriter when he was young and, later, city desk editor at the News and Observer, so he knew the ropes when it came to journalism. He was giving me a break, and I knew it. When he saw me, he stopped typing and smiled. It wasn’t the world’s best smile. His teeth were crooked, and his mouth hitched to one
side when he talked, causing a pearly residue to form in the one corner that I did my best to ignore. He was only in his forties then, but he had a certain old-timey courtliness that people found charming. He wore enormous black glasses that overwhelmed his face.
“Come in, Armistead. Have a seat. Good to have you aboard.”
He had been in the Navy himself, so, like my father, he was tickled by the notion that I would soon be heading off to service at sea.
I already had several family connections with him. His daughter Jane had been a friend of mine in high school. His wife, Dot, had recently approached my mother about organizing Wake County’s first SPCA with five thousand dollars left in an old lady’s will. There wasn’t a real shelter yet, just a farm out on Six Forks Road where stray animals were boarded until they could be placed, but my mother was determined to fix that. My father, in fact, had drawn up the incorporation papers.
All of this must have helped get me the job, but it was my college writing in The Daily Tar Heel that seemed to have done the trick. My new employer told me that afternoon that he saw me as the hope of the future, the natural heir to James Jackson Kilpatrick, the syndicated columnist in Richmond who would rise to fame a decade later as the right-wing side of “Point/Counterpoint” on 60 Minutes. I considered this a great compliment at the time, though I knew there was an element of charity in his praise. He was laying it on thick, because he didn’t want me to be ashamed of having failed abysmally at my legal career. I was going to be writer, he said, and a damn good one, and he was proud to be sending me down that road.
I was hired as a reporter in the newsroom, though I rarely appeared on camera—just the back of my head sometimes as I held a mic and asked probing questions at, say, a flower show or a Kiwanis Club meeting. Mimi was tickled to find me on television, since she had recently been moved from Grandpa Branch’s mahogany sleigh bed to a green cinder-block room at the Mayview Convalescent Home, where a small black-and-white set had become her portal to the world. Sometimes I visited her during the news hour, just so I could sit in front of the set with her and point to the back of my head and make her smile and say, “I declare, would you look at that?” one more time, as if the back of my head were the most amazing thing in the world.