Stonewall (6 page)

That was not the only way he was different. His family, perhaps as awed as his contemporaries by his perky verbalness, tended to treat him like an adult—his mother, after all, was only fifteen years older, and her husband was a year younger than she. Jim was also an unusually beautiful boy, somewhat undersized and slight, but perfectly featured, an angelic blue-eyed blond so pretty that as a three-year-old he had been chosen to be a “Whitcomb baby” in the famous series of ads that illustrator John Whitcomb designed for Gerber baby foods.

Jim's prettiness would often be mistaken, especially as he got older, for blandness or passivity, the surface stereotype belying the complex inner reality. He was, in fact, an intricate mix of sweetness and dynamism, and his cherubic mask misrepresented an assertive temperament. “My sensibility was much more female than male,” he later said, “but my Gestalt was male.” Often called “girl” or “faggot,” he identified with neither, though his “gay spirit” (as he later liked to call it), his sense from an early age of being different, did make him compassionate toward other outsiders. Since most people need to hang on to the illusion that others are one-dimensional—that makes them
seemingly
more comprehensible and manageable—the complex Jim would all his life be puzzled by the way people reacted to him as if he were
either
(and only) a passive boy or a warrior male.

He was further set apart by illness. As a youngster he had rheumatic fever twice, and then leukemia, and didn't go to school for two years. Given massive doses of cortisone—the drug had just come on the market and not much was known about its properties—he blew up to three hundred pounds (and never did develop an Adam's apple). Bedridden for more than a year, he lived in a world apart, putting on little shows in his room with stick figures, endlessly watching television and listening to soap operas on the radio.

He became so adept at performing that after he recovered, and while still a teenager, he was chosen to emcee
The World Around Us
, a local television show devoted to current affairs. And his fluency in public speaking led to his election as president of the Rhode Island chapter of Junior Achievement, a national organization founded to teach teenagers about the wondrous workings of capitalism by encouraging them to set up their own little businesses (Jim ended up winning the National Junior Achievement sales award for a French dressing he created).

He was even pro-McCarthy. At the tender age of seven, Jim was signing people up for membership in the Committee of One Million, founded to support Senator McCarthy. He dutifully carried petitions from door to door soliciting members, and when the door sometimes got slammed in his face, he would complain to his mother—he describes himself as a “self-righteous priss” in those years—that such people were refusing to be “good Americans.” She finally put an end to his canvassing by ripping up the petitions—not out of political progressivism (she really had no politics) but out of some powerful fear of “making trouble.” “My whole subsequent political life,” Jim later said, “has been a form of atonement for my McCarthy petition.”

By the time Jim was in high school, his numerous activities had him crisscrossing Providence. To save money, he would hitchhike and before long discovered that blow jobs were one of the side benefits. Men would pick him up in their cars and, in exchange for sex, drive him anywhere he wanted to go. He soon found out that certain street corners were favored, and thereafter confined his hitching to those. He never feared getting into a car; as a survivor in his own family, he felt he had developed extrasensory instincts about potential danger.

But once, in his late teens, those instincts failed him. A truck driver, perhaps attracted to his long blond hair and delicate features, picked him up and drove him to a place where other truckers gathered. Together five of them raped him, brutally ripping open his rectum; then they left him, bleeding, on the side of the road. A cop car finally came along but, instead of being helpful, the cops ridiculed him as a “faggot” and told him that he had asked for it. He ended up in a hospital for several days.

In 1960, when still a junior in high school, Jim won early admission to Harvard. It seemed a dream come true; he had already vowed
never
to go to a local school, like Providence College or Rhode Island College, never to become “the working-class kid stuck in a trap.” But then reality hit: His family simply couldn't afford the
Harvard tuition, and somehow nobody, neither his teachers nor his parents, suggested that he apply for scholarship money. Crushed, Jim, aged sixteen, decided to quit high school and become a priest.

As a moralistic, at times self-righteous young man, he was attracted to the do-gooding part of a priest's life, but had never been a fully convinced believer or felt certitude about the validity of Catholic dogma. The particular order he chose had been founded in the nineteenth century by Isaac Hecker (a baker at the transcendentalist community Brook Farm, who had later become a priest), and among its glamorous celebrants were the two “show-business priests,” Father Norman O'Connor (“the jazz priest”) and Father Elwood Kaiser (who produced movies for television and Hollywood). Given the order's showy tolerance for nonconformity, it seemed to Jim—in his own words, “a precocious, smart-assed” young man—just the right place for him. But as it turned out, only certain kinds of nonconformity were tolerated, which Jim—in some ways deeply innocent—was slow to discover.

Though he had gotten his fair share of blow jobs while hitchhiking across Providence, Jim only kissed a man for the first time when visiting New York City during the summer following his first year in seminary. Soon after that momentous occasion came another. At a poetry reading, he fell in love on the spot with the poet himself and went to bed with him—only to discover, when back in the seminary the next day, that he had caught crabs. Not that he had any idea what the squiggly little moving dots on his body were, or where they had come from; in his naïveté, he went to the head of the seminary to ask him about the strange visitation. The head, who had been a marine chaplain, sternly told Jim to shave every hair off his body—and would say no more.

But Jim's English teacher, with whom he had gotten friendly (and who was himself homosexual and would later leave the order), took Jim aside and tried to warn him that he was on dangerous ground. He explained that two members of the order had recently petitioned to be ordained as openly homosexual priests—and had not only been turned down, but had been thrown out. Something like a homosexual panic had ensued in the order, he warned Jim, and the issue had become extremely sensitive. Just how sensitive, Jim soon found out.

Another seminarian, angry at Jim for having made fun of his tiny penis in the showers, reported to the authorities that Jim had pictures of nude men in his desk. As indeed he did. Called in by the ex-marine chaplain to explain, Jim said he found the pictures “aesthetically pleasing.
” Was he a homosexual? the chaplain demanded. Yes, Jim said, he thought he was—but added that he saw no conflict between that and becoming a priest. Like Craig Rodwell, Jim had been brought up to believe that if you were honest, all would turn out well. He now learned otherwise. The chaplain told him he would have to leave the seminary at once, and gave him fifteen dollars for bus fare back home.

Jim was stunned and humiliated; he had become used to being treated like a winner. And as a winner, he refused to believe that his feelings were “sinful” or that his relationship with God had in any way been compromised. He was very clear about that, indeed had always been clear about that: He
knew
when he had done wrong and he had never felt that way about his sexuality. Telling his parents, however, was quite another matter. Sex was not something discussed openly in his house (though years later, when Jim did tell his mother that he was gay, she was supportive, only asking that he not inform his stepfather, whose uncle Freddy, a transvestite, was already more than the family could handle). So Jim said something vague to his mother about having decided that seminary was “not right” for him after all. And then he did what he had wanted to do all along: He went to Harvard.

Not as a matriculating student, but to live with two friends of his from East Providence whose families
had
been wealthy enough to pay their tuition. Jim simply moved into their room in Adams House and started sitting in on classes. It was a poignant time: He got close to becoming part of something he had long aspired to, yet he remained at a distance from it—an auditor, not a full participant. What made it all bearable was falling in love. He met a man who did promotional work for the Phoenix Theater (in the early sixties, among the most innovative and prestigious of theatrical companies) and, at the man's urging, decided to move to New York to be with him.

Jim arrived in the Big Apple in 1961—the same year Ray Rivera, aged eleven, left his grandmother's apartment and headed up to Times Square. Jim's excitement about starting a new life soon dissipated: The man he had followed to New York, it turned out, already had a live-in lover. He did at least make good on his promise to get Jim a job with the Phoenix, placing him in the subscription department; from there Jim quickly earned a promotion to stage manager and bit player with the Phoenix Traveling Theater, a troupe that performed in high schools. It may not have been the new life Jim had anticipated, but the world of the theater would in fact become exactly that for him. He soon moved in with two gay men connected with the Phoenix
who were eager to share expenses on a West Eighty-seventh Street apartment, found that he could live on his fifty-dollar-a-week salary by restricting his diet to pizza and Coca-Cola, and resolved, true to the “show-business” Catholic order that had kicked him out, that he would become a Broadway star.

FOSTER

T
he Gunnison home on Hampshire Circle, in the wealthy New York suburb of Bronxville, was notable for its grand staircase, its squash court, its sunken garden (which could be filled with water during winter for ice skating), and its butlers' rooms—complete with a Filipino butler named Dabby. Foster Gunnison, Sr., had built the house during the Great Depression. He had inherited some money, and on his own had made a good deal more in his double career as lighting designer and builder. The lighting career had come first. A pioneer in the use of glass brick and carved structural glass—indeed, in the whole concept of what is today known as “architectural lighting”—he had started the firm of Cox, Nostrand and Gunnison when he was twenty-three. It specialized in Art Deco design and handled many of the largest installations of the 1920s and early 1930s, including the President's office and Cabinet Room in the White House, the Empire State Building, the Center Theater (now demolished) in Rockefeller Center, the Chrysler Building, the Waldorf-Astoria, Radio City Music Hall, the RCA Building, and the Daily News Building.
¹

In the following decade, Gunnison launched a second career. Impressed with Henry Ford's mass-production techniques, he decided to apply them to building prefab houses in modular parts that could be shipped anywhere and reassembled. He bought an old furniture factory in New Albany, Indiana, used his designer skills to turn out inexpensive, assembly-line homes, and applied his sales skills to set up a national dealership system. Before long he had sold enough Gunnison Homes to build a modern plant; he eventually became known as the founder of the prefabricated-housing industry in America.

Handsome, driven, gifted, he married a woman whose beauty and surface charms were a match for his own, though her more modest lineage was not. Whereas Caroline McAllaster's family had been in
the United States a mere three generations, the first Gunnison, Hugh, had arrived in Boston in 1631, and had ultimately become a judge and a deputy to the Massachusetts General Court. The succeeding four generations of Gunnisons were shipwrights, carpenters (one served in the revolution, under John Paul Jones) and farmers, giving way in the fifth generation to ministers and army officers, and in the sixth to Herbert Foster Gunnison, who became publisher in the late nineteenth century of the
Brooklyn Eagle
, the distinguished newspaper that had earlier been edited by Walt Whitman.

Though Foster Sr. had little regard for Caroline's family (twenty years later he characterized her father, with derisive exaggeration, as a man who “never did a tap of work until he was thirty years old because he spent all of his time gambling”), he and Caroline do seem to have been in love when they married in 1918. But by the time Foster Jr. was born, in 1925, the ardor had decidedly cooled. Intensely preoccupied with his work, Foster Sr. had never had a deep investment in family life, and from the early years of the marriage had gotten involved in a series of side affairs—not all of them, apparently, with women. Both his wife and son eventually came to suspect that Foster Sr. was a bisexual and that his live-in “assistant” down at New Albany was in actuality a male lover.

At any rate, Foster Sr. was neither a devoted husband nor a consistently caring father. He spent an increasing amount of time living apart from his family, absorbed in supervising his new business in Indiana. By the early thirties, Caroline and Foster Jr. were, except for occasional visits, essentially living alone in Bronxville during the winters and at Gypsy Trail Club, an exclusive residential community outside Carmel, New York, during the summers.

Foster Jr. did, in the 1940s, spend several long vacation periods with his father at New Albany, where he was proudly exhibited to Senior's friends and business associates as the forceful, super-achieving chip off the old block that the inhibited, troubled youngster was decidedly not. Moreover, the father's overemphatic doting on his son in public contrasted sharply with the stern lectures he gave Junior in private about the boy's assorted shortcomings—lectures that alternated with constant admonitions to those “moderate habits of living” Foster Sr. had trouble incorporating into his own life.