Hold Tight Gently Read Free

recalls, “and he wouldn’t let you stand there feeling alone and irrelevant. He sensed despair somehow and didn’t turn away. . . . There he was, with those hands waving around, perfectly articulate, telling me things wouldn’t be okay, but eventually I’d get out of Hamilton somehow .” She never forgot his kindness.
    But Mike’s detractors in high school far outnumbered his admirers. He was frequently bullied, baited as a “faggot,” and at least once pissed on in the locker room after gym class by a circle of male classmates. All of which made Mike feel self-conscious and insecure about his appearance. He avoided all mirrors, refusing to look at his own image. As a result of the constant harassment, he attempted suicide twice before the age of twenty-one. Remarkably, he somehow managed, despite excessive chores and excessive ridicule, to maintain a straight-A average throughout high school.
    He was not only bright, but exuberantly articulate and musically gifted. From an early age, he idolized Barbra Streisand as “the most brilliant artist of the time” and especially appreciated her “willingness to be awkward and gawky if needed to get the sound out.” Bette Midler was another favorite, and Julie Andrews—he sang in her register. He dismissed both Neil Diamond and Elton John as “fake” when expressing pain. A friend told Mike that he sang in “the same sweet vein as Barry Manilow—but was better.” As early as high school, Mike started to dream about becoming a cabaret singer, a dream that his married music teacher did his best to sabotage: when Mike was a junior, the teacher tried to rape him, and when Mike successfully fought him off, the man retaliated by writing denunciatory letters about him to try to thwart his efforts to get a music scholarship.
    Mike’s first choice for college was Boston University. Though he’d never before traveled out of the sixty-mile radius around Hamilton,Ohio, he flew to Boston for a voice audition. Sitting nervously on the hard bench outside the fourth-floor audition room, he suddenly had to go to the bathroom. To his astonishment, all the stalls were occupied and several men were waiting in line. It suddenly dawned on him that they were there to relieve themselves in several senses. Later, a jubilant Mike would claim an epiphany: “I knew. I knew I was where my destiny was bringing me.” When his turn came to enter a stall, his heart was pounding.
    The walls of the stall were covered with gay graffiti—“meet me here 7-8-73.” Two large holes had been drilled between the stalls and Mike became aware that through the holes “two eyeballs on either side” were looking at him. Then a mouth appeared where an eyeball had been. Mike immediately got an erection and started to sweat. A note on toilet paper arrived from underneath the stall: “STICK IT THROUGH.” He did—and instantly ejaculated. As he later wrote, “My body was at peace for the first time ever.” He sang his heart out at the audition and won a full vocal scholarship to BU. If he was fated to be Boston’s Delmore Knight, he told himself, that was just fine.
    Despite its auspicious start, Mike’s first year in Boston was the most difficult of his life to date—at one point he told his parents he was going to give up school and return home (“I can’t take it”). He stayed, but his triple adjustment—to college, to the Northeast, and to being gay—brought him close to despair. He wrestled with thoughts that “the Bible would damn me if I admitted my [homosexual] feelings to myself.” But he decided—bravely, given the limited support systems in those years for a young person coming to terms with a tainted sexual orientation—that no sin was “more deadly than battling the self.” By his last year in college, he’d become conscious of “how wrong society was” about homosexuality, a discovery that made him “question everything. ” It was, he later said, “a very painful