Hold Tight Gently Read Free Page A

period; I didn’t know what to believe or who I was.” By the time he graduated, he’d declared himself an atheist and written to friends and family back home that society, not him, “had a long way to go” toward accepting gay people. In this—as would prove the case with much else—Mike had rapidly jumped to an “avant-garde” position.
    Whatever Mike did, he did with zest and intensity—including the pursuit of sex. He would later say that his “shamed-based” sexual fantasies—“quick and dirty”—had been formed “pre-Stonewall.” Fromfreshman year on at BU he haunted the fourth-floor men’s room in the music building, then broadened out into the gay baths and gay bars (never his favorite—he disliked alcohol, felt that contact took too long, and he was too horny). Initially, he let others suck him off. The first time he reversed roles, he put Saran Wrap—he’d grown up in a germaphobic home—around the other man’s cock, but he never took to sucking and professed to being somewhat puzzled and repulsed by oral sex. It didn’t help that he early on got gonorrhea of the throat and ever after had a recurring fear of contracting a syphilis chancre on his vocal chords—a terrifying prospect for someone planning a singing career.
    He discovered the orgiastic gay male bathhouses while still in college; one of his first partners there told him that he was “built to get fucked,” positioned Mike to sit on his erect cock—and voilà! Mike had a moment of “sheer revelation.” That same night he got fucked five times and decided that he’d unquestionably found his sexual destiny. From then on, he made a habit of announcing to a potential trick, within the first few moments of their encounter, that he was a “stone bottom.” But unlike some other bottoms, Mike never became interested in fist fucking; he heard too many stories of anal fissures and serious injuries. In New York City a few years later, for the first and last time he fisted somebody at their insistence—and promptly threw up; “it was so gross to me.”
    As an undergraduate Mike started to read gay-themed novels, especially Edmund White and Andrew Holleran, and plays, in particular, Tennessee Williams. In his spare time he was practical enough to pick up some secretarial skills and several part-time jobs, realizing that he had to prepare for the hard-knock life of trying to make it post-college as a singer. He stayed shy, though, of gay politics, then in its infancy—the Stonewall riots had occurred only in 1969 and the modern gay rights movement still had few troops.
    One day Mike picked up a copy of the alternative weekly the Boston Phoenix and was astonished to read about an organized gay and lesbian group on the BU campus that was planning a picnic by the Charles River. On the given day, he circled warily near the picnic site and was spotted by a member of the gay group, who called over, “I think you’re looking for us.” (Mike fit the “loose-wristed” stereotypical view of what a gay man was supposed to look like.) Three months later, Mike, verbal,smart, and archly, campily funny, was elected president of the group. But that first foray into gay politics proved disillusioning. As is often the case with political groups, especially college ones, people would sign up to help out on a committee or at an event and then not show up at all or fail to follow through. This ran directly counter to Mike’s highly organized temperament. He’d drive himself, even under difficult circumstances, to complete whatever he’d promised to do; he had little patience for sunshine soldiers. Yet his overall experience with the BU group convinced him that politics was antithetical to his personality. He’d dutifully march in the gay pride parade once a year, but as an individual, not as a member of any group.
    Looking back on his college years later in life, Mike would describe himself as “paralyzed by regret.” He’d had to hold down a