Hold Tight Gently Read Free Page B

job nearly full-time while going to school and could “barely remember classes. A time that should have been joyous was not.” Part of the problem was that it felt “DEVASTATING . . . to plop down into completely unfamiliar territory.” He felt like a “social cripple. I discovered that the way I did things—dressed, ate, talked, etc.—was NOT the way others did them and I got very embarrassed and shy and insecure.” Mike perhaps overstated his devastation—as any drama queen would. He excelled at school and, thanks to a few of his professors, became a lifelong, voracious reader.
    In his senior year, Mike came out to his family. His brother, Barry, took the news in stride and they remained close and supportive. The news was received badly by the rest of his family—Mike and his father didn’t speak for two years. It hadn’t helped that Mike had also declared that he was a nonbeliever, an atheist. His deeply religious mother, despite having thoroughly internalized the Baptist view of homosexuality as sickness and sin, nonetheless reiterated her love for Michael (“You can expect that to remain steady, regardless”) and even wrote him that she would “respect your right to believe what you choose to believe.” Younger sister Linda maintained a cool distance, cowed perhaps by the vehemence of the family dynamics.
    Michael had dated girls in high school and had several close female friends; they told him that his gentleness and respect attracted them (he would soon in fact become a pronounced, outspoken feminist, later on somewhat campily branding himself a “lesbian feminist”). But he’d never “done anything” with a woman, unless kissing Maria Lingleyinside the abandoned A&W Root Beer warehouse counted. The girl he dated longest was Lisa Gaylord, and she later explained to Mike “the agony” she went through because he never made any sexual moves on her: she blamed herself for not being pretty or smart or talented enough; later in life Mike apologized to her and to another young woman he’d dated for “fanning such flames of self-doubt.” When his parents suggested that “before locking himself into a dead-end lifestyle” he seek counseling, he dutifully presented himself for the eight free sessions the university provided, but no spark of sexual desire for women resulted. He was a confirmed Kinsey “6,” exclusively attracted to his own gender—a status he’d proudly embrace throughout his life.
    Following graduation, Mike moved to New York with the goal of becoming a singer, a cabaret performer, but he arrived with minimal financial reserves. After paying his first month’s rent on a dingy apartment, he had a mere $20 to his name. He haunted the employment agencies, but it was the late 1970s: New York had been hit by the national economic downturn and Mike’s hard-earned secretarial skills failed to land him a job. When the twenty dollars went, he made the practical decision to head up to Times Square—then a hustling mecca—where he gave some guy a blow job for $4 (he didn’t feel in a position to haggle).
    That enabled him to eat, but he began to feel “really helpless, like ready to cry,” fearful of “a nervous breakdown.” He’d initially seen the move to New York as a gutsy risk, but relocating to a very tough city to break into a very tough profession—during a recession, no less—now seemed like a mistake. In his early twenties, broke and jobless, he was also without friends, let alone contacts in the entertainment field. While still in college, he’d done a few auditions and had been told that he “had the stuff to make it”; he’d even had a nibble from a manager that didn’t pan out.
    But Mike had a tenacious streak and an internal strength that belied his scrawny looks, histrionic ways, and a less than validating upbringing. He refused to throw in the towel and crawl back to the Midwest—not even when he was awakened by a rat crawling over him in bed one night, or