The Gay Metropolis Read Free Page A

and the women would just
swoon
over me. All this romantic music that came pouring out of my head and heart!”
    ACROSS THE RIVER from Kern, Otis Bigelow lived in Manhattan. He, too, would never think of himself the same way again after the summer of 1942. Bigelow turned twenty-two that June. A striking native of Exeter, New Hampshire, where his father had been a master at Phillips Exeter Academy, Bigelow was an only child.
    After his father died, his mother sent him away to Rumsey Hall, a British-style school in Washington, Connecticut, where “Sir, yes, sir” was the required form and the students wore black ties to dinner.
    At twelve Bigelow was already having sex with his classmates, but they didn’t think their pastime had anything to do with being “gay” or “homosexual,” words that they had never heard spoken. “In my world, in the thirties, it simply did not exist,” Bigelow recalled.
    Like millions before him, and millions after him, Bigelow believed hewas simply going through “a stage. … It was just friends, you know, doing something for a friend. There was no masculinity or femininity involved. I thought for many years that it was fine, and that it was a substitute for girls. I always thought I would get married. I went out with girls and loved girls; they were interested in me and I in them and we got along beautifully.”
    His roommate at Rumsey, an admirer of Tarzan, taught Bigelow how to masturbate. “He loved to go off into the woods and tie me to a tree. Then I would say, ‘Oh, Tarzan, Tarzan, where are you?’ And he would come swinging through the trees and carry me away.”
    In 1934, Bigelow transferred to Exeter; two years later, his mother died, and he was devastated.
    At Exeter, “There were a couple of guys who could actually see through me, both of whom I think turned out to be totally straight. They would say, ‘Want to come down to my room?’ And I would sneak down after lights out, we would fuck each other between the legs. That’s what friends are for! It was just a friendly but mechanical act. More fun than doing it by yourself or doing it with a pillow—or a milk bottle. We tried everything.” Later, in New York, he learned the forties slang for this kind of primitive sex: “first-year Princeton.”
    Once, at a bus station away from school, he was a little more adventurous. “I had gone to the movies and had taken the bus back and went into the john. There was a nice-looking fellow standing there and he took one look at me and took me into one of the booths and stood me on the john. I thought it was wonderful, but I had a terrible attack of conscience afterwards. I went home and scrubbed myself. I had never heard of such a thing.”
    Bigelow loved the theater, and he played all the leading ladies at Exeter until his voice began to change. In
Androcles and the Lion
, he was Lavinia and he had to kiss the handsome captain on the cheek. He told the director he didn’t want to do it, but the director insisted that he follow the script. “So I did. It was a strange feeling.”
    When he graduated from Exeter in 1938, he ignored his uncle’s admonition to go to college. Instead, he moved to New York, where he hoped to become an actor. While performing summer stock in Rye Beach, New Hampshire, Bigelow had met Gordon Merrick, an actor who had just graduated from Princeton. Bigelow and Merrick used to kiss, but nothing more. Although they shared an apartment when they reached New York, Bigelow was still planning to marry a woman. And quite quickly Gordon decided that he was “very into
not
being gay,” Bigelow recalled.
    Three decades later, Merrick wrote
The Lord Won’t Mind
, one of the first gay novels to become a best-seller in the seventies, and he modeled one of its beautiful young men after Bigelow. * The other man sharing their apartment was Richard Barr, another