Hold Tight Gently (2 page)

Essex’s temperament was considerably more guarded and enigmatic than Mike’s. A person of charismatic charm and mischievous guile, Essex could often be enchanting, but he keenly guarded his privacy and—while not at all prudish—persistently warded off those who probed for details about his personal attachments or the state of his health. He was so intent on protecting his inner life from unwanted scrutiny and so quick to react to any threat to his principles that some mistook this integrity for hauteur. His poetry, often autobiographical, makes it possible to map certain aspects of his inner life, yet I suspect that even if Essex had left behind a massive archive, it would most likely contain little about his intimate feelings and struggles.

For all these reasons, this book contains more personal information about Mike than about Essex; that reflects both the nature of their respective personalities and the kinds of material each left behind. Though they were very different from each other, I hold these two exceptional men in equal regard and have made an equal effort to bring their remarkable stories to life.

1

Before the Storm

S
oon after Mike Callen completed college at Boston University in 1977, he moved to New York City, and soon after that, he became ill with shigella—intestinal parasites. At first, he thought he’d gotten food poisoning from the Kentucky Fried Chicken stand on Forty-Second Street that he frequented. Trying to shrug off and explain persistent, exhausting bouts of diarrhea, he told himself that he’d always been more or less sickly, which was true: as a sensitive, scrawny youngster in Hamilton, Ohio, he’d gotten an ulcer in the fifth grade, a second one in the eighth grade, and yet a third in the eleventh. Then, during high school, he’d been hospitalized twice, once with mononucleosis and once with hepatitis.
¹

A tender, hyperactive child, Mike was playing canasta with some older family friends one day—cheating and winning, “screeching” (his description) with delight—when one of the women put down her cards, gave him a stern look, and said, “If you don’t watch out, Michael, you’re going to become one of those homosexuals.” He had no idea what that meant, but he caught the overtones of imminent doom and realized that the prediction was meant to frighten him. Did that explain, he asked himself, why he often felt nervous and was repeatedly cautioned about being too “animated”? At age eight, for instance, he twirled a baton at the head of a neighborhood parade with such
giddy glee that eyebrows were raised; and he remembered running into the house at a young age, “flapping his arms like a little sissy,” and his father slapping him hard across the face and yelling, “Don’t you
ever
do that again!”

The neighborhood lady’s use of the word “homosexual” piqued Mike’s curiosity and he decided to ask around. It turned out that everyone in the town of Hamilton knew that “homosexual” meant Delmore Knight, that “dirty old man” who hung around the Greyhound bus station and enticed young boys to do “nasty” things. Although Knight was said to have a doctorate from Oxford University and was even rumored to have won some academic prize, no one in Hamilton seemed to doubt that he deserved the regular beatings that a cadre of high school jocks dished out to him. Republican and evangelical, Hamilton was a Dixie border town known as well for its strict adherence to racial segregation. According to Jennifer Jackson, who went to high school with Mike, Hamilton was “a town with secrets, with a polite midwestern refusal to acknowledge how many were hurt and excluded,” exemplified by the crumbling Victorian Poor House Hill, which sat on a visible precipice, initially serving as a debtors’ prison, then an orphanage, then a home for the mentally ill—“a perfect storm of misery and entrapment.”
²

When Mike and his brother, Barry, a year older, were in their early teens, their parents decided the time had come to tell them about “the facts of life” (their younger sister, Linda, was exempted from the talk). The boys’ mother, Barbara Ann, was a part-time elementary school teacher and their father, Clifford, a factory worker at General Motors. Both were deeply religious Baptists and the topic of sex was at least as embarrassing to them as to their two young sons. During her part of the “birds and the bees” session, Barbara fell back on traditional church teachings. Mike remembered her saying that sex was “dirty and disgusting, messy and a bother, but beautiful if it resulted in a child.” After the three children had been born, she and Cliff still had sex once a week to prevent him from getting headaches and hemorrhoids, or turning grumpy.

Mike’s father uncomfortably expanded on the theme: “The man puts his penis inside the woman and they make a baby,” he told the two boys. “Do you understand?” Cliff asked. Barry, who’d broken out in a cold sweat, nodded yes. Mike, bright and stubbornly outspoken,
said he was confused; why, he asked, should he concern himself with putting his penis “inside some stupid girl and peeing inside her just to make a baby; what if the baby turned out to be dumb like my sister?”

Cliff’s response was a non sequitur: “Never be afraid to ask us anything.” Fine, except that Mike’s main fear was his father himself. He always “smelled of grease”—Cliff worked at GM’s Fisher Body, welding doors—and was remote and unemotional. Mike became convinced that his father “hated” him and often dreamed that Cliff was stabbing him “with one of those cheap steak knives they kept giving us free for a fill-up at Shell.” His closed-down, evasive father was, in fact, a decent, if embittered, man, liberal (considering his time and place) in his political views and struggling to understand his children—though as a devout Baptist he would always find homosexuality repulsive, even immoral.

Life hadn’t been easy for Cliff. After his own father’s early death, he’d had to forgo college to support his mother and sister. After he married Barbara Ann and had children of his own, he worked ten hours a day, seven days a week, at GM—enduring a ninety-mile daily commute round-trip. According to Barbara Ann, he refused every chance to climb the corporate ladder since he felt that would entail the “sacrifice of his beliefs and his morals,” would force him, if he became a foreman or superintendent, to treat employees below him in a “degrading and demeaning” manner that would make them “feel like just so many cattle.”

Cliff dreamed of leaving GM altogether, but every idea he had of another way to make a living—starting a restaurant, moving to Arizona to open a small store—somehow broke down. He struggled to avoid seeing himself as a failure, but the effort further closed him off emotionally, made him a hard-shell Baptist in all but name. Trapped himself, he “forced” (as Mike saw it) his wife, Barbara Ann, to go to college and get a teaching certificate, though she preferred being a stay-at-home mom. They’d had “terrific fights” about it and Barbara Ann finally yielded, but in her unhappiness she put on a great deal of weight and according to Mike “had a nervous breakdown.”

During his senior year in high school Mike took over the running of the house and did all the shopping, cooking, and cleaning, with little assistance from his siblings. (Cooking would become a lifelong pleasure for him; he deeply associated it with “sensuality and hedonism,” and
he reveled in “cooking for his man.”) In retrospect, he felt the “housewife” role had been thrust on him, or perhaps he assumed it, because he was frequently mocked in high school as a “sissy,” a sort of substitute woman. He had his admirers: Jennifer Jackson, two years behind Mike, was one of them. She recalls his sensitive response to her one day when he spotted her standing in line to audition for a school play, “twisting and turning behind the curtain, ready to run.” Mike went over to her, asked her if she’d ever acted before (she hadn’t), and drew her out about her difficult background and family life. “He listened,” Jackson 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 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.” From
freshman 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.