Crazy or Queer

OUT PAST MIDNIGHT – Crazy or Queer

A Denver Police detective once told me that anyone who stays out past midnight is either “…crazy or queer.” I was only fourteen or fifteen at the time and had a pretty good idea that I probably fit into the latter of the detective’s two categories. It wasn’t until I was twenty-four – after a baccalaureate and two years in the Army – that I discovered the detective was partially right in his assessment of the nature of nocturnal creatures who haunt the streets of Denver past midnight.

Policemen have a way of expressing themselves in nuts and bolts terms which is probably a manifestation of the manner in which they view the world: there are good guys and bad guys out there and that’s that. Anyway, I did discover that my detective friend understood one facet of the gay lifestyle better than I: Gays are predominantly night people. Whether non-gay night people are preponderantly crazy is left to anyone’s assessment.

Growing up secretly gay wasn’t easy, especially since my father happened to be a cop. I was intensely curious, though, about queers and picked up any bit of information I could about the where, when, why, how, who, and what of that outlaw society of men who liked/loved other men. And, as I said, by the time I was fifteen, I knew queers stayed out late and I soon learned from my friends that queers gave each other blow jobs. And, while driving through downtown Denver, my father announced that there was one place I should never, ever be caught dead in and that was a little bar – he pointed it out to me – called the Court Jester. I don’t know why my father was worried about me – at fifteen – being caught dead or, much less, alive in a downtown bar full of queers.

Maybe he saw something in me that no one else saw. I don’t know. It’s possible, though. Cops get to be pretty good at reading people’s character. It becomes instinct with them after a while. It has to be. At times, their lives depend on whether or not they have read somebody right.

I was incredibly naïve then, at fifteen. One of my favorite teachers, Mr. R, who taught science with a sly smile and an occasional slap on the ass for those of us who he seemed to like best, invited me and two of his other pets to go camping with him over a weekend. My father refused to let me go (there’s that cop instinct, again) but the other two guys packed their sleeping bags and took off with Mr. R.

The following Monday, Mr. R and the two young men didn’t show up for school. After my father came home that night, I learned that Mr. R had had a “heyday” up there in the hills with those two innocents and a warrant was out for his arrest. One of my father’s detective friends vowed to kill that sonofabitch, Mr. R, if he ever saw him again. My father told me that Mr. R was “sick” and I was lucky I hadn’t gone camping with him. The two innocents came back to school on Wednesday and laughed about the whole thing. And I … well, I just wondered what it meant to have a “heyday” with anybody.

By the time I was sixteen I knew enough about queers to keep me curious to know more. They stayed out late; they gave each other blow jobs; they hung around the Court Jester; some of them were even teachers and, AND!, sometimes they had HEYDAYS! God, I was at the point where there was nothing much in the world I desired more than to have heyday with somebody … preferably Frank Allison who swam the butterfly (I did breaststroke and freestyle) and whose locker was next to mine. Even though I had given my treasured initial ring to Linda Jo Ramsauer and, thereby, pledged my heart to her for eternity, my fantasies were still consumed with Frank and me having a heyday together in one sleeping bag up in them thar hills. To this day, there is something so exquisitely sensuous about camping out in the Rockies that words simply won’t do justice in description.

I was sent off to college at the tender age of seventeen – I had skipped third grade – and, for the first time in my life, I was confronted with my own freedom. My naïveté about life and the world was certainly immense and, to tell you the truth, having the freedom to do what I wanted without daddy’s approval was, at least confusing. Usually my friends made up my mind for me and, while my study habits were adequate to keep me in school with grades which were depressingly average, I could be found, at lest three nights a week, in one or another of the local pubs in Boulder, drinking pitchers of beer and wondering constantly about this guy or that guy who I might happen to catch staring at me from across the dimly-lit interior of the bar. My friends had secured a fake ID for me and, with their help, I was beginning to learn a great deal about the practical things in life, which can only be taught over a cold beer in the dimly-lit, smoky, interior of one beer joint or another. And, my knowledge about queers was being constantly fed by the off-hand remarks my friends would make like, “You’d better keep your ass outa the second floor john at the library. Them faggots gonna rape your little booty one of these days;” or “The whole, fuckin’ first floor wing of that dorm is crammed with fuckin’ fairies.” Suffice it to say, I spent a great deal of time visiting that second floor john at the library and strolling through the first floor wing of that notorious dorm. I never did run into anything that resembled a queer, or what I thought a queer should look like. I didn’t happen to think that even I didn’t look like what I thought a queer should look like. And, now that I think about it, all those hunky young men I used to pass going into or coming from that second floor john at the library were probably as queer as I and just about as shy and scared to death to reveal themselves to just anybody. No, gays weren’t particularly liberated then in the late sixties and early seventies. Being gay was a particularly nefarious indiscretion then.

Most of us share a common youth. Most of us grew up holding our secret very deep inside us. Most of us have weathered the quiet, intense, personal storm of our youth. And, curiously enough, as we have grown, so too has the world around us.

Indeed, my detective friend announced at a small dinner party the other night that, “Anybody who stays out past midnight is just plain crazy.” Period. No mention of queers. Perhaps my detective friend is just mellowing out with age.

Or, yes, perhaps that slight twinkle in his eye as I shook his hand was not so much the effect of the bourbon and water as it was an acknowledgment that queers aren’t so bad. Why, even his best friend’s son is one.


(First published in Out Front Magazine, September 1980)