In One Person

use in 1960. At that time, I’d heard next to no mention of the gay word; it was a little- used word in the Favorite River Academy community. Maybe “gay” was too friendly a word for Favorite River—at least it was too neutral a word for all those homo-hating boys. I did know what “gay” meant, of course—it just wasn’t said much, in my limited circles—but, as sexually inexperienced as I was, I’d given scant consideration to what was meant by “dominant” and “submissive” in the seemingly unattainable world of gay sex.

NOT THAT MANY YEARS later, when I was living with Larry—of the men and women I’ve tried to live with, I lasted with Larry the longest—he liked to make fun of me by telling everyone how “shocked” I was at the way he picked me up in that gay coffeehouse, which was such a mysterious place, in Vienna.

This was my junior year abroad. Two years of college German—not to mention my studying the language at Favorite River Academy—had prepared me for a year in a German-speaking country. These same two college years of living in New York City had both prepared me and not prepared me for how underground a gay coffeehouse in Vienna would be in that academic year of 1963–64. At that time, the gay bars in New York were being shut down; the New York World’s Fair was in ’64, and it was the mayor’s intention to clean up the city for the tourists. One New York bar, Julius’, remained open the whole time—there may have been others— but even at Julius’, the men at the bar weren’t permitted to touch one another.

I’m not saying Vienna was more underground than New York at that time; the situation was similar. But in that place where Larry picked me up, there was some touching among the men—permitted or not. I just remember it was Larry who shocked me, not Vienna.

“Are you a top or a bottom, beautiful Bill?” Larry had asked me. (I was shocked, but not by the question.)

“A top,” I answered, without hesitation.

“Really!” Larry said, either genuinely surprised or feigning surprise; with Larry, this was often hard to tell. “You look like a bottom to me,” he said, and after a pause—such a long pause that I’d thought he was going to ask someone else to go home with him—he added, “Come on, Bill, let’s leave now.”

I was shocked, all right, but only because I was a college student, and Larry was my professor. This was the Institut fur Europaische Studien in Vienna—das Institut, the students called it. We were Americans, from all over, but our faculty was a mixed bag: some Americans (Larry was by far the best-known among them), one wonderful and eccentric Englishman, and various Austrians from the faculty at the University of Vienna.

In those days, the Institute for European Studies was on that end of the Wollzeile nearest the Doktor-Karl- Lueger-Platz and the Stubenring. The students complained about how far das Institut was from the university; many of our students (the ones with better German) took additional courses at the University of Vienna. Not me; I wasn’t interested in more courses. I’d gone to college in New York because I wanted to be in New York; I was studying abroad in Vienna to be in Vienna. I didn’t care how near to or far from the university I was.

My German was good enough to get me hired at an excellent restaurant on the Weihburggasse—near the opposite end of the Karntnerstrasse from the opera. It was called Zufall (“Coincidence”), and I got the job both because I had worked as a waiter in New York and because, shortly after I arrived in Vienna, I learned that the only English-speaking waiter at Zufall had been fired.

I’d heard the story in that mysterious gay coffeehouse on the Dorotheergasse—one of those side streets off the Graben. The Kaffee Kafig, it was called—the “Coffee Cage.” During the day, it appeared to be mostly a student hangout; there were girls there, too—in fact, it was daytime when a girl told me that the waiter at Zufall had been fired. But after dark, the older men showed up at the Kaffee Kafig, and there weren’t any girls around. That was how it was the night I ran into Larry, and he popped the top-or-bottom question.

That first fall term at the Institute, I was not one of Larry’s students. He was teaching the plays of Sophocles. Larry was a poet, and I wanted to be a novelist—I thought I was done with theater, and I didn’t write poems. But I knew that Larry was a respected writer, and I’d asked him if he would consider offering a writing course—in either the winter or the spring term, in ’64.

“Oh, God—not a creative writing class!” Larry said. “I know—don’t tell me. One day, creative writing will be taught everywhere!”

“I just wanted to be able to show my writing to another writer,” I told him. “I’m not a poet,” I admitted. “I’m a fiction writer. I understand if you’re not interested.” I was walking away—I was trying to look hurt—when he stopped me.

“Wait, wait—what is your name, young fiction writer?” Larry asked. “I do read fiction,” he told me.

I told him my name—I said “Bill,” because Miss Frost owned the William name. (I would publish my novels under the name William Abbott, but I let no one else call me William.)

“Well, Bill—let me think about it,” Larry said. I knew then that he was gay, and everything else he was thinking, but I wouldn’t become his student until January 1964, when he offered a creative writing course at the Institute in the winter term.

Larry was the already-distinguished poet—Lawrence Upton, to his colleagues and students, but his gay friends (and a coterie of lady admirers) called him Larry. By then, I’d been with a few older men—I’d not lived with them, but they’d been my lovers—and I knew who I was when it came to the top-or-bottom business.

It was not the crudeness of Larry’s top-or-bottom question that shocked me; even his first-time students knew that Lawrence Upton was a famous snob who could also be notoriously crass. It was simply that my teacher, who was such a renowned literary figure, had hit on me—that shocked me. But that was never how Larry told the story, and there was no contradicting him.

According to Larry, he hadn’t asked me if I was a top or a bottom. “In the sixties, dear Bill, we did not say ‘top’ and ‘bottom’—we said ‘pitcher’ and ‘catcher,’ though of course you Vermonters might have been prescient,” Larry said, “or so far ahead of the rest of us that you were already asking, ‘Plus or minus?’ while we less-progressive types were still stuck with the pitcher-or- catcher question, which soon would become the top-or-bottom question. Just not in the sixties, dear Bill. In Vienna, when I picked you up, I know I asked you if you were a pitcher or a catcher.”

Then, turning from me to our friends—his friends, for the most part; both in Vienna and later, back in New York, most of Larry’s friends were older than I was—Larry would say, “Bill is a fiction writer, but he writes in the first-person voice in a style that is tell-all confessional; in fact, his fiction sounds as much like a memoir as he can make it sound.”

Then, turning back to me—just me, as if we were alone—Larry would say, “Yet you insist on anachronisms, dear Bill—in the sixties, the top and bottom words are anachronisms.”

That was Larry; that was how he talked—he was always right. I learned not to argue about the smaller stuff. I would say, “Yes, Professor,” because if I’d said he was mistaken, that he had absolutely used the top and bottom words, Larry would have made another crack about my being from Vermont, or he would have shot the breeze about my saying I was a pitcher when, all along, I’d looked like a catcher to him. (Didn’t everyone think I looked like a catcher? Larry would usually ask his friends.)

The poet Lawrence Upton was of that generation of older gay men who basically believed that most gay men were bottoms, no matter what they said—or that those of us who said we were tops would eventually be bottoms. Since Larry and I met in Vienna, our enduring disagreement concerning exactly what was said on our first “date” was further clouded by what many Europeans felt in the sixties, and still feel today— namely, that we Americans make entirely too much of the top-or-bottom business. The Europeans have always believed we were too rigid about these distinctions, as if everyone gay is either one or the other—as some young, cocksure types tell me nowadays.

Larry—who was a bottom, if I ever knew one—could be both petulant and coy about how misunderstood he was. “I’m more versatile than you are!” he once said to me, in tears. “You may say you also like women, or you pretend that you do, but I’m not the truly inflexible one in this relationship!”