Gunn's Golden Rules

flight. I didn’t have much work to do, so I held my hand up and was assigned an adorable baby boy. For fourteen hours, he sat on my lap and ripped up magazines. I made faces at him, and he slept, and it was perfectly lovely.

Well, I guess this babysitting marathon impressed Daniel, because when we landed in New York, he said, “Would you mind if I called you?”

I said that would be great, and he did, and we went out and had a wonderful time. We started seeing each other whenever he was in town. About two months in, I started to think, This could be something.I really liked him and he had a lot to recommend him: He was my age. He traveled a lot. And he had almost no stuff.(This was key because I was nowhere near ready to merge households with anyone.) I was, for the first time since my horrible breakup, really and truly happy about being in a relationship.

Well, I made the foolish mistake of sharing my happiness with a colleague whom I trusted.

When I told him about Daniel, he had no reason to wish me anything but congratulations. We weren’t lovers. He had a partner of many years. But he went crazy and called me a fool.

“A flight attendant?” he spluttered. “What a stereotype!”

“Your boyfriend’s a florist!” I said, furious. “You don’t call a fashion designer and a florist being together a stereotype?”

We had a big falling-out over it. But he succeeded in shaking my very fragile faith in this new relationship. At least indirectly, it caused me to say good-bye to Daniel.

This was eighteen years ago. Sometimes I wonder whatever happened to Daniel. He was a really good man, and I’m sure he’s made a good life for himself, unlike my former friend, who now lives in a town called Crossville. I think it’s a good place for him, because he is still constantly cross!

You know people like this, right? People who are incapable of enjoying anything? I’ll never forget the time when someone I know ruined the rehearsal dinner of his dear friend’s daughter by throwing a fit because she hadn’t had him make her bridal gown. He went on and on. By the end of his litany, his friend was sobbing. It was so painful and horrible. He was mad that the wedding wasn’t about him.

Have you noticed how depressed people seem to show up at memorial services? Maybe it’s because they want to show that they’re still here. Or maybe they can get behind an unhappy event because there everyone feels the way they do every day.

Some people walk around under a rain cloud of their own making. In my encounters with Narciso Rodriguez and Isabel Toledo I’ve always found them a bit sulky, but at least they make sulking look glamorous, and they can express joy when need be. “The world is a beautiful place,” gloomy Narciso effuses in a cheerful print advertisement for a cell phone. “Liar, liar, pants on fire!” I shouted at the magazine page. But I am impressed that he was able to crack such a big smile.

So there’s a secret that should be hidden: unbridled pessimism. If you think the world is terrible or that someone shouldn’t be so happy with a flight attendant or in any other situation, keep it to yourself.

Then again, you need to be true to yourself, and for me that means not being coy about my sexuality. One thing that causes me to well up with emotion is when young men come up to me and say that I’ve helped them handle their sexuality; that is, coming to terms with being gay. It reminds me how lonely I was as a child with no gay role models.

Everyone needs a role model to look up to. When I was young and thinking I might not be John Wayne material, all I had for a role model was Paul Lynde from Bewitched.You may remember him as one of the more insane people on Hollywood Squares? Well, he was completely gawky and ridiculous on screen, and then in 1965, his boyfriend fell out a hotel window and died. (They may have had a few drinks.)

So that’s what I felt I had to look forward to as a gay man: playing ridiculed characters and having a tragic personal life. The gay people in the popular imagination back then were all predators or weirdos. Meanwhile, my straight friends had Clark Gable, Tony Curtis, Charlton Heston, and a million other heartthrobs to look up to. (A lot of famous fifties actors were later revealed to be gay; if only I’d known at the time!)

I often say in keynote addresses to college students that I figured out what I wasn’t before I figured out what I was. That struggle to find out who you are is so hard. You have to keep eliminating things that you aren’t and then see what’s left over. Most important, you should never pretend. There’s nothing harder than living life as someone you’re not, even if being what you are is very hard, which is what being gay was for me for a very long time.

One of the few times my father was physically violent with me was the evening we were to meet my grandfather’s new wife. They were coming to our house. That afternoon, I was putting together my sister’s Barbie & Ken Little Theatre (“After the show everything folds neatly away until the next performance!”).

My father saw me playing around with these dolls in what I can only imagine was an effeminate way, and he started smacking me with a wet washcloth. “You’re not going to be seen doing this!” he yelled at me.

It was terrifying, and I had no idea what I’d done to make him so mad or why it would be so awful if these people saw me with Barbie’s theater. In retrospect, I can see he thought I was heading down a less-than-macho path, and he was hoping to beat it out of me. Well, sorry, Dad—didn’t work!

When I told a friend of mine this story recently, she said, “Do you think maybe your father was secretly gay and disturbed by it?”

It has definitely occurred to me. He certainly did protest too much about those Barbies …

“And you don’t think he and J. Edgar Hoover were an item, do you?” she added.

Well, let me tell you, I’ve been there.

I have no proof, and I’m going to say right now, my mother would deny it up and down, and so, probably, would many biographers of Hoover; I’m likely just totally wrong about this. But … The men were incredibly close. They were both arguably repressed. So even if they were sleeping together, you can bet they never would have admitted it, even to themselves. He would have really beaten it back. He certainly wanted to knock it out of me, literally and figuratively!

I don’t believe my father ever had an affair. He was very respectful. He may never even have been tempted. He had strong moral fiber, and I can’t believe he would have betrayed my mother. But I do think it’s very possible that he was a big closet case.

I’ve always thought there was a touch of lavender in that bureau. There certainly were some issues. Of my father’s close circle of work colleagues, every one of the men committed suicide by gunshot after retiring. In two out of four, it was to the head; the other two were to the chest. Talk about an angry, horrible way to die; there’s a big mess to clean up. Dad was the only one who died a natural death. And from what I could tell, all the wives, aside from my mother, were barely functioning alcoholics.

I remember dinner parties at our house where the next morning you’d find people on the lawn. They would all get completely wasted. My father was a great enabler. He didn’t drink wine—I think he thought that was too fey—but he drank everything else: scotch, vodka, beer, whatever. He spent the parties behind our bar, always filling glasses. He never let a glass be empty, even if you protested. This behavior was either extremely generous or completely crazy.

Lately, I’ve been thinking more about men of that era, specifically my father and his colleagues. Last week I was on the plane from Los Angeles to Portland, on a little plane and in first class, which was a nice change of pace. The guy next to me was Ron Howard’s business partner, Brian Grazer. He was with a woman I didn’t recognize, and they were talking movies. Specifically, they were talking about a biopic of Hoover.

It was hard, but I kept my mouth shut. I knew that I held within me some deeply personal stuff, and I didn’t really want to tell these stories to a plane full of people I didn’t know. Still, I did keep thinking: Boy, could I fill in a lot of blanks for them.

My father was an FBI special agent for twenty-six years and then retired and ran the Washington Bureau of Reader’s Digestfor ten years. As you’ll recall, he was J. Edgar Hoover’s ghostwriter. He wrote his books and speeches and traveled with Hoover.

J. Edgar Hoover: Now there was an interesting figure, to say the least. He was the director of the FBI from