My fortunes changed in Paris. (Isn’t that always the way?) I had a two-day romance with a dude named Jean-Marie; he didn’t speak English and I didn’t speak French, so we conversed in bad, broken Spanish. We had not a thing in common, but it was the most romantic two days of my life. He would point to things and say, in Spanish, “This is a very typical French building.” Or “Summers in France are very warm.” Scintillating! I bet I wouldn’t last an hour with him today without having a narcoleptic seizure, but at the time I thought he was a poet. His apartment was the size of a Tic Tac, and despite its being a complete hotbox, I don’t recall hot water actually being readily available; in fact I have a faint recollection of something (nonsexual) having to do with a teakettle. I thought it was totalmente quaint. He was handsome and sweet and had a big Parisian nose. But more importantly, he liked me. We held hands under the dinner table. The whole thing felt like a fantasy. In my heart, there was no turning back.
When summer ended, though, and I reported to London for a semester of serious study, I was back to reality, which meant pretending to be someone I wasn’t. Some friends from BU were in my “programme.” (I’ll drop the quotation marks from now on, but is there anything that bugs you about this word, or is it just me?) Everyone was anxious to share tales of their amazing summers, while I couldn’t conceive of telling anyone about what I’d just experienced. Which, I realized, was going to be an ongoing challenge. Because from the moment I got there, everywhere I looked and listened was gay, gay, gay.
You couldn’t walk one foot in London that year without hearing Erasure’s super-gay pop song “Chains of Love.” Oh, and my flat was in the gayest part of town, Earl’s Court. How the hell was I supposed to stay in the closet when living in a neighborhood where everybody looked like a Village Person? I certainly wasn’t complaining, but it just seemed ironic.
I was committed to my secret, though, because I truly did not believe I had an alternative. I was terrified of being ostracized by my friends and family. I’ve always said that gay people and fat people are two of the last minority groups that it’s acceptable to make fun of across America. That’s finally starting to change now, but gay-bashing was still de rigueur in the eighties—and Eddie Murphy was hardly the lone offender.
On the trip from Paris I’d concocted a fairly elaborate story about my summer, and the minute I got to London, I began relaying it to friends back at BU and in St. Louis. I told them—through letters and phone calls and eventually just word of mouth—that I had taken a train from Switzerland to Paris (true), where I’d met a German girl (true) with hair under her arms (true) who asked me to get drunk with her (true) and that I did (false) and she attacked me (false) with her hot body (eew, false) and hairy underarms (again, true, but I didn’t touch them). We spent a mad, passionate night together fucking and fucking and fucking some more on the rails and had a very dramatic good-bye in Paris (false, gross, false, gross, and no).
The Tale of the Fräulein Who Took Me on the Night Rails made an immediate impact on my friends, to whom I must’ve always seemed like a Ken doll (sans the stunning Aryan looks) with no genitalia and just smooth flatness “down there.” They swallowed the Tale of the Fräulein like a fresh Slurpee, simultaneously happy for me and relieved that whatever questions they’d had about my—at best—asexuality were unfounded. And if it made any of their brains painfully freeze up for a moment, well, that was just from drinking it all in so fast.
Within one day of being in London I met two women who would become my best friends for the rest of my life. Amanda Baten was a petite, blond, earthy stunner with an infectious laugh and appetite for fun and drama; she was on the road to her eventual career as a psychologist and was already figuring out all our problems. Graciela Braslavsky was Brigitte Bardot on steroids, a New York City girl with an anything-goes vibe and a razor-sharp wit who was also enrolled at BU. That I’d never been somehow magnetically drawn to her on campus back in Boston seemed unfathomable. I connected with both women deeply and immediately. The image I portrayed to them was of a hetero hippie, and when I shared the Tale of the Fräulein Who Took Me on the Night Rails, they had no reason to question it.
The programme itself consisted of a couple of (fairly bogus) courses and an internship at United Press International Radio, which sucked. My hoped-for internship at the ABC News London Bureau never materialized, so I was stuck in this dead-end job in the Docklands, which was essentially the middle of nowhere. At this point I’d had several amazing internships already. I started young, as the “littlest volunteer” for Senator Tom Eagleton’s re-election campaign (I was twelve and felt strangely at home among adults wearing corduroy sport coats). At sixteen, I was the youngest intern at the CBS affiliate in St. Louis. Then came the internships at the CBS radio station in St.
