How a Cat Led to My Coming Out (1969)

Preface II: How a Cat Led to My Coming Out (1969)

James had a cat. James was cute.

Actually, the cat wasn’t James’ cat. He didn’t know whose cat it was, but he was playing with it the day I met him.

James was a neighbor of Sandra and Rick, a couple I knew through grad school. Neither one was a student, but Sandra liked to hang out at the university and through her I met Rick, who was her boyfriend and, later, husband.

Sandra was a Jewish girl from a small town in eastern Kentucky, where her daddy owned a clothing store. Rick was an East Tennessee gentile. They were a volatile combination, sometimes fighting, sometimes loving, and sometimes doing both at the same time. They were unpredictable and they became my good friends.

They had taken an apartment a few blocks from me, so I dropped by often, especially during the early summer months when neither my class work nor my broadcasting job occupied much of my time. We’d listen to music or talk politics or watch TV, go out to eat on the Cumberland Avenue “strip,” or, on a warm summer evening, sit outside the house their apartment was in and just talk.

James lived in a house across the street, with his aunt as I recall, although it might have been his grandmother. I don’t recall and I don’t believe I was clear about it at the time. When I would visit him later, he seemed to be the only one home.

Sandra was, um, outgoing. No, she was more than that. Spotting a person she didn’t know, she’d go right up to them and just start a conversation. Eventually she’d introduce herself to the often-startled individual. She’d spotted James on his porch and soon she considered him a good friend. There are those of whom it’s said, they’ve never met a stranger. Sandra didn’t know what a stranger was, although some she met probably wished that she had understood the idea better.
One evening as we were sitting on her front steps, she spotted James on his porch and insisted I meet him. We walked over and Sandra introduced me. So maybe it was Sandra, more than James’ cat, that was a proximate cause of my coming out. But I have to give the cat some credit, since, from a distance, it was the cat – and not James – that I noticed.

Then we got closer and I noticed James.

Did I mention James was cute?

Actually, I doubt that I thought of him that way at the time. I wasn’t really out to myself, and I’d grown up being told that boys didn’t refer to other boys as, “cute.” Handsome, maybe. But never cute.

Fear of coming out isn’t just fear of what friends and family will think of you. It’s also about what you will think of you. And it’s not just trying to imagine yourself having sex with another guy. Before coming out, most gay guys aren’t at all sure what gay sex might involve.

Society raises all males, gay or straight, to have a certain discomfort with intimacy and even with gentleness. Even straight boys don’t refer to attractive girls as cute, but maybe “nice,” or maybe “hot.” Somehow they have to keep a rougher edge about it, so as not to seem “girlish.”

So when a not-yet-out gay boy finds himself attracted to another boy, he knows the other boy looks good, looks appealing, but he can’t quite bring himself to say – even to himself – that the boy is “cute.”

But James was cute. I guess I’ve already mentioned that.

Somehow, I also knew James was gay.

Somehow, James also knew I was gay.

Somehow, I also knew that James knew that I knew that he knew.

How? I can’t explain that anymore than I can explain gaydar. It’s really a sensation in a moment of time – or perhaps out of time – an almost instant recognition. Most gay people have it. Some straight people even claim to have it. At the time, I would have claimed I was straight and that I’d never heard of gaydar. That didn’t matter; I knew James was gay and James knew I was gay. And I knew that he knew that I knew.

And though I would have said I was straight, I knew that I wasn’t. But I had no clue of what being gay really meant. No clue? Yes, no clue. There were no gay role models. Gay characters in movies committed suicide or were killed. Even the most sympathetic psychologists called gay people “inverts” or “deviates.” Was being gay just about furtive sex acts, likely performed in some dangerous place? Was being gay being effeminate, wanting to be female rather than male? So it would seem from all the information one could gather from books or from teachers or from friends. And if I didn't find myself in those books, then I must not be gay.

It was the early summer of 1969. Stonewall had already happened in New York City, but we knew nothing about that event in East Tennessee. (I first learned of the June event in December, while job hunting in Atlanta.) All I knew was that James was cute, James was obviously (to me, at least) gay, and I wanted to get to know him better. What that meant, I didn’t really know.
The way to some men’s hearts may be through their stomachs, but the way to James’ heart, I suspected, was through his (or whoever’s) cat. But I wasn’t even sure I wanted to get to James’ heart, just to his body. What I would do with it once I got to it, I also didn’t know. First things first, though, which meant focusing first upon the cat.

Since I hadn’t come out yet, not even fully to myself, Sandra had no idea what thoughts James was putting in my mind. And I thought it best that first night on James’ porch not to put any thoughts in her mind. So the three of us just talked about this and that and I asked James about the cat.

The cat in question, as I said, wasn’t actually James’ cat. It had shown up on his porch recently and essentially adopted James. Apparently the cat found something attractive about James as well.

It being early summer, my only school work involved thesis hours I registered for while (supposedly) working on a master’s thesis in philosophy. I had already been accepted to Ohio University in communications for the fall and I was working five days a week at an AM/FM radio operation in the Smokies. So I had evenings (and a lot of other time) free.

I began to spend some of that free time visiting James on his porch – without Sandra. We did quite a bit of verbal dancing, deftly stepping around the subject both of us wanted to bring up. It was a behavior not uncommon for not-yet-out gay guys who wanted to let the other guy know about themselves but not risk too much self-disclosure. We would use a kind of code and a lot of body language.

The code could be cultural, involving mention of supposedly gay-identifiable personalities, writers or musicians. Urban gay-guys-in-waiting might find references to Judy Garland or Broadway show tunes to be good for testing the waters. That didn’t work well this far from the Great White Way. All I knew about Judy Garland was that her daughter, Liza Minelli, had starred in a movie that was filmed at my undergraduate alma mater. The film’s story involved a very straight college romance. And I only liked Broadway musicals if there was no singing. Elton John not only was not yet out as gay, he wasn’t even known outside of his own family in England, and they knew him as Reginald Dwight. Trying to find gay cultural references in a part of the country known best for Elvis and the Grand Ol’ Opry was rather difficult.

The code could also be rather Freudian, with humorous but barely subtle references to “fruit,” to “sucking” on something, something innocent like a popsicle, of course, but the accompanying body language added a bit of salaciousness to the phrase. Sometimes more than a bit.
We continued to mutually choreograph this little dance of identity over our first three or four visits together, all of them on James’ front porch. Whether the cat, who was always there, picked up on what we were doing is uncertain, but apparently we were entertaining enough to sustain a feline’s interest. That was probably because, whenever one of us seemed to be getting too close to self-disclosure, we would change the subject to something about the cat. Good cat. Pretty cat. Nice kitty. Anything about the cat, anything to avoid saying, “Hey, I’m gay and you are too and I think you’re really cute!”

Of course that’s not all either of us probably wanted to say. That sentence might end, “I think you’re really cute and I’d like to …” But that would present another problem even if one of us said it. When two guys are trying to determine if the other is gay – if their own gaydar is working – there are other questions involved. If the other guy is gay, is he out of the closet? Does anyone else know he’s gay? Is he, um, experienced? What kind of experience has he had? What does he like to “do?” Am I even his type?

Such questions really never go away even when the sexual orientation of both parties is known. If you haven’t tricked with someone before, you have no idea what this other person likes to do in bed. Or even before getting to the bed. And even before the conversation gets underway, you don’t have any way of knowing if your interest in him is reciprocated. The cutest looking preppy boy in khakis and polo shirt may be looking for a strapping, hairy older guy in leather. And vice-versa.

So here’s the dilemma: I think I’m gay. I’m pretty sure he’s gay. I’m pretty sure he knows I’m gay.

But I can’t read his mind.

In the two or three weeks since Sandra had introduced me to James (and his cat), I had spent several evenings on James’ porch. Some of these meetings were random, some were planned. And some that may have seemed random to James were really planned. I would drive near James’ house, never getting closer than a block or two away. Then, if I spotted him on the porch I would take the car back home and walk over to his place. I would act as if I were heading to Sandra and Rick’s and seem surprised that he was at home on his porch. And to think I hadn’t yet heard the term, “drama queen!”

Wow, I sound like a stalker. Actually I think I put on a pretty good act. After all, I had done my share of theater over the years. At least I think I was convincing to James. And I never resorted to such tired lines as, “Oh, hi! I was just out for a walk and saw you on the porch.” Or, “Gee, I didn’t think you’d be home! Mind if I stop and chat a while?“ I was a much better drama queen than that.

For whatever reason, James never invited anyone into the house. We were always on the porch. That was fine for informal chats on warm East Tennessee summer evenings. But it was a bit too, um, public for anything more than chat and iced tea.

Finally I determined that if James weren’t going to invite me into his house, I would invite him into mine. I had a small two-room apartment in an old house about four blocks from James. It was actually two rented rooms, one of which happened to have a kitchen.

It seemed a perfect idea. I had a color TV. I had a stereo system. I had a cat.

We’d maybe watch some TV. We’d listen to some music. He’d play with my cat.

But then what?

As it turned out, we never did watch TV, we never did listen to the stereo. But James and my cat did get along famously.

So did James and I. After a fashion.

It turned out that James was as inexperienced as I in what to do next. He had “messed around” with a few other guys, but he wasn’t “out” in the gay scene of Knoxville, such scene as there was. His gay sexual experience was little more than that of any number of adolescent straight boys who “messed around” with their buddies.

So did we have sex? Well, yes and no. We were both horny and naïve. Our bodies (hormones) reacted but our minds didn’t know what to next. So we spent a lot of time hugging, groping, fondling, and even giggling as we ended up on the hard, cold floor of my apartment in our underwear. While maybe we didn’t “have” sex, the mechanics of which neither of us was clear about, we both got, um, sexual release. Then we got dressed and it was time for James to go.
It wasn’t until I looked at my desk calendar the next morning I realized that I’d had my first gay experience – my coming out event – on July 4th. Independence Day. Somehow that made me smile.

I had finally come out, at least to myself and one other guy.

Thanks to James.

And James’ cat.