Stonewall by Martin Duberman Read Free Book Online Page B

perhaps as awed as his contemporaries by his perky verbalness, tended to treat him like an adult—his mother, after all, was only fifteen years older, and her husband was a year younger than she. Jim was also an unusually beautiful boy, somewhat undersized and slight, but perfectly featured, an angelic blue-eyed blond so pretty that as a three-year-old he had been chosen to be a “Whitcomb baby” in the famous series of ads that illustrator John Whitcomb designed for Gerber baby foods.
    Jim’s prettiness would often be mistaken, especially as he got older, for blandness or passivity, the surface stereotype belying the complex inner reality. He was, in fact, an intricate mix of sweetness and dynamism, and his cherubic mask misrepresented an assertive temperament. “My sensibility was much more female than male,” he later said, “but my Gestalt was male.” Often called “girl” or “faggot,” he identified with neither, though his “gay spirit” (as he later liked to call it), his sense from an early age of being different, did make him compassionate toward other outsiders. Since most people need to hang on to the illusion that others are one-dimensional—that makes them seemingly more comprehensible and manageable—the complex Jim would all his life be puzzled by the way people reacted to him as if he were either (and only) a passive boy or a warrior male.
    He was further set apart by illness. As a youngster he had rheumatic fever twice, and then leukemia, and didn’t go to school for two years. Given massive doses of cortisone—the drug had just come on the market and not much was known about its properties—he blew up to three hundred pounds (and never did develop an Adam’s apple). Bedridden for more than a year, he lived in a world apart, putting on little shows in his room with stick figures, endlessly watching television and listening to soap operas on the radio.
    He became so adept at performing that after he recovered, and while still a teenager, he was chosen to emcee The World Around Us , a local television show devoted to current affairs. And his fluency in public speaking led to his election as president of the Rhode Island chapter of Junior Achievement, a national organization founded to teach teenagers about the wondrous workings of capitalism by encouraging them to set up their own little businesses (Jim ended up winning the National Junior Achievement sales award for a French dressing he created).
    He was even pro-McCarthy. At the tender age of seven, Jim was signing people up for membership in the Committee of One Million, founded to support Senator McCarthy. He dutifully carried petitions from door to door soliciting members, and when the door sometimes got slammed in his face, he would complain to his mother—he describes himself as a “self-righteous priss” in those years—that such people were refusing to be “good Americans.” She finally put an end to his canvassing by ripping up the petitions—not out of political progressivism (she really had no politics) but out of some powerful fear of “making trouble.” “My whole subsequent political life,” Jim later said, “has been a form of atonement for my McCarthy petition.”
    By the time Jim was in high school, his numerous activities had him crisscrossing Providence. To save money, he would hitchhike and before long discovered that blow jobs were one of the side benefits. Men would pick him up in their cars and, in exchange for sex, drive him anywhere he wanted to go. He soon found out that certain street corners were favored, and thereafter confined his hitching to those. He never feared getting into a car; as a survivor in his own family, he felt he had developed extrasensory instincts about potential danger.
    But once, in his late teens, those instincts failed him. A truck driver, perhaps attracted to his long blond hair