City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [105]
I had met Norm Rathweg at the Sheridan Square Gym, where I’d been working out since the mid-1960s. When I started lifting weights, it was still an unusual activity for a gay man. In the fifties and sixties gays wanted to be as thin as possible but it never occurred to them to be—well, not boys but men. In the seventies, however, we stayed thin but began to add muscles—a well-defined chest, a firm, prominent butt, massive legs, baby biceps, more muscled shoulders. I was one of the first in this metamorphosis from boy to man.
A more dramatic example of the transformation was Norm. When he arrived at the gym, he was a tall, skinny boy, pale with nearly invisible blond eyelashes and a blancmange complexion. He was timid and never spoke to anyone except his lover, Louis Keith Nelson. They were at the gym every day but kept to themselves. Norm wouldn’t even meet my eyes or anyone else’s. The only assertive thing he did was to burp loudly, which seemed to be unconscious.
But slowly he changed. He began to fill out and muscle up. He became more confident. I started to go out with him though it was understood that he and Louis Keith Nelson were a couple and would stay together. Back then, in the 1970s, these questions of fidelity and couplehood didn’t come up and we wouldn’t exactly have known how to respond to them. Introducing the issue now slightly falsifies the quiet, natural way in which we assumed everyone would have multiple sex partners, that jealousy was definitely not cool, and that new people could be regular fuck buddies or part-time lovers, that the molecule could always annex a new atom. Of course everyone tacitly feared that a new dalliance might take a lover away forever, but this seldom happened. It was as if the three elements (love, sex, friendship) that straight people centered on one other person we gays distributed over several people and this distribution was a more solid form than companionate marriage.
While I lived in that apartment in the Colonnades, I had lots of group sex—there was a beefy, slightly crazy American Indian from Colorado who’d been “discovered” at sixteen by Allen Ginsberg at the Naropa Institute in Boulder. He had a smooth body like pillows stuffed tightly inside a silk parachute. There was a handsome Norwegian flight attendant from St. Paul with a cool, bemused manner, though he was open to almost any suggestion. There were lots of other guys and we lay around in my loft bed talking and kissing and listening to music and getting high. I was in my late thirties and gay men of my generation had earlier always assumed that sex would come to a screeching halt at age thirty, but now that we’d long before reached that landmark age, it seemed just to go on and on, as did one’s youth. People of my parents’ generation had been married at twenty-two, had had children two years later, and were worn-out and paunchy by forty, but we kept working out and staying up late and falling in and out of love, “immature” but weirdly youthful.
We wondered where we were all heading. We assumed that gay life had branched off from normal family experience, sort of like Homo sapiens evolving in a separate direction from Homo erectus. We thought that gays had a separate destiny, that we were meant to point the way to more elegant and comprehensive models of adhesiveness. We were hostile to the idea of assimilation since we knew that would mean resembling straights, whereas we felt we had something better to offer.
Norm was emblematic of many of the young gay men who came up in the 1970s. He was from Florida, where he’d been a bookish nerd. His father had been