Numbers

John Rechy’s 2nd novel, Numbers, published in 1967 had me enthrawed for years. Rechy was one of the first main-stream authors that I ever read that dealt with being gay honestly and explicitly. Granted, his character, Johnny Rio, may not be looked upon by many as being a particularly happy or healthy homosexual. He was the epitome of the narcissistic, obsessive, gay man who falls into the trap of fighting the inevitable; aging and the accompanying rejection by the younger, body-obsessed gay male community. Yet, Johnny Rio is, in his own way, a representation of the everyday gay man and our eternal search for love and acceptance.

This was only the second "gay" book that I found the courage to buy before coming out. I found it at the same small bookstore across the street from the library where I had bought my very first book on homosexuality. The edition that I bought had the most beautiful naked man standing sideways on a gray cover. The model had incredibly sultry eyes and even if the book had been worthless, I would have purchased it just for the cover itself. It truly was a very striking cover.

This is an important book for me because it is, forever, associated with my coming out. Yes, this is just one more coming out story but it's my blog and my story so here it is.

Here's the condensed version:

I was 16 and looking for love. I lived in a home filled with fear, anger, and physical abuse. My brother called me queer or sissy daily. I fell in lust over a male neighbor who lived two houses up the street from my family. I wrote him a couple of explicit letters pleading with him to take me away from my pain and love me with his heart and his body. I left the letters in his mailbox and his car, never signing them but being very clear about my age and that I lived near him. He panicked and called the police. The police took the handwritten letters to my high school and had a handwriting expert compare writing samples from all of the male 16 year olds at the school. They ID'd me and sent two detectives to my house to charge me with disturbing the peace, and harrassment.

Rather than take me off to the juvenile detention home, my mother persuaded them to release me to her custody. That night she and my father confronted me with the dreaded question: are you homosexual. I denied it.

The courts eventually required my parents to put me under the care of a psychiatrist. Approximately one month after the encounter with the police, my mother asked me to go on a ride with her, ostensibly to go shopping. She took me instead to Morningside Hospital, a private mental hospital on the eastside of Portland founded by Henry Waldo Coe. I was introduced to Dr. James Krause, a psychiatrist associated with the hospital as well as one of the company doctors for Tektronix, Inc., the company my mother worked for at the time. Dr. Krause and my mother spoke for about 45 minutes and then Dr. Krause called me into his office sans my mother. He asked me if I knew what a homosexual was, whether I considered myself one, and a litany of other questions, that I found hard if not impossible to answer truthfully. I was scared.

After our private conversation, Dr. Krause and my mother spoke alone again for another half hour. When my mother emerged from his office, I could tell that she had been crying. He called me back into the office again without my mother. He informed me that they had decided to have me spend a couple of nights at the hospital so he could run some tests on me. My mother had agreed and had already left to go home so she could collect and bring back some clothes for me. I was scared and now felt abandoned.

I was escorted to Ward A by an orderly in a white uniform and introduced to the head ward nurse and told that I would be sleeping in a small dorm room with four other boys. They were not in the room when I arrived so I was told to make myself comfortable in the common room and wait for dinner. Eventually the four other boys came back. One was a 13 year old who was in the hospital because he was a pyromaniac and had set his family's house on fire; the next boy must have been about my age and was there because he had a glue sniffing problem; the next one I was introduced to was named Fern and was unable to talk because he supposedly had had a bad acid trip and had never come out of it (he communicated by drawing beautiful pictures); the last kid was actually a man about the age of 25 but who had the mental capacity of a 12 year old. He had been a resident of Morningside hospital since he was 5 years old. This was the group that I would end up spending the next 31 days with.

31 days. I had been told "a couple of days for testing." After the first two weeks, my aunt and uncle came by to take me to a family picnic, but the nurse would not allow me to leave. When they contacted my doctor, we all found out that I had been committed to the hospital and could not leave without the consent of both my parents and the doctor. I felt even more abandoned at this point.

Eventually, after 30 days of testing, prodding, group therapy, in-hospital schooling, occupational therapy and some pretty interesting episodes with my fellow inmates, I was released back to my parents with the understanding that I would continue out-patient therapy. That lasted two years.

While I was in the hospital, my mother was told by Dr. Krause to go through my room and find anything that might be of help to him in working with me. She found a stash of pictures of semi-nude men and some relatively blase male porno (in today's standards), as well as some poetry that I had written and one book: Numbers by John Rechy.