A Busful of the Morbidly Obese

I should have spoken out earlier, well before health insurance reform found itself in its current jeopardy, but cowardice kept my lips sealed; I have found over the years that it isn’t a great idea to antagonize the powerful and ruthless, and these people are both. I am coming forward now, though. If this is my last journal entry, I ask only that my grave be kept clean and my memory revered.

For nearly a year in the early 80s, Scott Brown, the Senator-elect from Massachusetts, the guy whose replacement of the late Ted Kennedy means that the Democrats will no longer be able to keep the Republicans from filibustering, and I were lovers — homosexual lovers, lovers whose love Leviticus 18:22 emphatically forbade.

Like so many others, I first became aware of Scotty (my pet name for him; his for me was Johnny) after he posed for Cosmopolitan magazine. I was between heterosexual relationships at the time, lonely and confused. Jesus had spoken to me quite audibly at one point years before, but had then taken to mumbling, and finally become inaudible; I see now that he was testing my faith. I see now that I failed the test. This is a shame I shall live with for the rest of my days, or until I fall prey to Alzheimer’s.

I was reading Cosmo only for its articles. I would read "10 Things to Whisper to Him Just Before He Ejaculates That Will Make Him Your Sex Slave", for instance, and just mentally reverse all the pronouns. When I saw Scott’s photo spread, don’t imagine that I was transfixed. He wasn’t as cute as Burt Reynolds. He lacked Burt’s cocksure smirk. He lacked Burt’s irresistible furriness.

But then I saw him at the Boston disco where I would occasionally drop in for a cold beer or a couple of poppers in those days of loneliness and confusion, and realized the Cosmo photos hadn’t done him justice. He asked me to dance. I didn’t see any harm in it. After a couple of hours, he asked if I’d enjoy seeing his collection of Tom of Finland lithographs. I didn’t see any harm in it. Once back at his apartment, he asked if he could sodomize me. I’d had a lot more beer over the course of the evening than prudence would have poured, and didn’t see the harm in it. It hurt — this was before I began getting regular (every five years or so) prostate exams — but it felt so right.

We became inseparable. He was just starting law school at the time. I would bring him cups of hot chocolate while he studied. He thought it might be fun to pretend we were inmates in a maximum security correctional facility; he was now sufficiently comfortable with me to admit that he’d long fantasized about being the “daddy” in such a setting. What this turned out to mean was that he wanted me to wear makeup and tight cutoffs and to do his laundry. I’d been a member of a sort of a glam rock group at one point, so the makeup wasn’t a problem. I was already doing the laundry.

It wasn’t as though I didn’t still have an occasional heterosexual fantasy, mind you. Sometimes I thought about plugging Morgan Fairchild, for instance, making her gasp and moan, mussing her perfect coiffure.

After he passed the bar, we got harder-core. Scotty bought both of us leather outfits, and we became friends with a couple who’d converted their rumpus room into a dungeon. I wasn’t crazy about getting burned with cigarettes while suspended upside down and handcuffed from the ceiling, and I won’t deny that I had misgivings about Scotty trading me that one time to an outlaw motorcycle gang for a case of Michelob Lite, but the rest of it was kind of fun. The Property of Master Scotty tattoo on my chest is a constant reminder — at least on days that I look at myself in the mirror while shirtless -- of those happy times.

I think we’d both known they wouldn’t last forever. The beginning of the end came when the supervising partner at the corporate law firm where he worked after first passing the bar told him he’d better get himself married, and quick, if he ever wanted to make partner. I drifted back into heterosexuality — not, mind you, with Morgan, who not only didn’t return my calls, but just had to get that offensive, gratuitous restraining order against me. It would have killed her to meet for coffee? The realization that I’d allowed myself to have been an unwitting foot solder in the homosexual war on American decency hit me like a busful of the morbidly obese.

All I have left are the tat, some cigarette burn scars, and my memories. But what memories!

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