Theater just might have been the most fun thing I did while in college. Acting, writing music for productions, working through rehearsals, all of it was fun to me.
The spring of my senior year we did
the Lion in Winter
. I had just done the lead in the last production, so I was rather surprised when the head of the drama department approached me and asked if I’d consider taking the part as Richard in the play. I was flattered and told him so. Why me, I asked. I knew immediately the answers he gave me weren’t the real reason. I listened and wondered. Since he and I played tennis most everyday throughout the year, when he finished I asked him for the real reason.
"Richard is gay," he muttered, "You’re probably the only one who will take the part."
I took the part.
Having done three years in the Army right after high school, I was an older college student by age standards for that day. Three years doesn’t sound like much difference now, but then it did. I wasn’t involved on campus very much considering that I was working two night jobs and carrying a full course load. The contact I had with other students was pretty much limited to the classroom and play rehearsals.
After reading the play I began to construct a character profile for Richard built around a brutal personality. As rehearsals moved forward, I worked on Richard’s brutality, his aggressiveness, his desire to create an intimidating persona. I didn’t tell anyone but to develop Richard, I used the image of a small college football player who never got a scholarship offer to a major university. Pompous bluster ruled the day for Richard. It worked for me, and the director liked the Richard she saw.
All of it was designed to carry the character within the play until the fateful lines from Richard’s brother that identified Richard as a man who "likes to play with boys."
My interaction with other cast members and production staff was rather limited, but fun nonetheless. I knew most of them only casually, but I liked them. I could tell that Richard’s sexuality was a question for some of them in so far as how it would all wash out and how was it that I was able to play a gay man and whether or not my comfort with playing a gay man might be because I was myself gay. No one asked, but they wondered. No collection of people in a small southern town wouldn’t.
No one knew me well enough to ask though. Or at least they didn’t, until Beth.
Beth was one of the born again Christians that felt the drama department should praise the lord, her Lord. She was as much an enigma to me as I was to her, but it was Beth who had the courage to carry the question straight to me after a late rehearsal one night.
She and I sat alone in front of a long mirror pulling off make-up after a mock dress rehearsal. We didn’t speak, there seemed to be no topic we might hold in common.
Out of the blue, Beth asked, "John, may I ask you something?"
"Sure," I told her, expecting an invitation to next Sunday’s prayer service.
"Are you gay?" she asked directly, turning to me for my reaction.
I held her gaze through the mirror before answering, "I’ve been happy most of life, yeah."
"I mean, are you a homosexual?" she went on not missing a beat.
I turned to her then and gathered a response.
"Beth," I began, "I’ll be honest with you. It’s sometimes hard to know how to answer that question. If someone asks me that hoping that I will tell them I’m straight so they can think I’m okay, then if I say I’m straight, then by inference I’ve slammed gay people. So I don’t answer the question for those people out of respect for gay people.
"Are you one of those people?" I asked her.
"The Bible says that homosexuality is wrong," she answered.
"Okay, Beth, I see," I told her, "Then I won’t answer your question."
"But homosexuality is wrong," she went on, assuming I was gay, "And it’s not natural."
"Not natural?" I asked.
"Yes," she said with surprising candor, "A man’s penis belongs in a woman’s vagina, not a man’s anus."
The smile on my face must have cracked my make-up. "You mean a man’s cock should fuck a woman’s pussy, not a man’s ass?" I asked her for clarification and fun.
She hardly blushed and it surprised me.
"Yes," was all she said.
"How is that more natural?" I asked her.
"In many ways," she went on quickly, "One evidence is simply that it feels better, feels more right with the way things should be."
"How should I know?" I pressed her, "How should I know you could be any better or natural than any man I might meet?"
