SUMMER CAME fierce and steamy to Cincinnati in 1976, but John Arthur escaped to the woods, where a creek was filled with bluegill and a nest of snakes lived in a moss-covered Frigidaire buried beneath the water. He spent long afternoons digging for rocks or worms or kicking off his sneakers to wade in the creek. The clay at the bottom felt smooth and cool as it squished between his toes, and he would grin at his younger brother Curtis and their cousin Keith, who splashed and danced around him.
There was peace here, in the long shadows of old oak trees. The prospect of sixth grade in a school with few friends terrified John, but in the woods with his brother and cousin, he would laugh out loud as he struggled up hills covered with a fine layer of sand, clinging to vines and tree roots to steady himself. Late one afternoon, the three boys decided to edge past the creek, deeper than they had gone before. All around him, John smelled wood and wet grass, and he breathed deeply, the Cincinnati summer long behind him.
Suddenly, Keith stopped and pointed. “Look!”
The woods spanned one of the steepest hills in the city, and Keith was standing on the ledge at the highest point, fifty feet above a desolate stretch of dirt and rocks.
“It’s got to be a thousand feet down,” Keith called, peering over the ledge.
“The thousand-foot drop,” John said slowly.
About ten feet away, a massive tree had toppled and lay partly over the ledge, fixed to the side of the hill by its roots. Keith, who had decided several years earlier that he had been blessed with the skill set of the Incredible Hulk, scaled the trunk, then crawled on his stomach out over the ledge.
“Come on!” he called.
Curtis, two years younger than John, immediately followed. John hesitated. He was asthmatic, uncoordinated, and so thin that Curtis and Keith had taken to calling him “Spaghetti Noodle.” But even at ten, John was learning how to overcome weakness with willfulness, a defiance that would startle his family and humble those who doubted him.
At summer camp, a truck tire had once been placed between two teams, and Keith and John were pitted against each other, each charged with pulling the tire back to their side. Keith’s team whooped and hollered; he was older, stronger, and cockier than John. But John wrapped his skinny arms around the tire and dug his heels into the ground as Keith tugged, red-faced and sweaty. John’s head snapped back and forth as Keith pulled and pushed, but John had a death grip on the tire and wouldn’t let go. John knew he couldn’t win, but he could hang on just long enough for the other boys to rush in and help. John’s team captured the tire, the sweetest win in his young life.
“Come on,” Keith yelled again from the top of the ledge in the woods. It was John’s turn to scramble out onto the tree trunk.
Slowly, John lowered himself onto his stomach, grasped the prickly trunk, and scooted out over the ledge. He looked down, and for one glorious moment he felt as if he were dangling from the top of the world, surrounded by air and space, cut off from home and connected to this hushed corner of the woods in some indelible way. The three boys would return to the tree on the thousand-foot drop again and again, daring each other to scramble out over the ledge, sometimes on their stomachs, sometimes standing straight up with their arms out for balance.
Looking back, Keith thought Barry Mulvaney and his brothers seemed like little more than punk kids with nothing to do at the tail end of summer. But when they charged John, Curtis, and Keith in the woods late that August, Barry and his brothers were giants, a terrifying, stomping furor of pumped fists and curse words.
It had started the day before, when Barry wandered over to Keith, knocked his pitching machine to the ground, and punched him in the face. In the woods with his brothers, the feud fresh and simmering, Barry spotted Keith and his cousins and yelled, “Let’s get ’em!”
John, who hated to run, sucked in his breath and started sprinting, desperate to escape the woods and the shrieking boys who were chasing them. Curtis followed close behind. They ran past the creek and over the hills covered with sand. They ran along the dirt path all the way to Keith’s apartment complex at the base of the woods, where they yelled for their uncle.
“We’re being chased!” Curtis shouted as John, covered in mud and grass, struggled to catch his breath.
The two boys and Keith’s father ran into the breezeway and found Keith stumbling out of the woods, his face bloodied and swollen. Barry and his brothers had pinned him down on the bank of the creek. Keith tried to grab a tree branch to fight back, but it was three against one, and the punches kept coming.
“They just attacked,” he told his father, spitting blood. His eye was swollen shut.
John had never seen a man run as quickly as Keith’s father that afternoon, particularly one who was nearly six foot four and three hundred pounds. John thought briefly of his own father and wondered whether his dad would have given chase.
“You sons of bitches,” Keith’s father bellowed at Barry and his brothers. “You wolf-packed my boy.”
The color drained from Barry’s face as he and his brothers bolted toward home. They didn’t bother John, Curtis, or Keith again, but the woods never seemed quite the same.
John dreaded the short, cold days of winter and the mellow sunsets that forced him inside his family’s trim white house on Wolfangle Road, to his homework and his chores and his father’s fraternity paddle, one inch thick and solid wood, which Chester Arthur used on his sons with a navy man’s precision.
Years later, John’s mother, Marilyn, would say that Chester had turned on his oldest boy early, even before he learned to walk. John fidgeted in school and fumbled on the soccer field. He had been appointed goalie on Coach English’s team only because he was two heads taller than anyone else and didn’t care much for running. John didn’t want to play, but his father had threatened, “You call the coach yourself and tell him you’re a quitter.”
Once, John had grown so embarrassed during a physical fitness test at school, he ran straight off the running track, stumbled home, and hid in a tree until the principal coaxed him down. He hated his asthma inhaler. He hated wearing Brittania jeans when everyone else was wearing Levi’s. More than anything, John hated a word that he didn’t understand.
“Fag,” the kids hissed on the bus to school. John would stare straight ahead, fighting hot tears. “Fag,” they said again.
If Chester Arthur suspected his son was gay, he never said a word. Chester had grown up just across the Ohio River in northern Kentucky, the son of a candy maker called Pop Arthur, whose peanut brittle had made him something of a local celebrity. Handsome and trim, Chester joined the service after high school and spent two years in Pensacola learning to fly planes, but there was no war to fight in 1960, so the naval cadet came home to study economics. A businessman comforted by the consistency of numbers, he used graph paper to draw up a list of chores for his two sons.
John was assigned the vacuuming.
As chores went, this one wasn’t entirely wretched. John could lose himself in the humming of the machine, and the burnt-orange carpet in the living room was never really dirty anyway. He was careful to avoid his mother’s antique pie safe, a six-foot cabinet near the bay window that held Chester’s prized Marantz stereo system. John had watched his father open the doors to the cabinet with great flourish, his fingers lingering over the shiny knobs and switches. Once, he had played Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant” for John’s cousin Keith, and then went straight to the record store to buy Keith the album.
One winter night after dinner, John pulled the vacuum cleaner from the closet. The house smelled of fresh coffee and his mother’s cigarettes, and John was happy because his aunt had come for a visit. Paulette, Chester’s younger sister, was an insurance executive and community theater actress. Called “Tootie” for as long as anyone could remember, she would swing John around by his arms and dance to Carly Simon songs. “Again, Aunt Toot,” John would cry. “Again.”
Paulette had loved John like her own from the moment he was born, perhaps because she sensed that her brother found John a great disappointment. Chester’s garage was crowded with camping gear and tennis rackets, but John had never shown any interest. Paulette doted on her anxious nephew, told him he was perfect, and their easy conversations gave John great comfort.
Paulette and Marilyn were in the kitchen sipping coffee when John started running the vacuum across the living room floor. His father came up behind him and John stiffened.
“You’re not doing it right.” Chester’s voice was low and strained.
John glanced briefly at his father, fighting a bout of panic.
“You’re not doing it right,” Chester said again.
His father dropped to his hands and knees, pointing to lint on the carpet. “Look here! Look here!”
John pushed the vacuum. Chester followed on his heels. John pushed. His father pointed.
“You missed a spot! Look! Look!”
Paulette and Marilyn heard the shouting from the kitchen, and they tensed over their coffee. But it was 1976, and the nuances of child abuse were not yet part of mainstream discussion. Chester’s barbs were written off to a bad temper, irreconcilable differences between father and son. As the yelling grew louder, Paulette finally looked at Marilyn. “What’s wrong with him?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Marilyn said, her eyes fixed to the kitchen table. Petite and blonde, Marilyn Arthur had been a headstrong student in the early 1960s at Christ Hospital School of Nursing in Cincinnati, but Chester insisted she stay home when their boys were born, so Marilyn had painted the walls of their four-bedroom house yellow and white, cooked chicken and biscuits and nursed the tulips and rosebushes in the backyard. She could never quite figure out how to confront her husband, perhaps because Chester had grown up in a religious family that believed prayer, rather than deep discussion, could mend even the most troubled relationships. Though Chester had shrugged off faith as an adult, he communicated in short, clipped sentences, and Marilyn figured it was wiser just to stay quiet.
By the time Paulette reached the living room, John’s eyes were red and wet.
“There you go crying again.” Chester smirked as he sat back on his heels behind John, arms folded across his chest.
Paulette bent down and touched Chester’s arm. She knew the only way to stop her brother was to distract him, so she said in a rush, “Ches, what are you up to this weekend?” Chester turned to answer and John ran to his bedroom, where he liked to squeeze inside a tiny closet with a shuttered door that was three feet off the floor, a cubbyhole of sorts that had been cut into the wall. With a foot of space, there was just enough room for his Matchbox cars and Hardy Boys books.
Paulette left a few minutes later, fighting a headache and unsure what to do. Cincinnati was a conservative, religious city heavily populated by German and Irish immigrants. Interfering with her brother’s children was unimaginable, so Paulette went home, hugged her son Keith, and tried not to think about John’s stricken face.
Paulette would tell her nephew, “If you ever need me, I’ll come get you. Call me, and I’ll be there.”
In the kitchen, the refrigerator was covered with graph paper. The straight lines and sharp edges appealed to Chester, and as John grew older, there was a chart to log grades, a chart to log chores, a chart to log visitors, to be filled out in triplicate. Name. Length of stay. Nature of visit.
Curtis, who would earn a master’s degree in education, filled out the charts every Friday. He played tennis with his father and chatted about fishing trips. But John was different. He pushed back. It seemed to John as if his father had always been angry, even when he was pouring concrete in the backyard so his sons could have a swing set or leading John’s Indian Guide youth group on sweaty hikes along the banks of the Ohio River. Once, Chester spent an entire weekend building a pen for the family dog, a basset hound named Beauregard that John loved fiercely even though Beau dragged his fat belly through the grass and made John’s eyes itch.
The father who hiked and built swing sets seemed starkly different from the man with the fraternity paddle, who once thwacked both boys for talking with the lights on when they were supposed to be sleeping. Keith had been watching the television series Kung Fu in the next room when he heard his uncle yell, “Bend down!” and his cousins start to yelp.
But by high school in the early 1980s, the paddle had been stashed in the attic, and John had become the irreverent focal point of an eclectic social circle. During his junior year, he had sat alone in the bleachers during pep rallies, feeling every bit an outsider as his classmates in maroon and gold chanted, “Open the door! Bring the Spartans on the floor!” Then everything changed.
In conservative Cincinnati, John started listening to Depeche Mode and streaking his blond hair. He wore Pierre Cardin cologne and Izod sweaters. He began to use his sharp wit to win over classmates and, carousing with friends in the 1978 Mercury Zephyr he bought with money from odd jobs, John became the consummate entertainer.
He was drinking warm beer on a friend’s horse farm late on a Saturday night when someone suggested a game of “Truth or Drink.” John sat cross-legged in the grass across from one of his best friends, Wendy Bailey, a pretty brunette who had shown up with her new boyfriend. “Have you ever gone all the way with her?” Wendy’s boyfriend asked John in a tough-kid twang.
Wendy was too startled to respond, but John didn’t hesitate. Humor, he knew, attracted friends and deflected criticism. He looked down at his feet, blinked rapidly, and shook his head back and forth. “Aww. I’m going to have to drink on that question.”
Wendy’s eyes widened. “John? John?”
“I’m sorry, Wendy. I’m just going to have to drink on that one.”
John turned to his cousin Keith and delivered a well-practiced eye roll.
“Tell him the truth! Tell him!” Wendy said, frantic.
John just sipped his beer, looking at Wendy and her angry boyfriend. John would have gone on drinking except that Keith laughed and it was someone else’s turn to ask a question.
John stayed out of the house as much as he could in high school, especially when he brought home a report card with mediocre grades and his father banned him from using electricity as punishment. John didn’t mind sitting in the dark, but he begged Curtis to answer his phone calls. One afternoon, John came home from school and heard his parents arguing in the bedroom. It seemed their fighting was growing more intense, and John tried not to listen. Then he heard his name. “John,” his father said slowly, “is the biggest disappointment of my life.”
John kicked shut his bedroom door so he couldn’t hear any more.
He left home two years later and enrolled in the University of Cincinnati. Halfway through college, he came back to the house on Wolfangle Road to collect his late grandmother’s chairs and end tables, stashed in the basement, which he would use to furnish his first apartment. He had worried about going home, but Marilyn assured him that Chester would be out of the house when John got there.
John parked his car in the driveway, let himself in, and crept toward the basement. The yellow hallways were still, almost peaceful, as if a happy family had lived here all these years. He passed the tiny closet in the bedroom where he had stashed his game of Monopoly. He passed the kitchen where his mother sat and smoked. Then John heard a noise in the driveway and hurried outside. Chester shot out of his car, sprinted toward the house, and accused John of stealing furniture.
John dropped the table he was carrying and backed away. “It’s fine. I’ll just go and get some stuff from Goodwill.”
He got into his car and sped off, empty-handed.
“It got really, really bad, Aunt Toot,” he told Paulette a few weeks later. “I mean really, really bad.”
Years later, Paulette would take Chester’s fraternity paddle and throw it in the trash.
John never actually told his parents that he was gay. They found out in odd, disparate ways, which suited John fine, since a formal announcement would have seemed preposterous in a family that had always avoided discussions of substance. His mother found out when she walked into the bedroom of the apartment that John was renting near the University of Cincinnati and discovered her son sound asleep next to another man, who was six feet seven inches tall, with long legs that dangled off the edge of the double bed. She slipped out quietly and never asked John about it.
Looking back, it had always been clear that John was gay, and the discovery that he was dating men was really no discovery at all. The only person who needed confirmation was Chester, but he and Marilyn had divorced when John and Curtis were in college and John was no longer speaking to his father.
In 1988, just after John’s twenty-third birthday, Curtis agreed to meet Chester for lunch. Curtis would later leave Cincinnati for teaching and client-services corporate jobs in Chicago, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Saudi Arabia, and Toronto, but he would talk to John nearly every day, exchanging witty words and phrases to downplay the dysfunction in their family. “How is your father today?” John would tease his brother. Curtis would reply, “My father is great. How is your father?”
But Curtis loved Chester, and during visits, they would talk about politics and bridge games. Over lunch, Chester must have suspected something because he looked at Curtis and said, “John’s gay, right?”
“Yeah,” Curtis said slowly. He studied his father’s face, searching for signs of a reaction. But Chester sat perfectly still and said only, “Oh.”
“Do you have a problem with that?”
“No,” Chester said carefully. “I don’t think so.”
“Good. Because if you cut John out of your life, you’re going to cut me out, too.”
Curtis thought about telling his father more. John’s turbulent childhood had given way to an unsteady life and a string of dead-end jobs, one month at a silk flower shop, the next at a video store, and he was spending late nights dressed in black at Cincinnati’s gay bars. But Curtis decided it was best to say nothing.
One of John’s favorite spots had fifty-cent drinks and Pet Shop Boys remixes, and late on a Wednesday in 1992 with his old fraternity brother, Kevin Babb, John staggered toward his car when it was time to go home. Babb tried to pull the keys away.
“Kevin Babb-u-lous,” John said, lingering over the nickname that he had assigned his friend, who had a square jaw and auburn hair. “I’m fine.”
John tripped and nearly tumbled face-first into his powder-blue Crown Victoria, which he had inherited from his late grandmother. Though the car was huge—John dubbed it the Battlestar Galactica—he had fallen instantly for the crushed-velvet seats and dashboard made of vinyl.
“Keys.” Babb held out his hand.
For months, Babb had been staying close to his friend at bars and parties, concerned that John’s tipsy antics would lead to real trouble. It was a difficult decision for the budding investment adviser, who, like other gay men in Cincinnati in the early 1990s, had considered leaving town for more liberal cities like Chicago or San Francisco. Cincinnati had always been a vibrant Midwest hub, the first in the country to establish a Jewish hospital, a full-time fire department, and a professional baseball team. Its chili parlors and tidy riverfront thrived, and downtown, modern buildings were linked by long stretches of indoor skywalks.
But sin, some believed, had settled in the city.
The word was being spread by a handful of activists and organizations, including the National Coalition Against Pornography and Citizens for Decent Literature, which had set up offices in town and called on the sheriff and local politicians for support. Temptation was run clear across the river to Kentucky; in Cincinnati, adult bookstores and movie theaters were forced to close.
The movement was heavily focused on the gay community, particularly young gay men, who whispered about arbitrary arrests of “queers” in parks and clubs. Police had charged two men with disorderly conduct for creating a “physically offensive condition” after they were spotted holding hands in a parked car. And the director of Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center was indicted for obscenity after refusing to take down an exhibit by famed photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, which included explicit images of men in sadomasochistic poses. There was talk about local doctors, dentists, landlords, and hair stylists who had refused service to gay men, fearing AIDS, and employers who were giving pink slips to gay employees. GQ magazine would declare Cincinnati the “Town Without Pity.”
Though Babb worried, John barely took notice. In 1992, he had just turned twenty-six, had no real career path, and was living with five gay roommates in a house that his mother had bought for him. That spring, John had lunch with his friend Meb Wolfe, who, at five foot two and sporting a pixie haircut, had a shelf full of self-help books and an intense interest in finding a suitable boyfriend. She had grown close to John after college over meandering conversations about astrology and their joint debacles with unavailable men.
John looked at Wolfe and put his head in his hands.
“I’m never going to find anyone,” he whispered. “Who’s going to want to be with me anyway?”