Ultimately, I have Judith Krantz to thank.
When I was nine, I discovered in our family bookshelves a novel called Princess Daisy. The flap copy promised a tantalizing story of a real-life princess, stripped of title and money, making her way in the world alone under mysterious and tragic circumstances. Within minutes, I was hooked. The book had deposed Eastern European royalty marrying Hollywood ingenues, great beauties and handsome powerful men, and women who rise above the worst the world has to offer with grace and dignity. And sex. Lots and lots of sex. It made me all tingly in my prepubescent girl parts.
By the time I hit seventh grade, my life had changed in three very important ways. First, I had become a compulsive overeater and was putting on weight more quickly than I was putting on height. Second, I had become completely boy-crazy, obsessed with the idea of having a boyfriend. I learned pretty quickly that the fat girl doesn’t get the boyfriend, at least not in junior high. Fortunately, I wasn’t a social pariah: I had plenty of friends, and the boys, even if they didn’t want to go steady with me, at least didn’t groan in disgust when the bottle spun my way.
The third thing, one that was entirely the result of my reading endeavors, was that, at age thirteen, I was determined to get myself a gay friend. In so many of the sexy books I had been reading, the women had at least one very close, very fashionable, very witty gay male friend who gave them the hard truths and made perfect martinis. I was a few years away from needing a martini, but a gay friend seemed like just the thing. He would be a boy I could pal around with, a boy who would simultaneously understand my obsession with young men and have the sort of male insight to help me land one. Someone who would ensure that I wouldn’t face yet another Chicago winter without someone to snuggle with.
Within two months of starting my high school career, I had found a wide circle of friends, but had not yet landed a relationship. Apparently the fat girl doesn’t get the high school guy, either. I had, however, met Jody. Jody was in several of my classes and played flute in the band with me. He was tall and porcelain-skinned, with green-blue eyes and strawberry-blond hair. He was much, much prettier than I was. He was experimenting with drag and had mastered applying foundation without getting that dreaded visible mask effect; he was doing this master makeup blending on a jawline with stubble! He wore a delicate rhinestone earring in his right ear, a subtle smear of sapphire blue eyeliner, and a perfectly tattered tweed trenchcoat. He was my age, and totally, completely out.
Jody sat directly behind me in algebra. On the third day of class, I felt something slip into my hand. It was a note.
I swear to God, this man is making my ass twitch, he’s so boring. At what point do you think he will realize we are all smarter than he is? X = Y are we wasting our time with fucking algebra. What are you doing for lunch? P.S. I LOVE LOVE LOVE your boots, so sassy! I just want to lick them.
I had agonized over those boots, black leather with floral embroidery. They were right on the edge, either deliciously cool or totally dorky, and while I was convinced of the former in the store, I was equally convinced I had made a huge mistake as soon as I got them home. With that one compliment, I was his forever. We picked up hot dog lunches that day and sat on the mall in front of the school, eating and talking a blue streak about our common lack of current male companionship.
“Babycakes, the way you work that hot dog…you’re going to make some boy very lucky indeed!” he said.
This made me blush furiously, as I swelled up with pride. He laughed. “And you look good in red!”
“Fuck you,” I laughed, punching him lightly on the shoulder.
Jody sighed dramatically. “Oh, darling, wouldn’t that just be the simplest answer for both of us.”
Thus began my official career as a fag hag. Jody took me shopping in Chicago’s bustling Boystown and helped me find my own perfectly tattered tweed trench. Jody took me to Berlin on Belmont Avenue for my first gay nightclub experience, teaching me that if I made really great faces while I was dancing and kept my upper body swaying to the beat, no one would be able to tell that my feet didn’t move too much. Jody introduced me to my first drag queen, and explained about the pull-and-tuck method of hiding her package so as to be able to pull off the skin-tight Lycra jumpsuit she was wearing.
Jody became my tutor in all things male, as well as many things female; he wasn’t just prettier than me, he was in many ways a better girl than I was. He taught me how to put my makeup on properly; he taught me how to kiss. But I wasn’t longing for Jody to be my real boyfriend. While I thought he was beautiful, I wasn’t physically attracted to him. Mainly I loved how he made me feel. He told me I was wicked in a tone that implied that I was a film noir vixen of devastating sexual power. He said it in such a reverential voice that I knew he really believed it.
If I had been profoundly wrong about most of my decisions where boys were concerned, I was dead-on in one respect: Getting a gay boyfriend enriches life immeasurably.
I became better dressed. “Honey, those pants are ghastly. Come over here and look at these instead. See how this cut is going to make you look taller?”
My vocabulary increased. “The taint? You never heard of the taint? It’s that little piece of deliciousness between the balls and the butthole. T’aint the package, t’aint the tushie…”
I began to pepper conversation with witticisms. “He is from the Chinese province of DarLing!”
I learned more about the penis than previously thought imaginable. “No, just lick underneath the rim of the head, that’s where the really sensitive part is.”
Under Jody’s tutelage, in addition to the ever-growing list of naughty books I’d read—not to mention that I was sporting an awe-inspiring D-cup rack—I became the queen of party hookups. I never lacked for male attention, albeit drunken, at any of our weekend gatherings or after-school get-togethers. But no matter how charming my conversation, how deft my kissing, how readily I allowed access to second base, none of those encounters ever resulted in my party playmate pursuing anything further. Making out drunk or high at a party? No problem. Furtive gropings in the back of the bus on the way back from a band competition? I was always popular. Escorting me to the homecoming dance? Not so much.
High school moved along at its petty pace as I stopped getting taller, continued getting wider, outgrew my awkward stage of glasses and braces and an unfortunate short haircut, and entered into an awkward stage of overmoussed hair and royal blue mascara. I had the requisite fake ID to get into clubs or buy beer at local liquor stores, and the tits to ensure no one ever actually asked to see it. I had a car named Bippy, a part-time job as a receptionist for my parents’ real estate business, and a large collection of rhinestone pins and Salvation Army jackets. I had lost my virginity by design to a good straight male friend, having lost patience waiting for a true love to show up and deflower me. Jody had come up with the idea; he said he would have done it himself, but he had looked pretty nauseated at the reality of it.
Jody was the perfect playmate, and while we weren’t friends to the exclusion of others in a My So-Called Life kind of way, we spent a reasonable amount of time hanging out together. We went dancing at Medusa and the Mars Bar. We went shopping on Halsted and at the Water Tower. We ditched a whole day of school to watch a sneak preview of The Unbearable Lightness of Being at the Fine Arts Theater. We tried cruising for boys at the mall, but that never worked; straight boys always assumed we were a couple, and if Jody ever actually found another age-appropriate gay boy, I quickly became extraneous and bored.
By senior year, Jody had been joined by Mikey, a less effeminate, less flamboyant (but no less gay) boy whom I’d bonded with while working on the literary magazine.
Still, I had no boyfriend.
I never saw my size as an imperfection, and neither did Jody or Mikey. We brashly viewed my weight as protecting me from shallow guys who wouldn’t be worth my time or energy. I pitied the skinny girls as much as I envied them. They might have an easier time with the cool clothes, and they never lacked for boyfriends, but could they ever know that those boys liked them for who they were inside? All three of us wanted what they had, those magical girls: the handholding, the never worrying about having someone to dance with, the ability to buy a pair of boots that went over the calf. The secret jokes and huge class rings from boyfriends that were made small enough to fit delicate fingers with layers of tape.
Still, I believed I was both lovable and physically desirable, and Jody and Mikey believed it, too. As much as I longed for a real boyfriend in my life, for someone to devote myself to, for the romance I had been reading about for so long, I never thought losing weight was the way to get there. I just needed to meet a better quality of guy. While much of this confidence was acquired from a lifetime of loving support from my family, and some was a part of my natural personality, a great deal had to do with Jody and Mikey and their constant reaffirmation of my good qualities and desirable attributes.
“You totally need a real man,” Jody would say. “These little boys just don’t get you. You’re too smart for them. You need someone mature.”
“I know!” I would reply every time. “These children we go to school with are nice as friends and all, but I mean, really! They have no idea what a relationship is about! I just need to find someone more on my own intellectual level, you know? Someone who doesn’t care if there are only eight band uniforms after me, and six of them are being worn by football players.”
Band uniforms, you see, were numbered according to size. Unisex, they got both taller and wider as the numbers went up. There were 115 uniforms owned by the band. I was number 107. This fact was gloriously listed for all to see on the large assignment sheets in the uniform room. And yes, most of the defensive linemen from our football team filled in 108–113, joining band being an easier way to complete the school’s music requirement than music-theory or-history classes. The pants on 107 were so long on me that they were hemmed to my knees, but the jacket at least fit over my ass.
“You’re built like a woman,” Mikey would rail. “Women are supposed to have curves. You’re not supposed to be some stick. You aren’t Edie Sedgwick, for Christ’s sake.”
“I know that, and you know that,” I replied. “But these idiot boys don’t know that. And frankly I need to get laid.”
“Can I get an amen to that!” Jody threw his hands in the air like he was receiving the Holy Ghost.
Anyone who thinks the boys’ locker room is the center of the lewd and crude universe has never spent time with a sexually active girl and her favorite gays. At seventeen, I was a teenage girl who had given up the goods, and now I had the good fortune to be dishing with my gay boyfriends. The three of us would turn instantly from mooning, cooing romantics into lust-driven psychotics, with language that would make sailors blush. We bandied about words like girth, engaged in the age-old debate about spitting versus swallowing, and had competitions to see how many different positions we could name in one minute.
“He doesn’t exactly fill out his track pants in a meaningful way,” Mikey might say in reference to a new student teacher in gym.
“One never knows for sure,” Jody would pipe in. “Bobby was the same way. Looked like a total absence of junk unless we were fooling around, and then when it came down to business, it was like he was smuggling three pounds of grapes in his briefs.”
Mikey was the one who first suggested that I look outside of school for someone a little more mature. We both had agreed that someone older wouldn’t expect a girl to be the size of a French fry, and I embraced that ideal with all the fervor of a Grail-tormented knight of yore.
Ah, the older men of my youth.
Some of these guys had graduated when I was a freshman and were now in college, but still showed up at the parties when they were in town. There was a particularly handsome twenty-something waiter at an ice cream parlor where our crew hung out. I dragged my friends there twice a week for four months so that I could flirt with this devastatingly cute guy. (This did wonders for the size of my ass.) I finally got up the nerve to leave him my number on the table one night. But he never called. I assumed he must be gay, and I worried that I’d never find a straight guy.
Mikey consoled me by telling me that the eighties were a tough time for gaydar, what with all the androgyny in fashion. “It’s Robert Smith’s fault, princess, all these boys in eyeliner—anyone would be confused.”
Despite our best intentions and well-laid plans, when prom time came, it was Jody who escorted me, dapper in a tuxedo with a cream silk scarf jaunty around his neck. He and Mikey took turns dancing with me all night and telling me how beautiful I was. And while I would have loved to spend the night after prom in a hotel room in the arms of a lover, I consoled myself with the knowledge that at least my escort genuinely loved me, and I wouldn’t have to worry about prom-night date rape.
I emigrated East for college, and set about immediately to fill the void in my life formerly occupied by Jody and Mikey. Jody decided to travel for a time instead of going to college, and Mikey headed to California. In a time before cell phones and e-mail, and with our new adventures taking precedence, we fell out of touch the way high school friends often do. But when one door closes, another opens: Eli lived exactly one floor below me in my freshman dorm, and we sniffed each other out within thirty-six hours of our arrival. He had been wandering on the girls’ floor and stopped in my open doorway to make a window treatment recommendation.
“You might want to extend that left side a bit beyond the actual window,” he purred in a slight Southern drawl from the doorway.
“Really? Over the wall? Why?” I asked.
“Your window isn’t centered on that wall. It is over to the right six inches or so. If you add six inches to the curtain on the opposite side you’ll give the illusion of the window being centered, that’s all.”
We looked each other up and down. His khakis were pressed, his loafers battered artfully, the blue oxford well-worn and fraying delicately at the sleeves and collar, with a wide brown belt worn a little low on slim hips. He took in my full size-18 amplitude, the baggy black pants, the freshly minted Brandeis sweatshirt, the wrestling shoes.
“Are you a budding interior designer?” I asked coyly.
“Maybe.” He grinned. “Or I could be a florist.”
“Or a caterer,” I offered.
“Hair stylist is always an option,” he laughed.
“Don’t sell yourself short, you could be a lawyer.” I paused for dramatic effect. “I hear Lambda always needs good people.”
This cracked us up, and within two hours he had completely rearranged my furniture, referred to three other guys from our dorm as “she,” “Nancy,” or “Miss Thang,” taken a scissors to my sweatshirt, and given me a thorough tutorial on the art of the blow job.
“Don’t give up the goods too quick, honey. These college boys will move on to the next girl in a heartbeat unless you give them a reason to come back. And getting them off without getting them naked is a guaran-damn-tee of a follow-up phone call. Now, you wanna start by firmly shaking hands with the monster…”
Eli assured me that by parceling out my gifts, I could be reasonably sure of three to four dates, by which time, “They’ll have fallen in love with you despite themselves!”
Eli wasn’t wrong, and with his guidance I managed to spend the better part of my freshman and sophomore years having intense mini-relationships of anywhere from one to four months.
A few choice tips from Eli worked wonders. It wasn’t all about sex, either. Eli helped bring out my inner seductress, even when I wasn’t in the bedroom, and I quickly gained new confidence.
I learned new social skills. “You’re a natural flirt, kiddo, but you lack mystery. Get ’em hooked with the humor, the light stuff. But when it comes to real information, be cagey. Watch me, a little I-know-a-secret kind of smile, no teeth, a lowering and slow raise of the eyes, and a shrug. Then some innocuous comment like, ‘You know how it is,’ or ‘Let’s speak of more pleasant things,’ and he’ll be chomping at the bit to really know you.”
I appreciated it even when the truths Eli told me were hard to hear.
“Dollface, I adore you. And I think you are the most beautiful, sexy, spectacular broad on this whole campus. But as much as you want boys to love you for who you are and ignore that you color outside the lines of conventionally accepted physical beauty, you yourself are a total looks queen. All these boys you moon over are handsome and fit and shiny like a damned Calvin Klein ad. When have you ever gotten a crush on some little schlubby guy with sloped shoulders and a weak chin, hmm? Your ideal of attractiveness is just as fucked up as theirs, and if you don’t open your horizons a bit, you are going to miss out on some men who are just as extraordinary as you, and just as alternatively beautiful.”
Eli spent his junior year abroad in Israel, and then transferred out of Brandeis to pursue a career as a rabbi. I missed his warm wit and caustic observations on life. His time in the Holy Land had reinforced his personal commitment to Judaism, which was wonderful for him, but put something of a barrier between us, as I am not religious. And it is difficult to talk about sex with an about-to-be rabbi. But his sage advice to me about my tastes in men broadened my criteria. I threw myself headlong into a relationship with my future ex-husband and lost my drive to pursue a constant companion of the homo variety.
However, once a hag, always a hag: After returning to Chicago and enduring graduate school, a wedding, and teaching high school English, I found myself working for a professional theater company, running their education programs. In one fell swoop, my social arena broadened to include more gay boyfriends than even I could juggle. My circle of gays even had subsets:
There were my shopping gays, who introduced me to the thrift stores where shabby was indeed chic: “It’s got great lines, kiddo, just strip that yellow paint off it. Cross my heart.”
My bitchy gays, who would sit for hours in my living room drinking wine and dishing the dirt on everyone: “I’m serious, he actually showed up to rehearsal high as a kite, and fell asleep during table work!”
My dancing gays, who kept me out far too late, and took me back to Berlin for the first time since Jody and I had last gotten our groove on, the summer after graduation: “Baby, it’s already two in the morning, you might as well keep dancing!”
My dinner-party gays, who took my natural love of cooking and entertaining and sent me into the stratosphere: “I found the best place for wild mushrooms ever, come get me and we’ll practice risotto tonight!”
My hang-at-the-bar gays: “Well, we could either go sing show tunes at Sidetrack or shoot pool at the Four Moon. Your choice.”
My sub-for-the-couchbound-husband gays: “Of course I want to go to the opera tomorrow!”
And of course, there were my sex-coach gays. The latter attempted to assist me in rekindling, albeit unsuccessfully, the spark in my marital boudoir: “Have you tried the spanky spanky? He’s a corporate guy, they always like the submissive role.” The failure therein was not their fault but my own. (Do not ever marry someone to whom you are only peripherally attracted and who is boring in bed. It won’t get better with time. No matter how many wise homosexuals offer guidance.)
After my divorce in 2001, my gay boyfriends became more essential to me than ever before:
“You are taking out a personal ad. I’ll help you. And I promise not to laugh if you meet a couple of losers.”
“I’m coming over. No one should watch a Thirtysomething marathon alone.”
“Get off the couch and come meet me. This place is crawling with straight boys and martinis.”
“It isn’t your job to make someone happy if they aren’t making you happy. Of course you’re not a failure!”
“I’m sure it was just the beer, sweetie, of course he’s attracted to you.”
“I think we need new shoes.”
They pushed me with firm directive back into the dating world and schooled me on how things had changed since I was last single.
“It’s all about the online research. Google him, baby, Google him!”
They talked me through how to get over my first-time-naked-with a-new-boy anxiety: “Wine, not liquor, two glasses, not four, and candle-light, not electric.”
And how to delicately handle a limp lover who has been overserved: “Take his face in your hands, kiss him gently on the lips, and tell him that you’ll blow him for the same number of minutes he goes down on you.”
They built up my self-confidence and my lingerie collection: “Of course you can wear a garter belt! On those luscious, creamy thighs?”
They encouraged me to discard all the devices from my nightstand that had gotten me through the last years of my marriage, and helped me acquire a totally new set of toys that were not only functional, but yes, pretty, too: “Oooh, look at this one, it’s lavender!”
They helped me buy a new bed, introduced me to six-hundred-thread-count sheets, and then showed me how to find and attend to the male G-spot: “Okay, first, shower him—you know how lackluster straight-boy hygiene can be. Then use some lube and your middle finger…about two and a half inches in, make a motion like you’re beckoning him…and for heaven’s sake, don’t make that face when you do it!”
For all the wonderful support of family and colleagues and friends, it was my gays who really got me through the dark days and back out into the spotlight, both in and out of the bedroom. A pink spotlight, no less.
So when a recent new lover gasped to me, “I think I lost consciousness for a second there—that may be the best sex I have ever had,” I just snuggled up to him and said, “Yeah, I know. Thank God for gay men.”
Judith Krantz would be proud.