Books |
The Best Little Boy in the World
Andrew Tobias
By
Published: Jun 27, 2011
Category:
Memoir
Andrew Sullivan sobbed. (Big surprise.) On the street, we could hear cheers. And in our house, when the New York Senate made gay marriage legal in our state, there was immense relief that, in a season of unrelenting stupid, our side had scored at least one victory for smart, sane and decent.
I wrote to Stephen Mo Hanan, a forever friend and Head Butler contributor: “Getting married?”
“Damn straight,” he replied.
It was that kind of night.
My wife and I joked about bakers chugging Red Bull to keep up with the orders for wedding cakes, tuxedo rental shops reduced to empty hangers, florists with nothing to sell but carnations. Happy stuff. There can never be enough of it.
And then we asked ourselves why this happened.
In large part, credit goes to Governor Andrew Cuomo, who insisted on making good on a campaign promise, and then did so with a plan so brilliant you have to hope the guy in the White House is taking notes. [Michael Barbaro’s New York Times piece on Cuomo’s political maneuvering is just brilliant. You’ll do well to read every word.]
But it’s also — and here’s the deeper point — that public sentiment has shifted. We now know pretty much who doesn’t want gays to have equal rights: people who don’t know any. If you see a gay woman or man every day at the office — and you make it home every night without being propositioned in the bathroom — it’s pretty hard to sustain your homophobia. Frank Bruni, who is gay, made this point in the Times: “how common it now is for Americans to realize that they know and love people who are gay.”
This is, as it happens, a point that Andrew Tobias made years ago: "You like and respect us when you don’t realize we’re gay. So now please just continue to like and respect us once you do realize. It’s not that big a deal." That was in a book, “The Best Little Boy in the World Grows Up." [To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
“Grows Up” is a sequel to a book that Tobias wrote in his mid-20s, “The Best Little Boy in the World. “[To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.] Back in distant 1973, he published it under a pseudonym. Odd. A guy writes an entire book about coming to term with his sexuality — and then doesn’t quite come out. Hey, welcome to 1973.
I met Andy Tobias in 1964 — we were in the same class at college. I can’t remember when I learned he was gay; that I don’t recall says a lot about how little I cared. Obviously, it was a huge issue for him. Not that he was gay, but that others weren’t quite okay with that.
As he tells the story, he realized he was gay when he was 10. ("Don’t ask me how I knew. I was a gifted child.") Being gay was natural for him; it just wasn’t easy. ("I wasn’t a homosexual, for crying out loud.") After college, he joined a young company and made a fortune — on paper — before it all fell apart. He went to Harvard Business School and wrote a book about his business experience. Which were all nice stats for a guy in his 20s.
On the scoreboard of life, however, he wasn’t putting up any personal points. His idea of a Sunday was dropping a tab of mescaline and seeing “Easy Rider” — twice. And all the while, the message "I’m gay" pounding in his blood. Not out of regret; if there was ever a man who understood he didn’t have a "condition" or a "problem," it was Andrew Tobias:
So much deception! So much shame! What had I done wrong? What had any of us done wrong to have been born the way we were? And how did it hurt anyone if we simply were ourselves?
The book — and, for that matter, coming out — didn’t wreck his life. He wrote a bestseller about cosmetics czar Charles Revson. He became an important business writer, author of the classic The Only Investment Guide You’ll Ever Need. At the New Year’s get-together in South Carolina called Renaissance Weekend, he met a Presidential candidate named Bill Clinton. He is now Treasurer of the Democratic National Committee.
Those may be the lesser markers, Here are others. He acknowledged that “John Reid” was Andrew Tobias. He came out to his parents. He had a Real Relationship — and, like so many gay men, found himself, years later, eulogizing his lover at a memorial service. (Last winter, he buried another lover, his partner of 14 years, fashion designer Charles Nolan.) One thing is unchanging: his ability to produce withering commentary about his sexuality. Sample:
Dan Quayle told The New York Times that being gay was a choice, that it was the wrong choice, and that it was immoral. I’d love someone to do a profile on Dan Quayle. Find out from him when he made his choice. Was it difficult? What had been the pros and cons as he saw them at the time? Did he have any regrets?
Strip the laughter away, and you’re confronted with a simple message: It’s okay to be gay. To be anything, in fact, so long as you are whoever you are. "How we are perceived," Tobias has written, "depends in large part on how we perceive ourselves." Teenage suicide among boys who can’t cope with being gay has been much higher than suicide among other teens. Ditto for gay men.
Equality is a great life-enhancer — books like “The Best Little Boy” may be less necessary now. Thanks to the New York law and the laws of other states that are destined to follow, I like to think we’ll count many fewer gay suicides. And wouldn’t it sweet to banish shame?
It saddens me that many lifelong couples will continue to die without a wedding ring. It outrages me that, in some states, lovers cannot legally visit their lovers in the hospital. But this is not the moment to point fingers at the haters. It is a time to marvel. Just look at the faces of gay friends and co-workers. And then, because you can, you could cry for happy.
