The Best Little Boy in the World by John Reid; Andrew Tobias

it?"
    "Good."
    "Good."
     

 

     
    It wasn't a bad life, surrounded by Yale's most attractive, preppie young men. A little frustrating, maybe.
    If only I had had someone to talk with. The single most important thing in my life that I thought about for hours each day, that determined what kinds of activities I would participate in, how I would spend my time, who I would sit with at lunch—the most important thing in my life had been kept a total secret for ten years now that I was turning twenty-one, about to graduate. (Applause, please.)
    Ten years, and I had never once been able to speak honestly, to open up.
    That's not a healthy situation.
    I was so inhibited and uptight and defensive I couldn't even get stoned. Marijuana had come into its own by my last year at Yale, and two of my best friends, sophomores named Brook and Fred, used to smoke all the time. Not wanting to be left out, I would sometimes smoke with them. I would smoke my head off down in their room, but I would not get stoned.
    Not even a buzz. Grass did not turn me on. What did were the occasional playful scraps Brook and I would have, the way college pals do. Brook had wrestled in high school back in Tulsa, I had wrestled in high school, we were both high (he on the dope, I on him)—and we would flex our competitive egos to see who could pin whom. I usually won when Brook was stoned because the grass dulled his competitive spirit. I could never pin Fred, because I could never goad him into action. He would sit in a lotus position on the floor, his back against the wall, too stoned to move, nothing on but his shorts, for hours on end.
    Wrestling around with Brook was a risky thing to do, I knew—not least because I couldn't keep something besides my competitive ego from flexing when we did. (Jesus! What if he notices? But he never did.) And it left me feeling guilty, it was such a sneaky, depraved thing to do. I felt worse about it when I would see the older bachelor faculty residents of the college trying to pick the same kind of friendly fights. They never fooled me. I knew exactly what they had in mind, or I thought I did. And when I saw myself acting like that, a dirty old perverted man aged, say, thirty-one—the future looked bleak.
    Although I knew what these resident perverts had in mind, and what the counselors in my boys' camp had in mind, and what the teachers in my high school had in mind, I would never have gone to them to talk about it. They would have vigorously, if not violently, denied it, just as I would have. These were the last people I wanted to confide in, let alone have a relationship with. I wanted to ride around Wyoming with Tommy or Brian or Chip or Hank—not sip sherry with some pudgy, hairy old faggot. I was terribly intolerant, but they were terribly threatening to me. They were everything I was afraid of becoming.
    Among all my fellow Yalies, surely there were others like me. There had to be. To find one!
    I even thought of sending "sexual preference questionnaires," marked "highly confidential, entirely anonymous," to my 1,000 classmates, or perhaps to just a few. We frequently received questionnaires of one sort or another. I would send mine out on forged Psychology Department letterhead and have the business reply cards return to a post office box registered, naturally, under a phony name. The "anonymous" questionnaires would have been preprinted with a code that showed up under ultraviolet light. Brilliant, no? The scheme was sufficiently foolproof for me to consider it every so often, and sufficiently preposterous for me never to summon the nerve to try it out.
    In our college we did have one "avowed homosexual," Jon Martin, a student in Brook's class and one of his good friends. Brook could afford to like this lisping, shrieking long-haired kid, because Brook was at peace with his masculinity. Jon was particularly threatening to me because along with exposing himself as a homosexual, he had taken it upon himself to