Religious guilt pretty much dispensed with, I made some progress at Northern Iowa, my undergraduate school (then State College of Iowa): my roommate for the last two of my three years there was very openly gay, so I was exposed to what was usually the secret world of gay life, and I told several friends that I was gay.  But I continued to think I could be straight.  I tried to date, even though my heart wasn't in it (nor was my body).  I had a rolonged, if forced, crush on Karen Gaither, and I hoped she would ask me to a big sorority dance.  She already had a date, but she did have a plan for me: one of her sorority sisters was the campus queen, was Miss Iowa, and was eventually a finalist for Miss America.  Jeanne was beautiful, blonde, and very shy; she was like one of Hitchcock's lovely, but almost frigid heroines.  Karen arranged a date between Jeanne and me.  Jeanne's beauty was so intimidating that no one had had the courage to ask her to the dance.  So there we were--Karen (in whom I was supposedly interested), her date, and geeky me with Miss Iowa.  I spent the entire evening, however, lusting after Karen's date: Mark Greenberg.  I had never met him, I never saw him again, and he ignored me completely, but even after nearly 50 years, I remember his name.  Only once in my three years at UNI did I get up the courage to make an overture to another man.  It took me three hours of helping him do research in the library (my excuse for following him around for so long), and then I stumbled through a proposition.  He said no.  He was polite, but his response was unambiguous.  And that ended my taking the initiative.

In the fall of 1966, having just turned 21, I went off, still a virgin, to be a graduate assistant at the University of Oklahoma.  I didn't know anyone there and will never forget how frightened I was when I walked across campus to teach my first class.  But making friends turned out to be easy, and I quickly got into the swing of graduate school life.  And then something totally unexpected happened.  I met a nice, Jewish girl, Barbara, and we began seeing each other.  For the first time in my life, I was sexually turned on by a woman.  I told her I was gay, but she thought she had converted me.  One night, someone asked us how long we'd been married, and Barbara said that we were getting married as soon as school was over.  Then she began telling people that we were getting married on May 28.  Instead of putting an end to this story, I played along.  One Saturday night, we had both had too much to drink, and I said, "Should we do it for real?"  She said yes, of course, and we ended the night thinking that I had just proposed seriously.  When I woke up Sunday morning, I was more lucid and had an Oh My God! What Have I Done? moment.  I called Barbara to try to undo the damage, but she had already called her parents in St. Louis and they had made plans to come the next weekend to meet their sheygetz future son-in-law.  I chickened out of backing out.

They came the next weekend, and since I was already into my long ersatz Jewish phase, I gained their approval.  Would I convert?  Yes.  The mother kept wishing that Shecky Greene, a comedian, could give me conversion lessons.  Would we raise our children Jewish?  Of course.  The adjective 'surreal' is badly overused, but there was something surreal about the entire weekend, based as it was on a series of lies.  Once they left, I summoned my none-too-plentiful courage and told Barbara that this was all a huge mistake.  She was devastated and even though the semester was nearing its end, she dropped out of school.  During the vacation between the spring and summer sessions, I contemplated what I had done and how stupid, to say nothing of cruel, it had been.  I knew I was gay.  I knew that I wanted to spend my life with a man.  And because of my cowardice and passivity, I had really hurt another person.  That was the belated end of all the pretense.  I knew that there were three men who were attracted to me, and I resolved that as soon as I returned, I would sleep with all three of them.  One, two, three.  Check, check, and check.  There was nothing romantic about it.  It was just finally turning the page forever on the silliness of not being who I was--and its consequences.

I'm sure I must have been nervous as I bicycled for a rendezvous with Robert, my choice as the first of the three.  But I don't really remember the nerves.  He greeted me in a robe, so their was no ambiguity about what was going to happen.  What I remember the most is the utter relief I felt.  Everything was so natural.  My mind wasn't elsewhere.  Nothing was complicated.  We might see each other again--or we might not.  It didn't make any difference.  I had not only talked about being gay; I had acted on it.  The floodgates had opened, and I had no intention of ever turning back.  What was also remarkable was that there were no repercussions from friends or colleagues.  This was the high 60s, as John Barth called the period, and the motto was "If it feels good, do it."  We talked blithely about polymorphous perversity and cited Norman O. Brown.  Make Love, Not War didn't discriminate about whom you made love to.  Although the process of coming out hadn't been easy, once the door was opened, even in a conservative state like Oklahoma, the university was a welcoming place to find one's niche.  And find it I did.

To be continued one last time: I tell the Army and my parents.