Memoirs: Chapter Three

College


When I graduated from Los Angeles High School in the spring of 1952 it was assumed as a matter of course that I would go to a university.  After all my parents had attended college, and I was clearly destined for a white-collar career, quite possibly as an academic myself.  For that I would need a decent education.  Moreover, as a culture vulture I craved this instruction for its own sake.

Ideally I would have liked to have attended one of the major Eastern schools, but for financial reasons that was out of the question. I would go to the University of California at Los Angeles.  UCLA admitted students selectively, but my grades were good enough that I was sure to get in.

One of the two flagship universities in the University of California (alongside “Cal”; the University of California, Berkeley), UCLA is located in the Westwood area of Los Angeles.  It was founded in 1919.  The university has been labeled one of the “Public Ivies." That is, it is an institution funded mainly from tax revenues and boasting a quality of education comparable to the private universities in the Ivy League.

The original four buildings of the campus were the College Library (now the Powell Library); Royce Hall; the Physics-Biology Building; and the Chemistry Building, all arrayed around a quadrangular courtyard.  In a variation on the traditional Collegiate Gothic, the buildings were designed in a version of the Italian Romanesque style. Over the years they have become familiar because of the many movies that have been shot on the campus.

Several major American universities, including Stanford and Rice, have buildings in the Romanesque revival style. However, the core structures at UCLA are the only ones known to me with a specific Italian source, the church of Sant'Ambrogio in Milan.  This choice seems to reflect the perception, common in former years, that Southern California's pleasant climate merited the name of the New Riviera.

The four years I spent at UCLA (1952-56) were more congenial than the previous three in high school, in large measure because most of the rowdies were not college material, leaving the cohort of more serious students as my classmates. In fact two close friends from LA High School, Paul H. and Chuck McC. joined me at the Westwood campus. UCLA also hosted older students on GI Bill scholarships, strongly committed to making something of the gift of their college years. Because of the effort it took to get there, out-of-state students and foreigners were generally serious.  While it had its own supply of fraternity and sorority people, UCLA was not a "party school,"

Apart from the reputation of the university, tuition was only $50 a semester. This was lucky, because there were no student loans to speak of in those days.  I supported myself with a job in the library.  An additional advantage was that I could stay at home with my parents, saving me the expense of living in a dorm or joining another student in a rented apartment.  However getting to the university was quite a trek.  I generally took a streetcar to the end of the line, then one bus, and then at Westwood Boulevard transferring to another bus.  If classes were early I was sometimes late.


MY STUDIES

Having abandoned my earlier interest in the natural sciences, I targeted the humanities, with the aim (ultimately achieved) of making a career by qualifying as a professor in that realm. I began by majoring in classics, then switched to history. Only in my third year at UCLA did I settle on art history, a field previously unknown to me. This major appealed to me not as an artist (here I was only a dabbler), but because of the rich interdisciplinary vistas it revealed. At first I was strongly drawn to Chinese art (and still am), but I ended up becoming a medievalist, a choice responding to a certain muffled spirituality in my make-up.

From the start it was clear that I would make my way in the  humanities, but during the first two years UCLA required that students fulfill a distribution requirement.  The menu included both the natural and the biological sciences.  I liked the introductory courses I took in astronomy, geology, and microbiology.

I cannot say the same for psychology, which was taught by a pedantic practitioner of rat psychology, as the current form of behaviorism was termed.  The instructor rejected Freudian psychoanalysis (about which I had my own reservations), but I didn't cotton onto what he was offering either.  It seems to me that classical conditioning theory - the underlying rationale - has some limited validity.  Some things, like irregular Latin verbs, are best learned by reinforcement, that is, by running through them over and over again.  Ceasing this practice leads to fading and ultimately extinction.  But there are many things that are not learned in this way.  In addition to the professor's maddening lecturers, I was required to participate in a sadistic experiment in which I had to plunge my foot in a bucket of ice water for what seemed to me an inordinate period of time.  Today such nonconsensual experiments on human subjects are forbidden - and rightly so.

Another unfortunate course purported to be an introduction to philosophy.  Obviously bored, the instructor provided only the most perfunctory account of the history of the field prior to the twentieth century.  Then he launched into his true passion- if that is the right term - the austerities of logical positivism.  This school of philosophy, tracing its roots back to Vienna in the 1920s, claimed that metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics were all nonsense.  The only valid goal for philosophy was natural science.  But since the scientists were doing quite well on their own, and did not need the guidance of zealots who had no real laboratory experience - or (sometimes it seemed to me), no real experience of any kind.

The teachers of those two UCLA courses in psychology and philosophy disappointed me. Not so the historian Eugen Weber. His lectures, combining telling detail with astute generalizations, were enthralling. He was handsome and self-assured, impressing us all by his cosmopolitanism. Eugen was born in Bucharest of (I suppose) Jewish parents. When he was 12, his parents were astute enough to enroll him in an English boarding school. After the war, he discovered his true calling: the history of modern France.

Some observers have stressed Weber’s methodological empiricism and avoidance of grand themes. This is not my recollection, though perhaps he became more skeptical as he went along. To be sure, Weber had a practical side, derived from a serious fund of experience. Once (anent the Crusaders) I fatuously remarked about how single combat must be more satisfying than bombardment and other form of “distance warfare.” He immediately contradicted me, saying that he had had to bayonet enemy soldiers when he was with the British Army in Sicily. It was not satisfying at all.

Since Weber’s political views inclined to the left, it might seem surprising that he chose as his first major research project the Action Française, a far-right movement. In those days, we thought that the French were all lefties, and only gradually did one become aware (in large measure because of Weber’s work) that France had been, regrettably, a hothouse of proto-fascist thought.

Many will have seen Eugen Weber on public television in the 52-part series “The Western Tradition,” produced in 1989 by WGBH in Boston. Perhaps because I had heard much of the material in class thirty years before, I was not so impressed. In fact, the television lectures were a kind of elegy for a particular concept of Europe, which now seems dated and exclusivist. Some have even gone so far as to call this approach “Nato history,” a kind of enabling instrument masking some of the seamier aspects of Cold War realpolitik.

In my college days one might have said that Weber was a “refugee.” This term is unkind. The best rubric for this geographic and intellectual status is “the Transatlantic Migration.” Being Romanian with an English education, Weber was a somewhat unusual example of these creative people.  He made a great impression on me, foreshadowing my meetings with other scholars from Central and Eastern Europe.

Apart from my formal studies, I learned a good deal through conversations with advanced students in the social sciences, especially sociology and anthropology. Ultimately, I found sociology unrewarding because of its reductive tendency to regard human beings as little more than mirrors passively reflecting contents projected on them by society. In those days of conformity, "adjustment," that is, accepting one's lot, was held up as the ideal. This dismal imperative suppressed human agency. I couldn't go along with this, because active intervention on my own behalf was essential I felt that I must go beyond the constricting setting of Southern California and even the US. This task would call for a big effort.

Of course, with such works as The Lonely Crowd by David Riesman et al., sociology enjoyed much more prestige then than it does now. I can't say that I regret the decline of this discipline with its endless platitudes, not to speak of the many studies replicating what experience had already abundantly shown to be true.

I thought better of anthropology. This connection led to my reading of a paper by Claude Lévi-Strauss, who was then little known. The French scholar has proved one of my lifelong guides. Recently I began reading him once again. I was impressed by anthropology's ambition to provide a comprehensive description of an entire society - indeed of many societies. Having previously been an enthusiast for Arnold Toynbee, I was drawn to such portrayals. In the last analysis, though, I wanted them to address high cultures. Europe beckoned.

By way of outreach, I continued to assuage my culture-vulture penchants by forming a college humanities club, called “Investigations.” We met at my parents' home, covering a variety of themes, including novels, painting, and music.  There was even an Investigations String Quartet.  Despite my efforts, the meetings were not very popular, and I had to dragoon attendees. Such was the work of culture mongering - hard, but somebody had to do it.


SEX AND FRIENDSHIPS

Some years ago David Halperin, a gay professor of classics at the University of Michigan, decided to offer a course on “How to Be Gay.” This announcement provoked consternation, leading to a hostile discussion in the state legislature. Subsequently, he published a book with this title.  What I think Professor Halperin has in mind is an exploration of the fact that becoming gay is inevitably a process. One does not achieve this identity all of a sudden, emerging fully developed like Athena from the head of Zeus. The AHA! moment simply does not occur, either at the point where one acknowledges one’s orientation to oneself, through introspection, or at the point of declaring oneself (coming out). Instead, there is a complex process of negotiation, extending over some years, in which one gradually adjusts one’s expectations to social and psychic realities. Much as we would like to, we cannot shape our own situation just as we wish, but must work within the parameters of what is possible. All the same, our response must be active, and not just passive and accepting. I will illustrate this truism by discussing two gay circles, one of which became known to me after the fact, the other being one I actually participated in.

In my previous chapter, "Hapless in High School," I have already alluded to the clandestine gay circle in LA High. in my previous chapter, It flourished under my very nose. Only when I got to college did I learn from my friend Chuck McC. of the true nature of this bunch. As it formed something of a contrast to the group that I actually joined at UCLA, I will now say something more about this earlier group, as it formed (retrospectively) a benchmark for my later experiences.

Chuck’s high school circle was essentially democratic. The boys either took part in group sex (generally jerking off) or made themselves available to others, if you will, as fuck buddies. While some members of the group were more prominent than others, there was no clear leader.

Above all, the binary differentiation between confirmed gays (queens) and “trade” (men available for gay sex, but not stereotypical) had not taken place. Some members of the circle probably assumed that they would “turn straight” one day (as Chuck ultimately did). There was a silver lining, for the boys probably felt that, with their ready access to a form of sex that quenched their raging hormones, they were better off than most of their heterosexual peers, who had to be content with mere petting. The situation combined hedonism with flexibility.

How did the pattern prevailing in this group originate? Was it something ad hoc, like the Nicaraguan village of deaf mutes who invented their own sign language? Probably not, in that some of the boys had probably previously engaged in sex play with younger boys in circle jerks and similar gatherings.


THE QUEENS' CIRCLE

I turn now to an important theme: the gay circle I joined at UCLA. The fluidity of identity characterizing the high school circle (which had of course disbanded) yielded to a fixed personality type, that of the queen. For many the new guise proved a lasting one. Most of the individuals who had come together in the UCLA circle continued to see one another regularly after graduation, evolving into a social amalgam they called “the Loved Ones” (an ironic reference to the Evelyn Waugh novel). I was a peripheral member of the group, but once I moved away in 1956, had no further relations with it.

At UCLA the daily gatherings of the circle were charged with powerful underlying currents of cynicism and acerbity. These corrosive solvents surely reflected internalized homophobia, a condition difficult to escape in those years of conformity. Turned inwardly, the negativity served to consolidate the norms of the group. And in fact much of the dishing was of each other, and of other gays who did not conform to the circle’s norms.

Internally, a hierarchy was generally recognized. What was this hierarchy based upon? First, it depended on looks and “endowment." They were all size queens. While most didn't have much to offer in that department, this deficiency did not prevent them from making catty comments about the skimpy "meat" of men they saw. So looks mattered most, facially and in terms of genitalia. Grotesquely, this criterion was called "standards." In fact the group had only the faintest idea of what might actually constitute standards.

Only with great difficulty could a homely person occupy one of the higher spots in the pecking order. Under exceptional circumstances this status could be achieved by marshaling the resources of the second and ultimately decisive resource. That was the ability to dish and give attitude. We did not use the term at the time, but attitude was indeed the key. It emerged in the verbal sallies that qualified (dubiously) as wit, and in the hauteur of a challenging gaze that ostensibly summed up the confrontational stance of the group. "She for he" put downs were common.

Under circumstances less benign than the 1950s college setting, group members would have been repeatedly beaten up. Their bravado was hollow - but as it was never put to the test, they could continue to nourish their illusions. And of course to keep “camping up a storm,” the latter-day gay version of the venerable bohemian practice of “épater le bourgeois.”

The solidarity of the group, such as it was, was reinforced by a pervasive scorn and belittling of outsiders. Sometimes these targeted individuals were the subject of “reading” in which their pretensions to heterosexual normality were ostensibly exposed as a sham; they actually were gay, but were just not willing to acknowledge it. In reality this process of reading was counterproductive, because in applying it across the board, the pool of desirable males would inevitably shrink. Thus tarnished, the object of this scorn, could no longer serve as a sexual object. We did not want to sleep with people like ourselves. By the way, such ascriptions were not always inaccurate. I remember scoffing when I heard that Rock Hudson was gay. I should not have.

By now it will be clear that the Loved Ones could not boast many positive features. Puffed up and preening because of their sense of being special, the members had little incentive to change their ways. Yet the group showed one remarkable distinction, one that would have been less likely before and after: it was salt-and-pepper--that is, it consisted of about ten black members and ten white members. In that era of the Supreme Court decision known as Brown v. Board of Education and the rise of the civil rights movement, the times were achangin.’ Even in liberal Southern California, though, there were many who remained uneasy about “race mixing.” We played on this uneasiness. It was another way of skating close to the edge.

A serpent was loose in this Eden, compromised as it was, in the form of the Vice Squad of the Los Angeles Police Department. By and large, this insidious organization did not operate on the UCLA campus. But when members ventured out into the city for sex, they faced the likelihood that eventually they were going to be arrested. I do not know of any of these men who escaped this fate. Their prissiness and attitude availed them naught when they were entrapped in this way. Evidently, the cops were particularly hard on black guys who were found with white partners. As I noted, racial animosity lurked just beneath the surface in the LA of those days. Probably it still does.

Unlike the high school circle, there was no intragroup sex, as all the members of the band were “sisters.” To have sex with each other would be incestuous.

Functioning as a kind of pseudo-family, the group carefully controlled admission, and those who did not measure up were either relegated to a suppliant position on the fringe, or excluded altogether. I was one of those men assigned a marginal status.

My polar opposite was Victor S., an überqueen, who affected long hair, heavy make-up, and gender-ambiguous clothing. He majored in French, naturally. Victor’s high-pitched shrieks were a startling ostinato punctuating the gatherings of the group, which regularly occurred in one of the school’s cafeterias. Eventually, the college authorities forced Victor to clean up his act. In retrospect it seems that he was ahead of his time, a prefiguration of later trends in advanced gender bending. But that is not the way he was received in those days. This strange creature was basically antisexual rather than gay. All the same, Victor expended a lot of energy putting down other gays as being less brave than he was for not being proud and open, and failing to conform to his peculiar criteria. In short he was a scold. Nonetheless, Victor served the group as something between an idol and a mascot. He symbolized our defiance.

With all the negativity that festered in this UCLA group, why would anyone want to join? Well, it was the only game in town, or so it seemed at the time. Otherwise, one was condemned to a desert of loneliness in which one had only straight acquaintances with whom one could not really discuss one’s feelings. All the same, the apprenticeship this group provided to an emerging gay person was seriously damaging.

BROADER PERSPECTIVES

To what extent was the UCLA queens group typical? At the time I did not know any other such circles, so that I could not judge from personal experience. However, the late John Grube, a Canadian scholar, interviewed a good many older men of this period. His research indicates that such circles--replete with hierarchy, rule enforcement, and constant bitchiness--were common, probably the norm.

Later I acquired some evidence of my own of the prevalence of the corrosive banter and putdowns, for in 1968 I saw Mart Crowley’s dismal play “Boys in the Band” in an off-Broadway production.

Here is how one character dissed another in the play. “You’re a sad and pathetic man. You’re a homosexual and you don’t want to be, but there’s nothing you can do to change it. Not all the prayers to your god, not all the analysis you can buy in all the years you’ve go left to live. You may one day be able to know a heterosexual life if you want it desperately enough. If you pursue it with the fervor with which you annihilate. But you’ll always be homosexual as well. Always Michael. Always. Until the day you die. “

Note the date: 1968. The Stonewall riots happened one year later, signaling a new era in which gay pride would supplant gay shame. It was about time.


THE MATRACHINE SOCIETY

Above, I implied that the UCLA queens group was the only game in town. Maybe that was so for our college campus, but it was not true for the larger world of the city in which we lived. In 1951, a year before I went to college, Los Angeles gave birth to the first successful US gay-rights group, the Mattachine Society. To be sure, these folks had some issues of their own: they were much too respectful of the views of psychiatrists, for example. Still, the Mattachine Society signaled the rise of a new type of homosexual assertion, one based on pride and not marinated in self-pity and internalized homophobia as the UCLA group regrettably was.

I did not participate in the rise of Mattachine in those days, because ignorant UCLA queens warned me to stay away from it. But no matter, for later I was to become friends with the heroic band who started the movement that redeemed gay people--with Dorr Legg, Don Slater, Jim Kepner, and Harry Hay. I would not have missed this company for the world. And their cause was destined ultimately to triumph, putting the self-hating faggots our of business. A very good thing.


BECOMING AN ART HISTORIAN

It was stimulating to monitor these developments. All the same caution became my watchword. Retreating into the closet was a necessity if I was to make a career as a college professor. But in what field? Arriving at UCLA I opted for classics. Not having done Latin in high school, I quickly realized that that would be a long road with uncertain prospects at the end. So I switched to history. Those opting for that major were encouraged to have a related minor. I decided to try art history--and was immediately captivated. I had not realized that such a field actually existed. (Some don't acknowledge it even today--or else they opine that it should not exist.)

In my general enthusiasm for the visual arts I even toyed with the idea of becoming a painter. I knew just what kind I would be. I would practice a West Coast version of Abstract Expressionism, the New York School that had risen to prominence with such figures as Jackson Pollock, Willem De Kooning, and Franz Kline. Probably, I thought, De Kooning with his brilliant colors and slashing brush strokes would be my model. Early in 2012, I went to the huge retrospective of De Kooning, the Dutch-American painter, at the Museum of Modern Art. The enchantment had long vanished.  I hated his (to me) misogynistic works collectively called "Woman" and found the later Alzheimer-blighted canvases pathetic. But the big abstractions of the late 'fifties still seem to me right on target.

At things turned out, I was never to take a studio course in painting, satisfying myself with a few amateurish experiments at home. I rightly judged that the academic path of art history was best for me. Why then did I decided to emphasize the medieval period?

Several factors converged. First, the overall society kept hammering at the idea that we would be stronger in our battle with world communism if we had an ideology of our own. That, it seemed, must be Christianity. (This was long before the fad for Asian religions spawned by the Counterculture.) The Catholic scholars Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson, who regarded the works of Thomas Aquinas as the answer to everything, were widely acclaimed as sages, even by non-Catholics. I had several goes at reading the works of Thomas, but always got bogged down. For their part, the Luce publications promoted their own version of this pro-Catholicism. Clare Booth Luce was an enthusiastic convert to Roman Catholicism.

There was also a “lite” version, if you will, in the form of Anglo-Catholicism, which was actually high Episcopalianism. This was the tendency that T. S. Eliot, once my idol, championed. For his part, the British historian Arnold J. Toynbee, then much in vogue, seemed to favor this approach in making religion a major factor in the unfolding of civilizations.

I knew that I wanted to become an art historian, so choosing medieval art seemed a good way of fulfilling these spiritual aspirations.

Two other factors were more serendipitous. At UCLA I had a charismatic professor of art history, Carl Sheppard, whose main field was the middle ages. While he never published much, Sheppard was a spell-binding lecturer. His other field of interest was modern art. I was interested in that too, and the affinities many detected between the medieval and the modern seemed genuine.

Finally, there was a not very honorable motive, though a a lesser one. Showing an interest in Catholicism and the middle ages annoyed my parents, who remained staunch atheists.