Time to get the Gays, Part 2

As close as I can get to how they feel. Don’t want to know the intimacies. That was always my sticking point. Never wanted to imagine the acts. But in this clip you really can see the romance of the love, and you are simultaneously repelled and understanding of the yen if not the act.

So. I was telling you earlier that I was president of a Harvard Final Club other clubs regarded as a repository of homosexuals. Out of 30 members we had two that I knew of, and I was close friends with one. He’s dead now, as is the other one, for reasons you can guess. The other one is where the story starts to get complicated, because he was a graduate of Middlesex, youngest member of the Grottlesex prep school league. My three year roommate, PE as I will call him, remarked one day, “You guys took in Philip Core.”

“Yes, we did.”

“Nice guy,” PE said. “A bit strange.”

(Yes he was. Always dressed in black. His fashion inspiration was Edward Gorey, deliberately, unobtrusively provocative.)

Which was him telling me the Phoenix was now officially a gay club. I’m not exaggerating. Two things. Most of the final clubs were filled with Harvard legacies, from all the great prep schools and few great minds among them. It had been my greatest disappointment at Harvard to find that Exeter and Andover and Choate and Groton and Deerfield and Hotchkiss had so little to show for their names.

PE belonged to the Owl, just around the corner from the Phoenix, Teddy Kennedy’s club, home of Grottlesex crew jocks, great turkey sandwiches, Pine Manor girls in their beautiful sweaters, inside the largest guest room any club had, the only one with a TV. Because women weren’t allowed in final clubs, except in the guest room. TA DA.

Pretty much the same deal with the rest of the nine final clubs. Jocks, some smart, some not, it being Harvard after all, but not very interesting people, even though they are now the VPs and CFOs and coupon clippers of their generation. (How do I know about the other final clubs? At 17 I was already the buccaneer of the bunch. I had broken into, or climbed up and into, all of them. All but one. Another story, another time.) All of them filled with not very interesting people, destined for not very interesting lives.

Was the Phoenix any different? Actually, yes. We were the smartest of all the final clubs. Simple fact. We weren’t mostly dumbass Grottlesex. We were heavily St. Alban’s, which really is the best prep school in the United States, forgetting all the Exeter and Andover dither. We had, every year, serious candidates for summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, Rhodes scholarships, Marshall fellowships, and some clever also-rans from Deerfield, Taft, St. George’s, St. Marks, and, have you detected an Episcopal bent here? Exeter too. Direct heir to the Merrill-Lynch fortune, finishing his 20s at Harvard Law School. We had, to my knowledge, the only 1600 SAT student I’d ever met. Nice fella. Personality of a toaster oven.

We were the smart ones. I was a kid, drinking a lot of beer, scotch, and Champagne. Did I learn anything from this crew of brains? Mostly no. I learned from the gay friends and friends of friends I met through the true power elite of the Phoenix.

Án aside I think really isn’t. I spoke with PE a few weeks ago. My roommate for three years and a Middlesex guy. He didn’t remember Philip Core. I asked him if life had turned out as he expected. Shockingly, he said yes. Then I referenced the President, to the NYC-born and lately banished from bankerdom with a cardboard box after 30 years of service. He went straight anti-Trump, chuffing about him fitting work in between golf rounds. I said, “Fuck you,” and hung up. He still can’t understand what happened.

Here’s the deal. The smart people I met at Harvard were mostly gay. One guy I knew at the Phoenix turned into three, four, seven guys who never made a move on me, but taught me everything about music, art, and literature I never learned from the dry sticks of  St.Alban’s. How is that?

Here is Philip Core’s masterpiece. Where is PE’s? Nowhere. Core is dead. PE might as well be. But this painting is worth a fortune.

Stay tuned for Part 3 about Getting the Gays...

Go on to Part 3.