77

“For Pete’s sake, dont mention the name of the
town, will you?”

I promised him I wouldn’t and went back to the
hotel to see what was going on there. It was quiet.
So I went to my room and extracted the notes that
had tipped me off to this new phase of homosexual
activity.

The information had come from Tom R., a lean,
tall man in his late thirties. The ravages of heavy
drinking were beginning to show in his eyes. He was
quite drunk but still coherent when I met him. When
he got around to the inevitable question, “What do
you do?” I told him that I was a newspaperman.
He asked what I was working on. Having nothing
to lose I replied, “A book on homosexuality.”

“Brother, have I got a story for you? Let’s sit
down.”

We found a table and Tom spouted. He couldn’t
recall never having had homosexual ideas. In his
own words, “I was wild and passionate about it. I
could never get enough sex. When I started I went
at it as though there were no tomorrow, making
conquests as fast as I could. I did everything and
did everybody. Don’t ask me how, but I got to be a
school teacher. I never tried to keep my private life
a secret.