“Gay Adventurer Reports on World Travel,” read the headline in the summer issue of The Clock Tower, the student newspaper of my school, Union College. Gay adventurer? How had they figured me out?

Actually, there were thirty adventurers on the Three-Continent Tour sponsored by this small Christian college that summer. Someone else had sent the report of our journeys back to the school paper, not me—but there was that scandalous headline! I was the only gay one, as far as I knew, and I hadn’t even really figured that all out for myself yet. At least the headline didn’t read “World Traveler Reports on Gay Adventurer!”

That two-month tour of the Soviet Union, Europe, the Middle East and Egypt offered not only my first taste of world travel, but also my first taste of being held in the arms of another. I was nineteen. And they weren’t the arms of a woman.

So now you know. It was on that trip that I started “practicing.”

But not as you might imagine. Most of what I might have “practiced” with Clifford—the first young man to touch my life in a special way—I was too naive even to imagine. For weeks we just held hands—secretly during taxi rides, and at night while we slept. I don’t remember precisely how the hand holding started, but if the hotel beds were too far apart, Clifford would push them close enough for us to reach out and lock hands to fall asleep. No words were necessary, it was gloriously natural—just that much touching seemed glorious. And light years from wrong.

At age 26 Clifford was an “older man” to me, working on his doctorate. He was about my height, slightly leaner and considerably darker. He was the first African-American I had ever had occasion to get acquainted with, and it seemed that that particular interest was mutual. Clifford was attentive to my every thought and deed, paying more attention to who I was than I paid to myself. When we talked, it seemed his whole body listened, and much of what he said was without words. I remember once, at the end of some meaningful but long forgotten conversation,  he took my hand and slowly folded his fingers into mine with great deliberation, watching the colors alternate like the keys of a piano. For a moment he studied our hands together as though they were a work of art, then slowly turned his face toward mine and smiled the unspoken words right into my soul.

I thought it was just the closeness of our friendship that sent the searing heat like lightning through his fingertips into mine and all the way up to my heart. I never thought it was romance. A deep friendship, yes, but not romance. Romance was watching the sun set in Pioneers Park with my girlfriend, Linda, back at Union—just the two of us and a blanket for keeping warm. That was romance—intellectual and disciplined, understood, easily tamed. At least I found it easy to tame; before going out with Linda I always asked God to lead me not into temptation, and God always answered that prayer whenever I was with her!

What I had with Clifford was anything but intellectual and disciplined. It was a joy unbridled and tameless, deep feelings, foreign and unexplored. It was what I thought all real friendships should be. Would that all the world should become a brotherhood of friendship such as I had with Clifford! No more wars, just jolts of electrifying friendship when men touch.

But after a few weeks as “practicing hand-holders,” Clifford and I started practicing something new: I found myself dreaming the nights away in his arms. Eventually we fooled around a little—not sex, just touching—getting an idea of what heaven must be like.

I wish I could say the profound joy of this intimacy was the full story of this foreign adventure of our souls on foreign soil. But there was another profundity. The intimacy had progressed slightly beyond hand-holding, and each time, after glimpsing heaven through a glass darkly, I would turn away from Clifford and literally cry over my sin. ...Nineteen years old, crying and telling Clifford, “You know this isn’t right—we’ve got to stop doing this!” I had no awareness, then, of the depths from which the doing sprang.

There really wasn’t much to stop doing—holding our bodies together to warm our souls, that’s about all. But thou shalt not hold thy bodies together if they are similar!

So this gay adventurer ventured into both heaven and hell on three continents that summer. I’d been taught that to get to heaven, I had to resist tasting any of it now. Hell now, heaven later. Those were the rules of intimacy that applied to gay boys. I broke them a little, sneaking a few peeks at heaven. But I knew tasting heaven before its time was horribly perverted, so I dutifully checked myself into hell after each offense.

In the fall I went back to Union and spent lonely nights in the dormitory dreaming of holding Clifford, but never dreaming of looking him up. I knew Saint Paul admonished against “making plans to do evil.”

Years later, long after losing track of Clifford, I realized I had been following the wrong rules. At first I was angry, having spent all that time in hell for nothing. But then I realized my time there helped me learn more about heaven than many people ever will.

Oh—about the Clock Tower story: I still have my fragile, yellowed clipping of that story so ironically headlined. It appeared July 8, 1965, four years before the Stonewall Riots brought national attention to Gay Liberation. I think the word gay meant something different then.

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Copyright © 2000 by Larry Hallock