Fragments of a Life

Shortly after my parents died thirteen years ago, I was cleaning out the basement of my childhood home in preparation of selling the house. While sweeping out the storage closet, I stumbled upon a strange, black cardboard box that had been stashed behind a wardrobe trunk, unseen for nearly 30 years. It was an uncanny moment for me since I thought I knew every square inch of that old house (I was forever redecorating its drab interiors when I returned home briefly after college) and yet had never seen this dusty, slightly dilapidated carton before.

Lifting it with the urgency of Pandora flipping open her fabled box, I popped the lid and uncovered a cache of yellowed newspaper clippings, well-preserved scrapbooks and hastily scrawled letters from France that I soon realized, by reading the dates, had been written during the First World War. This unexpected “buried treasure” amazed and delighted me, but there was still more. Beneath the paper ephemera I uncovered dozens of magnificent sepia-tone photographs, kept in immaculate condition, not having seen the light of day in three decades. I’d been a collector of antique photographs since college, when I raided the local antique stores at my college, looking for faded pictures of yesterday’s students (all male).

But here was a king’s ransom worth of one-of-a-kind images: pristine snapshots of a devilish boy winking at the camera; of the same young man, as a teenager, at the Kentucky Military Institute in 1911, huddling into a human pyramid with his schoolmates, spiffy in their thick, striped, woolen suits; pictures of this strangely enigmatic fellow (he always wore a scowl) and his rowdy pals cavorting amidst a surprisingly brand-new Palm Beach in the 1910s. He must have been what we used to call a “four letter man” for there were scores of stilted portraits of him in ill-fitting uniforms on the track, baseball, basketball and football teams, including one of him with his arm in a sling, sporting a mock expression of pained outrage. There’s a framed portrait of this intriguing stranger in the school marching band and another of him made-up as a toothless hillbilly in some outrageous amateur skit.

I say “stranger” with some irony, because the more I delved into this material, the more it became clear that this person I was staring at, and quickly becoming fascinated by, was a relative of mine. I wasn’t sure exactly which one. I come from a family where speaking of one’s forebears was not very commonplace. Not because it was the moral equivalent of exposing family skeletons or ratting on a friend, but because the subject rarely came up. I grew up knowing very little about my parents’ families, and their respective clans. For all I knew, we were all brought into this world by spontaneous generation.

But it soon became apparent, as I read the beautifully inscribed letters from the war, that I was holding in my hands all that remained of my mother’s father, Leonard Minor Reno. I had never laid eyes on the man before. He died on Christmas Eve, 1944, in Utah, years before I was born. My mother mentioned him once in passing, and then only to tell us that he had abandoned her and her mother when she was just one year old to run off with a Ziegfeld Follies showgirl named Jessie Reed. He was not a man she admired or missed very much.

But staring at his pictures, I found myself getting a little weak in the knees, as if I had developed a crush on him. Or at least the image of him. For my appreciation was almost entirely aesthetic, and therefore superficial. Yet, if Granddad represents my beau ideal, it’s not because of his appearance. He was not especially handsome or classically good-looking. He did not have the buffed physique of a modern-day muscle god, nor the fine-boned features of yesteryear’s matinee idols. His nose was a bit too large; his lips a tad too thick; his posture poor. He was a far cry from the severe, square-jawed fashion plates favored by artists of his era like Leyendecker who created the classic advertisements for the Arrow Collar man. But Reno had what the French call du chien, an idiomatic expression that means an earthy, almost canine sex appeal.

In his pictures, Granddad looks oddly sad at times, suffering from a deep-seated melancholia that would prove to be a precursor to the sensuous angst of James Dean and today’s jaded X-generation. In that regard, he stands apart from his peers, who in these pictures exude an All-American, apple pie bonhomie. But Reno therefore seems even more so a standard-bearer for his times, at the start of what would turn out to be a brutal, battle-scarred 20th-century. No matter what his mood, Granddad was aggressive, virile, seething with a just barely contained cockiness that triggers totally inappropriate, but completely characteristic pangs of awe in me. In the parlance of today, he had an “attitude,” a “don’t mess with me” defiance, the cool embodiment of so many of my macho ideals of what being a “real man” really is. Or at least what I had gleaned in my impressionable youth from Clint Eastwood movies and Raymond Chandler novels.

Needless to say, it was exciting to come across so many different images of one person, in one place, all at one time. Even if I’d had no relation to this mysterious fellow, I would have been intrigued to the point of obsession. What was he like? Who were all these hunks he was hanging out with? Seemingly so at ease with? And so obviously fond of? His journals are filled with comments about his comrades, some annotated with playful, and to my eyes, provocative pet names: “Box” “Kinky” “Chick” “Peck” “Sister”. A boy nicknamed “Fat” gets this puzzling accolade: “O, You Swamp Angel!” Next to one Italian chum dubbed “Dago” my grandfather inscribed: “I like him like a stamp. Stick him!” Perhaps he meant “lick him like a stamp.” Either way, the comment’s suggestive tone raises more than eyebrows.

Amid odes to “wine, women and song” and scurrilous attacks on the military school he attended scratched into the margins of his journal are subtle hints of unspoken affection for his buddies. These notations barely scratch the surface of what must have gone on in that harsh 19th-century-style military academy, with dorm rooms like grim prison cells, and primitive facilities. But each throw-away aside speaks volumes about the depth of its survivors’ camaraderie.

The most memorable images of Granddad were taken later in France, as Reno stood in front of his single engine propeller plane, the very model of a flying ace on the rise. In some other portraits, he’s sporting the Croix de Guerre he’d been awarded by the French Government for bravery and distinguished service. He was a hero of the old school for whom honor and glory were hard-won virtues fought for in death-defying dogfights high above foreign lands.

My grandfather’s documents are not only invaluable as a time capsule, a glimpse of life in a certain America many decades ago, but also as a testament to a vanishing, if not entirely lost, universe of male bonding. My grandfather grew up in an era when men and women were educated separately, and for the most part raised apart until marriage. Men often formed romantic, if most likely physically chaste, attachments with each other. Their friendships took on an almost spiritual cast. Think of the homoerotic verse of Rupert Brooke, a poet of my grandfather’s era whose beauty and tragic early death alone destined him to stardom. Friendships like these still exist today, of course, but without the societal structures that reinforced them. The cult of masculinity is not as all-encompassing as it was at the tail end of the Edwardian era, diluted as it has been by women’s liberation and political sea-changes, due in no small part to the devastating aftermath of the very world wars these young men fought so bravely in.

As any collector of vintage photography can attest, there is a vivid fascination and appeal in finding evidence of these “special friendships” in the vestiges of a more innocent age. We’re drawn to these unadorned images of long vanished souls because they underscore how far we have evolved, and in some ways, strayed. They also incite curiosity and provoke projection. We bring to these sepia-tone touchstones an enormous amount of our own cultural baggage, especially as gay men peering into them for some tangible evidence that our feelings for men are not unique to our time, or perhaps more precisely, are timeless aspects of maleness — of men’s unconscious and innate desire for their fellow men.

What is also illuminating is that these papers only encapsulate a short period of my grandfather’s life, from the ages of 14-21. There is absolutely nothing documenting his life after the war or during his marriage to my grandmother, or, more pointedly, his later downward spiral. After marrying that Ziegfeld Follies showgirl, he lost his fortune. His business career had been a series of tragic misfires. He’d never again reached the heights of his valiant youth. It is literally as if, in his case, time stood still, when he was at his prime. It is almost as if he lived in a world populated entirely of men — an imaginary world that has always had a tremendous allure for me, even in spite of my intense friendships with and admiration for members of the opposite sex. It is a world I searched for at prep school and college, by joining all male glee clubs and fraternities. Later on, in New York City, I tried to find similar realms of all-male camaraderie, but they were merely hollow reflections of a lost ideal. I found a glimmer of what I’d been seeking, ironically, among less obvious all-male associations, such as self-help groups, charity organizations and gay outreach programs.

No doubt it’s the fact that I never knew my grandfather that frees me to fantasize about him as an icon of masculinity, with a haunting homoerotic allure, rather than as the flesh and blood, presumably straight, creature he was, with a highly complex, neurotic persona with a battery of character defects. In short, the man I worship is not my grandfather at all, but a glorified reflection of the man I’ve always felt I am not.