When he was 10, Andrew Tobias realized he was gay. ("Don't
ask me how I knew. I was a gifted child.") Being gay was natural
for him. It just wasn't easy. ("I wasn't a homosexual, for
crying out loud.") He joined a young company and made a fortune
--- on paper --- before it all fell apart. He went to Harvard Business
School. He wrote a book about his business experience.
Nice stats for a guy in his 20s, but on the big scoreboard of life
he wasn't putting up any points. His idea of a Sunday was dropping
a tab of mescaline and seeing 'Easy Rider' --- twice. And all the
while, the message "I'm gay" pounding in his blood. Not
out of regret; if there was ever a man who understood he didn't
have a "condition" or a "problem," it was (and
is) Andrew Tobias. ("So much deception! So much shame! What
had I done wrong? What had any of us done wrong to have been born
the way we were? And how did it hurt anyone if we simply were ourselves?")
So, at 23, he came out. Three years later, he wrote a book about
spending all those years feeling like "a secret agent in a
foreign country." Despite the fact that anyone who's ever read
a word that Andrew Tobias has written can recognize his style from
thirty feet out, he published "The Best Little Boy in the World"
under a pseudonym: John Reid. And it took him another year or two
to tell his parents.
The book --- and, for that matter, coming out --- didn’t wreck
his life. At all. He wrote a best-seller about cosmetics czar Charles
Revson. He became an important business writer. He acknowledged
that “John Reid” was Andrew Tobias. He had a Real Relationship
--- and, like so many gay men, found himself, years later, eulogizing
that lover at a memorial service. At that New Year's get-together
in South Carolina called Renaissance Weekend, he met a Presidential
candidate named Bill Clinton. He became Treasurer of the national
Democratic Party. And, whenever he had a chance, he skewered the
stupid with witheringly funny commentary (sample: "Dan Quayle
told The New York Times that being gay was a choice, that it was
the wrong choice, and that it was immoral. I'd love someone to do
a profile on Dan Quayle. Find out from him when he made his choice.
Was it difficult? What had been the pros and cons as he saw them
at the time? Did he have any regrets?").
Strip the laughter away, and you’re confronted with a simple
message: It’s okay to be gay. To be anything, in fact, so
long as you are whoever you are. "How we are perceived,"
Tobias has written, "depends in large part on how we perceive
ourselves." Teenage suicide among boys who can't cope with
being gay is much higher than suicide among other teens. Ditto for
gay men.
The writing of Andrew Tobias is, for them, as potent in its way
as a cure for AIDS --- it makes the "illness" disappear.
Come out, come out, wherever you are; that's the Tobias message.
No wonder he gets hundreds of letters from men whose lives he changed.
No wonder a generation of gay men has grown up passing his book
down to younger friends.
Full disclosure: Butler met Andrew Tobias at college and, like pretty
much everybody who crosses his path, became his friend right away.
Forty years later --- yikes! --- Butler is delighted to see that
the guy whose business writing has saved many from ruin has, along
the way and off to the side and almost as an afterthought, written
a book that has saved many more from despair and self-loathing and
a foolish death.
So consider this a love letter of sorts from a straight man to a
gay man. In too much of our country, it's a dangerous idea. In the
world Andrew Tobias has made for himself, it's perfectly normal.
To know him is to know that. And, happily, to read him is to know
him.
-- Jesse Kornbluth, for HeadButler.com
To order "The Best Little Boy in the World" from Amazon.com,
click
here.
